Three Friends of God: Records from the Lives of John Tauler, Nicholas of Basle, Henry Suso

The history of these communities of Brethren,' who called themselves simply Christians,' reminds us, in a remarkable manner, in the mode by which they are described, and in the course of their destiny, of the incidents of the earliest Christian centuries. For it was just those Christians,' who were represented by the chief authors of antiquity as the offscouring of all things,' who were hated and persecuted as sectaries by the Jewish and heathen priesthood -- we may recall that Paul himself was brought to trial as a leader of the sect of the Nazarenes' -- it was just those despised men who were the beginning of a new era for the heathen and the Jewish world.