Faced with the challenge of defending the orthodoxy of the Evangelical Reformation against attacks from the Catholic Church, the early Reformers tended to regard all other competing groups as an undifferentiated threat, generally under the heading of Schwärmerei (fanatics). In their eyes these movements were dangerously subjective and seditious – a threat to both the Reformation cause and to good public order. Thus, in his 1528 tract Von der Widertauffe Martin Luther described his opponents as “wild-eyed fanatics,” bent on destroying godly order in church and society. Two years later Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon depicted them as “angels of the devil” whose only interest was to sow seeds of confusion and division.