III. CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
The founder of the German Reformation has written somewhere that man could change but that only God could better. But oddly Luther – the son of a peasant – failed to explain why God worked so exclusively on the side of the ruling classes. Chelc̄icky̍ – the son of a nobleman, if the Za̍horka theory proves correct – insisted that the devil rather preferred working with the ruling noblemen and churchmen!
. . .The pagans do not have . . . to contend with so many lords and useless clergymen who all hold great dominions. . . Yea, they do not bear their sword in vain, they rob and oppress the poor working people.85
The nobility and the priesthood have "alienated the people from God." Naturally, Chelčicky did not accept Wyclif's division of men into three estates (noblemen, priests, and the working people).86 Such division, said, he, amounts to an enforced grouping of men into the following professions:
1) the estate of the ruling class which conducts defensive warfare, kills, burns, and hangs;
2) the estate of the common and higher priests who pray;
3) the estate of the common peasants who must slave and feed the two upper-class insatiable Baals.87
