Is it possible to understand the Gospel, which now follows, in its grandeur, truth, purity and love, without a knowledge of the age, which preceded it? or the prejudices, against which, He, who revealed it, had to contend? We find varying opinions among those who wrote it--the stamp of diverse authorship; here Judaistic narrowness, there freer elevation, homely simplicity, and again deep glow and feeling. We even find contradictions, historical and chronological, and yet, what unity in all that is essential--what agreement in all that contributes to peace in life and comfort in the hour of death; in all that determines our actions and confers worth upon them! Are there any other writings, for whose investigation, for whose explanation, so much sagacity, so much science, so much conscientiousness are demanded? Such are the questions, which very naturally crowd upon us, when we once more survey the man, in whom all these qualifications are joined, as he goes forth to battle with a multitude of others, who possess them only partially and hence dangerously. And thus we return again to those disturbers, before alluded to, in the bosom of the Reformed party, who assailed Zwingli more boldly than any monk, and whose scientific culture, adroitness, and, in the end, desperation, prepared for him a far more violent conflict. Conrad Grebel has already been represented to us as morally and physically depraved. The higher spirit, which once attracted Zwingli's entire love to him as a youth, richly endowed by nature, had not yet sunk so far, that it did not show some clear sparks, and sometimes even break out into a momentary blaze. But when he saw that Zwingli penetrated his inmost soul, understood, pitied and then despised him, he conceived the most intense bitterness against him, which at last deepened into hatred--hatred that stopped at no means to secure revenge. Gathering all his strength, nerving all his powers to their highest pitch, his self-confidence increased; the various modes of interpretation, which isolated passages of the Holy Scriptures admit, made it possible for him to maintain, with a tolerable appearance of truth and certainty, dogmas at variance with those of Zwingli. The support, which he found from those of like mind, the followers who adhered to him, awakened in the head of this fanatic the delusion that he had received a call to be a prophet, and pictured to him a final victory over Zwingli, or at least placed in view the crown of martyrdom, in which latter, one and another of them, perhaps, saw, not without an inward satisfaction, an atonement for the conscious guilt of their former lives. Here again, the simple presentation of the facts will furnish proof for this opinion.