The excitement at Wittenberg soon reached an alarming height, and was intensified by the arrival of the Zwickan prophets, who claimed to be the first to have properly received the divine Spirit, and to have been called to carry on God’s work. They boasted of prophetic visions, dreams and direct communications with God. They also rejected infant baptism, saying that there was no such thing taught in the Scriptures. The people, losing their hold on the old, were ready to take up with anything that came with a plausible face. Even the most prudent were afraid to condemn anything that might have truth in it, and especially were they unwilling to reject anything that seemed to be taught in the Scripture. Melanchthon was greatly troubled and disturbed. It was not so much the visions of the Zwickan prophets that disturbed him as their teaching on baptism, and instead of settling the matter by an appeal to the Word of God, he referred it to the Elector Frederick, who advised him not to discuss the subject with them, but wait for Luther, for they quoted Saint Augustine to prove that nothing could be brought in favor of infant baptism except ecclesiastical custom. RETAINS THAT WHICH THE SCRIPTURES DO NOT EXPRESSLY FORBID Luther returned from Wartburg to Wittenberg in the early part of 1522, when efforts were made to get him to drop infant baptism and make the Reformation thorough. But while translating the Bible, at Wartburg, he had determined to retain whatever practices it did not forbid. At first he had no little struggle on the subject of infant baptism. On other subjects he had been forced, against his will, step by step, to abandon the fathers, the councils, and Catholic tradition, being driven to it by the Scriptures. But when he found no authority in the Bible for infant baptism he assumed a new attitude. At that point he had a fiery contest with himself as to the true key of Biblical interpretation, and he deliberately chose the negative turn. That is, he determined to abide by what the Scriptures did not forbid, instead of by what they enjoined. He saw at a glance where his rule of interpretation on other subjects must inevitably lead him on this point. And he dared not venture one step further in free thought, for fear of invoking a complete revolution. To take one step more was to let infant baptism go and the State church with it. But this was not the kind of a church Luther wanted, so he dismissed the whole matter as a very inopportune question. Thus it appears that he was willing to do as a positive duty to God whatever the Scriptures did not prohibit, as in the Supper, when asked, “What scripture have you for elevating the cup?” to which he indignantly replied, “What is there against it?” By the same answer he might have justified the offering of masses for the dead, auricular confession, purgatory, infallibility of popes, and any other unauthorized thing practiced by the Catholics, but which the Scriptures had not positively