political freedom.

The growth of extreme Protestantism, more especially perhaps of
Independency, was greatly quickened during the reigns of both Mary and
Elizabeth, by the immigration of many thousands of refugees fleeing from
religious persecutions on the Continent. Amongst these were disciples
and apostles of many sects that were heretics in the eyes of both the
Catholic and the Protestant Churches, and who rejected alike the dogmas
and doctrines of Rome, of Wittenberg, and of Geneva. The one point all
such sects seem to have had in common was the denial of the sanctity and
efficacy of infant baptism: hence their inclusion under the general term
Anabaptists, even though many of them passionately disclaimed any
connection with this hated, proscribed and persecuted sect. As Gerrard
Winstanley, the inspirer of the Digger Movement, seems to us to have
been greatly influenced by the teaching of one of these sects, the
Familists, or Family of Love, it may be well to give here a brief
outline of its history and main doctrines.

The founder of the Family of Love was one David George, or Joris, who
was born at Delft in 1501. In 1530 he was severely punished for
obstructing a Catholic procession in his native town. In 1534 he joined
the Anabaptists, but soon left them to found a sect of his own. He seems
to have interpreted the whole of the Scripture allegorically;[15:1] and
to have maintained that as Moses had taught hope, and Christ had taught
faith, it was his mission to teach love. His teachings were propagated
in Holland by Henry Nicholas, and in England by one Christopher Vittel,
a joiner, who appears to have undertaken a missionary journey throughout
the country about the year 1560. According to Fuller,[16:1] in 1578,
the nineteenth year of the reign of Elizabeth, "The Family of Love began
now to grow so numerous, factious, and dangerous, that the Privy Council