Zwingli approached the problem of salvation from a less personal, certainly from a less agonized, and from a more legal, liberal, empiric standpoint.

He felt for liberty and for the value of common action in the state.

He interpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his reason under the tuition of the Bible in its apparent meaning.
[Sidenote: Anabaptists, 1522] Next came the turn of the Anabaptists--those Bolsheviki of the sixteenth century.

Their first leaders appeared at Zurich and were for a while bosom friends of Zwingli.

But a parting of the ways was inevitable, for the humanist could have little sympathy with an uncultured and ignorant group--such they were, in spite of the fact that a few leaders were university graduates--and the statesman could not admit in his categories a purpose that was sectarian as against the state church, and democratic as against the existing aristocracy.
[Sidenote: 1523] His first work against them shows how he was torn between his desire to make the Bible his only guide and the necessity of compromising with the prevailing polity.