There is one other sect met with during the Hussite wars in Bohemia, which bears some similarity to the Anarchical Communism of the present day, that of the Chelcicians.[5] Peter of Chelcic, a peaceful Taborite, preached equality and Communism; but this universal equality should not (he said) be imposed upon society by the compulsion of the State, but should be realised without its intervention. The State is sinful, and an outcome of the Evil One, since it has created the inequality of property, rank, and place. Therefore the State must disappear; and the means of doing away with it consists not in making war upon it, but in simply ignoring it. The true follower of this theory is thus neither allowed to take any office under the State nor call in its help; for the true Christian strives after good of his own accord, and must not compel us to follow it, since God desires good to be done voluntarily. All compulsion is from the Evil One; all dignities or distinctions of classes offend against the law of brotherly love and equality. This pious enthusiast easily found a small body of followers in a time when men were weary of war after the cruelties of the Hussite conflicts; but here, too, his theory developed in practice into a kind of Quietism under priestly control, an austere Puritanism, which is the very opposite of the personal freedom of Anarchism. [5] _Vorlaeufer 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 Zuerich 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 naively 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,-- "Vindice nullo Sponte sua sine lege fidem rectumque colebat; Poena metusque aberant, nec verba minacia fixo AEre legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat Judicis ora sui, sed erant sine judice tuti." [6] "_Der Wideraeufferen vosprung, fuergang, Secten v.s.w. ... beschreiben durch Heinerrychen Bullingern...._" Zurich, 1561. Fol. 32.