unsparing denunciations of corruption in high places, brought her
into conflict with the secular clergy. They tried to burn her
books--those religious love songs which had already endeared her to
German popular sentiment. It was then that she seemed to hear a
voice saying to her:

Lieb' meine, betrŸbe dich nicht zu sehr,

Die Wahrheit mag niemand verbrennen!

The rulers of the Church, unhappily, were not content with burning
books. Their hostility towards the unrecognised Orders became more
and more pronounced: the Beghards and Beguines were harried and
persecuted till most of them were driven to join the Franciscans or
Dominicans, carrying with them into those Orders the ferment of
their speculative mysticism. The more stubborn "Brethren and Sisters
of the Free Spirit" were burned in batches at Cologne and elsewhere.
Their fate in those times did not excite much pity, for many of the
victims were idle vagabonds of dissolute character, and the general
public probably thought that the licensed begging friars were enough
of a nuisance without the addition of these free lances.

The heretical mystical sects of the thirteenth century are very
interesting as illustrating the chief dangers of mysticism. Some of
these sectaries were Socialists or Communists of an extreme kind;
others were Rationalists, who taught that Jesus Christ was the son
of Joseph and a sinner like other men; others were Puritans, who
said that Church music was "nothing but a hellish noise" (nihil nisi
clamor inferni), and that the Pope was the magna meretrix of the
Apocalypse. The majority were Anti-Sacramentalists and Determinists;