1. The treatment of the Gospel as a new law to be literally followed and obeyed by all who are to have the right to be called "saints."
2. The true Church is a _visible_ Church, the community of the saints, founded by covenant, with adult baptism as its sign, formed exactly on the pattern of the apostolic { 18} Church and preserved in strict purity by rigorous church discipline; and
3. The denial to magistrates of all power to persecute men for their faith and doctrine on the ground that the Gospel gives them no such authority--its great commandment being love.[2]
Hans Denck, though in his early period of activity closely identified with this movement and regarded as one of its chief leaders in Germany, does not properly belong, however, to the banyan-tree of Anabaptism. His writings reveal ideas and tendencies of such enlarged scope that it appears clear that he had discovered and was teaching another type of Christianity altogether.[3] He is the earliest exponent in the sixteenth century of a fresh and unique type of religion, deeply influenced by the mystics of a former time, but even more profoundly moulded by the new humanistic conceptions of man's real nature.
There are few biographical details of Denck's life available. He was, most probably, a native of Bavaria,[4] and he was born about the year 1495. He studied in the University of Ingolstadt, where he was admitted among the baccalaureates in 1517.[5] In the year 1520 we catch a glimpse of him in close association with the Humanists of Augsburg.[6] In 1522 he was at work in Basle as proof-reader for the famous publisher, Valentin Curio, and was living in intimate fellowship with the great scholar OEcolampadius, whose lectures on the Prophet Isaiah he heard.[7] In the autumn of the same year, on the recommendation of OEcolampadius, he was appointed Director of St. Sebald's School in Nuremberg, which was then the foremost seat of learning in that city, { 19} a great centre of classical humanistic studies. During the first period of his life in Nuremberg he was closely identified with the Lutheran movement, but he soon shifted his sympathies, and aligned himself with the radical tendencies which at this period were championed in Nuremberg by Thomas Münzer, who, in spite of his misguided leadership and fanatical traits, had discovered a genuine religious principle that was destined to become significant in safer hands.[8] Münzer read Tauler's sermons from his youth up; in his own copy of these sermons, preserved in the library at Gera, a marginal note says that he read them almost continually, and that here he learned of a divine interior Teaching. It was Münzer's teaching of the living Voice of God in the soul, his testimony to the reality of the inner heavenly Word, which God Himself speaks in the deeps of man's heart, that won the Humanist and teacher of St. Sebald's School to the new and perilous cause. He also formed a close friendship with Ludwig Hetzer, who, like Münzer, taught that the saving Word of God must be inward, and that the Scriptures can be understood only by those who belong to the School of Christ. Having once caught the _idea_ from these impassioned leaders, Denck proceeded directly to work it out and to develop its implications in his own fashion. He was himself sane, clear-minded, modest, sincere, far-removed from fanaticism, and eager only to find a form of religion which would fit the eternal nature of things on the one hand, and the true nature of man on the other--man, I mean, as the Humanist conceived him.[9]