The Book of the Concord of the Koran or Law of Muhammad and the Evangelists

must be someone highest who decides, especially in matters of doubt, and who heals errors that arise among councils. For it cannot be that there is always a continuous council in which the highest power of religion resides. Therefore, just as in public administration it is necessary to compose a certain highest power among the inferior judges, and a highest authority in the republic which is divided through the complying members, so it is necessary that in sacred matters there be a highest power in one, a middle power in a few, and a lowest power in many, by which all things may be governed in divine harmony. The Geneuangelistae Empty-gospellers neither can nor will recognize this. For as they constitute for themselves the leaders of the faction, they do not wish to recognize a public, ordered, and approved power that lacks the sword. They obey the one bearing the sword indeed, not out of public love but out of fear, awaiting an occasion by which they might also topple it. For just as the body languishes and dies and the soul vanishes when the mind departs, so when the authority of religious power begins to be shaken and moved, the public, profane, and judicial order is also endangered. Hence it happens that although heresies begin from one person, yet with the author scorned, they are immediately split into various sects and factions, while each person persuades according to his own whim what seems right to him. From Luther, the pleas of heretics already condemned for five hundred years and more are protected and enriched. From this have arisen six kinds of sacramentarians, parabaptists those who baptize alongside, catabaptists those who reject baptism, anabaptists those who rebaptize, pneumatics, Suermeri enthusiasts/fanatics, Adamites, Jews, Muhammadans, the impious, natural and brutal Epicureans, and daily they devise new dogmas, so consistent are lying and falsehood to themselves. All things are free and loose for them, says Tertullian. With the sacred magistrates removed