At first the Anabaptist movement at Zuerich was regarded as an extreme wing of the party of the Church reformer, Zwingli, in that city, but it was not long before it broke off entirely from the latter, and hostilities, ensuing in persecution for the new party, broke out.
To understand the true inwardness of the Anabaptist and similar movements, it is necessary to endeavour to think oneself back into the intellectual conditions of the period.

The Biblical text itself, now everywhere read and re-read in the German language, was pondered and discussed in the house of the handicraftsman and in the hut of the peasant, with as much confidence of interpretation as in the study of the professional theologian.

But there were also not a few of the latter order, as we have seen, who were becoming disgusted with the trend of the official Reformation and its leading representatives.

The Bible thus afforded a _point d'appui_ for the mystical tendencies now becoming universally prominent--a _point d'appui_ lacking to the earlier movements of the same kind that were so constantly arising during the Middle Ages proper.

Seen in the dim religious light of a continuous reading of the Bible and of very little else, the world began to appear in a new aspect to the simple soul who practised it.
All things seemed filled with the immediate presence of Deity.