# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface. 3

of this life from him, and therefore wanted to make men — after the fashion of abolitionists and communists — free and equal in right, possession, and enjoyment, and accordingly regarded advantages in these things as crimes deserving punishment. Though the first two grounded their humanism in the teachings and promises of Christian revelation, and the latter in a pantheistic system, the spirit that drove them all was one and the same. The peasants say, for example, in their "Twelve Articles": "Thirdly, it has hitherto been the custom that we should be held as another's own people, which is to be pitied, seeing that Christ has redeemed and bought us all with his precious shedding of blood, the shepherd as much as the highest, none excepted. Therefore it is found in Scripture that we are free and wish to be so. Fourthly, it has hitherto been the custom that no poor man had the power to catch game, fowl, or fish in flowing water, which seems to us wholly unseemly and unbrotherly, but selfish and not in accordance with the Word of God . . When God the LORD created man, he gave him power over all beasts, over the bird in the air, and over the fish in the water, Gen. 1:28, 30. God the LORD made the cattle free for man." (Luther's Works, ed. Walch, XVI, 26–27.) The sum of what the articles intended, Münzer expressed in the words: "Omnia simul communia" — that is, all things shall be held in common and shall be distributed to each according to need, as occasion allows." That in this new "order" of things there could no longer be talk of princes and lords went without saying. "It was taught," reports Ranke, "that since all are children of one Father and all are redeemed alike by the blood of Christ, there must henceforth be no inequality, either of wealth or of rank. Münzer preached everywhere of the liberation of Israel and the establishment of a heavenly kingdom on earth."*)

How, then, did the Church at that time take her stand against this? — She did not, indeed, fail to recognize that the excessive abuse of the privileged classes had driven the shamefully oppressed, ignorant people to despair and plunged them into their delusion; rather, she declared the outbreak of the peasants' revolt to be a well-deserved divine judgment, and exhorted the abolition of the oppression of the poor and of tyranny against those under authority, and the improvement of civil and social conditions that had fallen into corruption crying out to heaven. But far from allowing herself to be led by this to represent the distinction itself between lord and servant, prince and subject, rich and poor, and so forth, as incompatible with the Gospel, the attempt made to overturn these relations gave the Church occasion, rather, to testify with a loud voice against it as a perversion and denial of the Gospel of Christ and of his kingdom.

*) Cf. Ranke's German History in the Age of the Reformation. 3rd ed., II, pp. 144–183.