The executions which followed, however, had for the time suppressed the practice both in that place as well as throughout Flanders and the rest of the provinces.

It now broke forth as by one impulse from one end of the country to the other.

In the latter part of June, Hermann Stryoker or Modet, a monk who had renounced his vows to become one of the most popular preachers in the Reformed Church, addressed a congregation of seven or eight thousand persons in the neighborhood of Ghent.

Peter Dathenus, another unfrocked monk, preached at various places in West Flanders, with great effect.

A man endowed with a violent, stormy eloquence, intemperate as most zealots, he was then rendering better services to the cause of the Reformation than he was destined to do at later periods.
But apostate priests were not the only preachers.