picturesqueness as by Professor Karl Pearson in his _Ethic of
Freethought_. "As the illegitimate son of a tailor in Leyden,"
says Professor Pearson--Jan's mother was the maid of his father's
wife--"his early life was probably a harsh and bitter one. Very young
he wandered from home, impressed with the miseries of his class and
with a general feeling of much injustice in the world. Four years he
spent in England seeing the poor driven off the land by the sheep;
then we find him in Flanders, married, but still in vague search of
the Eldorado; again roaming, he visits Lisbon and Lübeck as a sailor,
ever seeking and inquiring. Suddenly a new light bursts upon him in
the teaching of Melchior Hofmann [the Anabaptist]; he fills himself
with dreams of a glorious kingdom on earth, the rule of justice and
of love. Still a little while and the prophet Mathys crosses his path,
and tells him of the New Sion and the extermination of the godless."

Mathys, or Jan Mathiesen, was a baker of Haarlem, who, constituted an
Anabaptist bishop, was preaching the new gospel through the Netherlands
and gathering recruits to the community of God's saints which had been
established at Münster. "Full of hope for the future," says Professor
Pearson, "Jan sets out for Münster to join the saints. Still young,
handsome, imbued with a fiery enthusiasm, actor by nature and even by
choice, he has no small influence on the spread of Anabaptism in that
city. The youth of twenty-three expounds to the followers of Rottmann
the beauties of his ideal kingdom of the good and the true. With
his whole soul he preaches to them the redemption of the oppressed,
the destruction of tyranny, the community of goods, and the rule of
justice and brotherly love. Women and maidens slip away to the secret
gatherings of the youthful enthusiast; the glowing young prophet of
Leyden becomes the centre of interest in Münster. Dangerous, very
dangerous ground, when the pure of heart are not around him; when