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[5] Vorläufer des Neueren Socialismus, Pt. i., p. 230.

Once more the Anarchist views of the Amalrikite appear at the beginning of the sixteenth century among the Anabaptists in the sect of the “Free Brothers,” who considered themselves set free from all laws by Christ, had wives and property in common, and refused to pay either taxes or tithes, or to perform the duties of service or serfdom.[6] The “Free Brothers” had a following in the Zürich highlands, but they were of no more importance than the other sect, we have mentioned; utterly incomprehensible to those of their own time, they formed the extreme wings of the widespread Communist movement which, coming at the same time as the Reformation in the Church, separates the (so-called) middle ages from modern times like a boundary line. We observe in it nothing but the naïvely logical development of a belief that is common to most religions: the assumption of a happy age in the childhood of mankind (Golden Age, Paradise, and so on), when men followed merely the laws of reason (Morality, God, or Nature, or whatever else it is called), and needed no laws or punishments to tell them to do right and avoid wrong; when mankind, as every schoolboy knows from his Ovid,—