Fortified by the imperial favour, Kerlinger, the principal delegate, displayed great energy at Magdeburg, Erfurt, Mühlhausen, etc.; and notwithstanding the occasional opposition of a jealous episcopate the Inquisition had made such good progress by 1372 that it had apparently succeeded in driving its enemies out of northern and central Germany. These were the days of the Flagellants and of the dancing mania as well as of Beghards and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. There certainly seemed to be no less need of organized repression; nevertheless the Inquisition in Germany after the days of Kerlinger tended to lose ground. Complaints made against its recent proceedings were found on investigation by Gregory XI to be well founded, and the papal disapprobation armed the episcopate against their rivals. As in France, so in Germany, the Schism had the effect of still further reducing the influence of the Inquisition. Persecution of Brethren of the Free Spirit continued late into the fifteenth century: but heresies far more formidable than the mystic antinomianism which had been the characteristic heresy of Germany were about to dawn. The intellectual force in men such as Johann Wessel, Reuchlin and Erasmus had infinitely greater power than a perverted pantheism. And when Lutheranism took hold upon Germany, there was no powerful Inquisition to check it. Had there existed in Germany such a tribunal as had stamped out Catharism in Languedoc, it might, so far as we can tell, have succeeded in silencing Luther, while he was still an unknown monk of Wittenberg, before he had come to apprehend the full significance and the ultimate developments of his famous theses. But when the hour came of the Church’s greatest danger from heresy in Germany, the weapon which it had used with such tremendous effect in earlier days had been hopelessly blunted.