Although there is no documentary evidence, there is reason to connect Rembrandt's tender conception of Christ during the first years of his mature period with the teachings of the Mennonite sect. According to Baldinucci, one of the artist's seventeenth-century biographers, Rembrandt was a Mennonite, and we have seen that he was in contact with Cornelis Anslo, a famous Mennonite preacher of Amsterdam. In 1641 Rembrandt made an etching of Anslo, and in the same year he made the impressive double portrait of the preacher and his wife. In Rembrandt's day the Mennonite sect was a liberal one which discarded the sacerdotal idea, accepted no authority outside the Bible, limited baptism to believers, and held to freedom of conscience. They emphasised precepts which support the sanctity of human life and man's word and, following the Sermon on the Mount, they opposed war, military service, slavery, and such common practices as insurance and interest on loans. Compared with the severe Calvinists, the Mennonites represented a milder form of Christianity in which, according to the literal sense of the Sermon on the Mount, the leading principle was 'Love thy neighbour.’ [Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Oil on canvas, 176 x 210 cm]