The condition of the Empire at this time was very similar to that of many countries today, where we find two large upper and middle-class parties, the conservative (Catholic) and liberal (Protestant) over against the radical or socialistic (Anabaptist).
[Sidenote: The Anabaptists] The most important thing about the extremists was not their habit of denying the validity of infant baptism and of rebaptizing their converts, from which they derived their name.

What really determined their view-point and program was that they represented the poor, uneducated, disinherited classes.

The party of extreme measures is always chiefly constituted from the proletariat because it is the very poor who most pressingly feel the need for change and because they have not usually the education to judge the feasibility of the plans, many of them quack nostrums, presented as panaceas for all their woes.

A complete break with the past and with the existing order has no terrors for them, but only promise.
A radical party almost always includes men of a wide variety of opinions.

So the sixteenth century classed together as Anabaptists men with not only divergent but with diametrically opposite views on the most vital questions.