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enough to excite the intolerant spirit of the age, and invite persecution from all sides. Other circumstances conspired to bring them into disfavor alike with the clergy and the civil magistrates. Their rejection of infant baptism was sufficient, in the judgment of those who cared not to inquire further, to justify the charge that they were Anabaptists, and bring upon them the odium of the excesses committed by that sect but a few years before at M�nster. Neither the explicit denial by Schwenkfeld in his lifetime of any sympathy with the Anabaptists, nor the blameless lives of the people, who rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and strove according to their knowledge to render unto God the things that were God's, availed to free them from that charge. They were called Schwenkfelders in derision,--a name which they accepted,--and were stigmatized by almost every name that was supposed to convey a reproach. The new Duke, Frederick III., determined to stamp them out of his dominions, and issued a stringent decree against them, among other things imposing a fine of five hundred florins upon any person who should harbor an Anabaptist, by which he meant a Schwenkfelder, and later, ordered all their books to be seized and burned.

These measures had the opposite effect to that intended; the number of Schwenkfelders increased rather than diminished, but the persecutors did not gain wisdom from experience. Persecutions increased from year to year, until about 1580, when it seemed that every means that the ingenuity of man could devise was employed to coerce these people into either the Lutheran or the Catholic Church. In addition to former methods, the clergy refused to solemnize marriages until the contracting parties would partake of the Sacrament at the parochial church; men and women were dragged in chains into churches; leading men were expelled from the country; frequently when the people met at private houses for worship, as