which would attune with the intense individualism of a mystic illuminism. By such men and women Lutheranism might well be welcomed and its progress materially assisted.[64] One of the strangest of the fanatical outbursts of the Middle Ages, especially in Germany, is indirectly connected with the Brethren of the Free Spirit, some of whom joined themselves with the Flagellants. The latter first made their appearance in Europe in 1259 in Italy, whence the movement spread to Bohemia and Germany. A more important outbreak occurred in the middle of the next century, when the appalling ravages of the Black Death had no doubt brought home to many thousands of the survivors the awful fragility and insecurity of human life and the need for repentance and godliness. It was the consciousness of the impotence of man probably that gave popularity to the abasement and self-torture of the scourge. There was a positive luxury of misery in the suggestion of so drastic a means of grace for a polluted people, smitten by the heavy hand of an angry God. Through Hungary, Germany, Flanders, Holland marched these penitents, proclaiming complete regeneration for all who should persevere in flagellation for thirty-three days and a half, chanting weird prayers in which this creed was enshrined.[65] Theirs was a new gospel—the all-sufficient efficacy of the voluntary effusion of blood.[66] It is no wonder that the authorities became alarmed. Legitimate exception was taken to the enthusiasts’ indecency—men went virtually naked, women insufficiently clad, all were under a temptation to sexual excesses.[67] Worse was the doctrinal error involved—the attack upon sacraments and priesthood contained in the preaching of the strange means of grace by these new priests of Baal.[68] In 1349 Clement VI, condemning the movement on the ground of the contempt of the Church implied in the formation of such an unlicensed fellowship, ordered the suppression of the Flagellants, who thereafter came under the purview of the Inquisition. The heretical doctrine inherent in the Flagellant mania was enunciated in its most extravagant form by a native of Thuringia, named Conrad Schmidt, who in 1414 was maintaining that all spiritual authority had passed from the Catholic Church to the Flagellants, that not only were the sacraments useless, but they had been proscribed by God and it was mortal sin to partake of them, so that, for example, the ceremony of marriage polluted the union. The fundamentally anti-sacerdotal character of the Flagellant movement was shared by another contemporary mania in Flanders and the Rhinelands—a dancing mania, under whose impulse fanatics would leap and convulse themselves in the most violent contortions in fierce ecstasies of religious frenzy.[69]