Mennonites

The sight of Mennonites coming out of their plain meetinghouse on Sunday, the glimpse of an Amish buggy on the road, or the spectacle of the "plain people" behind their stalls at Friday market have often startled travelers in southeastern Pennsylvania. Having no idea that such people existed, they feel that they have dropped back into an earlier century. The impression made by these sectarians is such a vivid one that it has given rise to one of the most widely spread misconceptions about the Pennsylvania Dutch, that one and all wear bonnets or broad-brim hats. At the very most only one out of ten Pennsylvania Dutchmen dresses "plain" ; the rest, usually "church people" or Moravians, look like the great mass of Americans elsewhere.

The Mennonites, the parent church of the Amish, are one of the oldest religious groups in Pennsylvania. Their belief in adult baptism, the most important of their doctrines, attracts no particular attention today from the rest of the world. In the Mennonite baptism water is usually poured on the head, although occasionally the man or woman joining church may kneel in a running stream and be baptized by water from the hand. It is their plain dress rather than their method of baptism that calls attention to the Mennonites. Avoiding the bright colors loved by the Amish, the Menonites usually dress in black or gray. The women wear small, neat black bonnets with house caps of fine white linen under them. Their dresses, with tight bodices and full skirts, have long tight sleeves and high necks. A kerchief of the same material as the dress comes to a point at the waist in front and in back and at both shoulders. Often aprons are worn and shawls instead of coats. The men, usually clean-shaven, wear flat broad-brim hats and coats with stand-up collars without lapels. In the speech of the more worldly of the Pennsylvania Dutch, to join the Mennonite Church is to "turn plain," a phrase aptly chosen.

The meetinghouses, with benches and whitewashed walls and a coal stove in the center, are severe and plain. The men sit on one side andthe women on the other; the older people sit in the front. The broad-brim hats are hung on pegs on the wall or on racks suspended above the benches from the ceiling. As there is a church attendance of almost 100 per cent, the meetinghouses are often large. A Mennonite has to be very sick to stay home from church. Even a baby is taken to church as soon as he is five weeks old. There is no organ or instrumental music of any kind, nor is there a choir. Instead there is hearty, full-voiced singing by the whole congregation.

Except among the more liberal groups of Mennonites the ministry is not an educated one. The ministers are chosen from the congregation by lot; none of them has had special education or preparation for preaching. Even their consent to act as ministers is taken for granted. Mennonite proposed by the congregation as a possible minister cannot easily withdraw. He may feel unworthy or he may believe that to preach a sermon is beyond his powers; but the choice is the Lord's, not his. At the service at which a minister is chosen Bibles are placed before the candidates. In one of the Bibles is a slip of paper with the verse from Proverbs 16: 33, "The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord." The man who selects the Bible with this slip of paper is the one chosen. He serves as minister for life and without pay. Nor can he be dismissed by the congregation except for gross misdemeanor. In colonial days the uneducated ministry worked to the advantage of the Mennonites. Where Reformed and Lutherans by the hundred or even thousand went without clergy and often without churches. the Mennonites could always provide themselves with ministers from within their own congregations. There was not the dependence on Europe for leadership that early hampered the growth of the Reformed and Lutheran churches and later hamstrung the Moravian Church.

The Mennonites in their settlement at Germantown in 1683 planted the first German colony in America. It was the Mennonites who led the way to this new land of Goshen. An even earlier attempt to establish a Mennonite colony on this side of the Atlantic had been made in 1662, when Cornelius Plockhoy and twenty-five Dutch Mennonite families had tried to build a utopia where the Whorekill flows into the Delaware. There they set up a cooperative society where all men were free to worship as they pleased, where each man was the equal of every other man, and where poverty was to be abolished. Slavery was forbidden. A free school was established. For two years this tiny utopia went its happy way, and then the English came and "plundered what belonged to the Quaking Society of Plockhoy to a naile." Plockhoy escaped and for thirty years somehow or other he managed to keep alive iri the early American wilderness. In 1694, old and blind, he turned up in Germantown, his wife leading him. There the Mennonites took up a collection for him, gave him a lot on which they built a little house, and in front of the house they planted a tree. Here Plockhoy lived quietly for the last few years of his life.

Germantown was soon followed by other settlements, along the Skippack and the Pequea, and later along the Swatara and the Tulpehocken. Most of the early Mennonites were Swiss driven to the Palatinate by persecution, though some of them came directly from Switzerland. Many of them were helped on their way by Dutch members of their faith. The Mennonites of Amsterdam set up a Committee of Foreign Needs, which by 1732 had received over three thousand requests for aid, of which a large number were granted.

The larger part of the Mennonite emigration took place in the early eighteenth century. Practically all the Mennonites who came to America at this time settled in Pennsylvania. Later in the eighteenth century a few made their way down the Great Valley to Maryland and Virginia, and in the nineteenth century to Canada and the West. In Pennsylvania the Mennonites settled in the placid valleys and the gently rolling hills south and east of the first range of mountains.After Germantown the earliest settlement was in the upper half of what was then Philadelphia County but is now Montgomery, and later in upper Bucks and Lancaster County, all Mennonite centers to this day. Except for Germantown the Mennonite country began twenty miles to the north of Philadelphia; to the west, with rare exceptions, it was fifty or more miIes away. The land on which the Mennonites settled was good, and that of the Lancaster Plain more than good. Most of the early Mennonites were farmers, though in Germantown some were weavers and artisans. Even today almost all Mennonites are farmers.

It has been one of the glories of the Mennonite Church that the first American protest against slavery, made in Germantown in 1688, was in part a Mennonite document. Presented to the Quaker meeting in Germantown 175 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, it was signed by four men: Pastorius, a German pietist; Gerrit Hendricks, a Mennonite; and Derik and Abraham Op den Graff, two Mennonites turned Quaker. They found it "a terror, or fearful thing, that men should be handelled so [as slaves] in Pennsylvania." "How fearful and faint-hearted are many at sea," they wrote, "when they see a strange vessel, being afraid it should be a Turk, and they should be taken, and sold for slaves into Turkey. Now, what is this better done, than Turks do?" The monthly meeting, finding this protest too weighty a document for it to act upon, sent it to the quarterly meeting, which in turn passed it on to the yearly meeting, where it was quietly shelved. This evidence of a tender conscience and courage in the Mennonites when all the rest of the world took slavery for granted is greatly to their credit. None of the Mennonites ever owned slaves, not even those who in the next century moved to Virginia.

Mennonites turning Quaker were not unusual in the late seventeenth century. The two faiths had much in common: their emphasis on simplicity, their stand on nonresistance, and their interest in ethics.Both the Quakers and the Mennonites were far more concerned about leading a good Christian life than they were about theology. Both Fox and Penn owed much to the teachings of Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonite Church. Even the essential Quaker belief of the "inner light" was commonly held by the Anabaptists, from whom the Mennonites were descended. It was this marked similarity between the two peoples that led Penn to invite the Mennonites to settle in his colony of Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania the Mennonites were fervent supporters of the Quakers, especially in the Quaker opposition to war. Like the Quakers, most of the Mennonites were separated from the Indians by a broad band of churchmen, Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian, and Presbyterian. Yet even in the Revolution most of the Mennonites were treated leniently. The authorities in general recognized that their opposition was to war rather than to the American cause. True, they found themselves in difficulty when they refused to pay the special war tax of £3 10S. that Congress levied. This attitude was roundly condemned by one of their ministers, Christian Funk: "Were Christ here, He would say, Give to Congress that which belongs to Congress and to God that which belongs to God." For this Funk was excommunicated, where-upon he organized several Mennonite congregations loyal to theAmerican cause. It was only in communities where the Mennonites were few in number that they were mistreated. In Bcrks County several Mennonites were put in Reading jail, and in Northampton County they were classcd as Tories by the court. At Saucon in Northampton County all their possessions were confiscated: furniture, stoves, bedding, household utensils, dishes, food, even their very Bibles. The men were ordered to leave the province within thirty days; the women and children, having been made destitute, were permitted to remain. Though such persecution was rare, the Mennonites through much of Pennsylvania were looked upon with suspicion and often with contempt as men who refused to fight for their country.

The memory of this hostile attitude during time of war may have prompted a later generation to emigrate to Canada, where they were promised freedom from military service and where land was cheap. Probably it was this last fact that carried most weight.Beginning in 1793, the exodus to Canada reached its height in 1806-1807. Making their way northward through the river valleys, they crossed western New York to settle on the fertile lands of lower Ontario in what is now Waterloo County. Here, too, life was beset with difficulties. To some of the rascals and cheats of the frontier these unworldly people were sheep ready for fleecing. They were sold tracts of land by men who had no title to the land. When the Mennonites discovered that the deeds to their farms were worthless, they turned to their fellow Mennonites in Lancaster County for help. In the country round about Brickersville $20,000 was raised. In 1802 this money, all in silver dollars, was carted north to Ontario by Conestoga wagon. In the end there was established in Ontario a little island of Pennsylvania Dutch, where the dialect and Dutch customs persist to this day. There the bank-barns and springhouses as well as sauerkraut and chicken potpie show the race from which the people sprang. In the town of Kitchener there is even a farmers' market of the sort found in every Pennsylvania Dutch city.

Later wars have only served to make the Mennonites more convinced pacifists. In the Civil War the North permitted the Mennonites to choose between hospital service and exemption upon the payment of $300. In Virginia exemption cost $500 until 1864:, when an effort was made to force the Mennonites into the army, whereupon many of them slipped through the lines to West Virginia and Maryland. In the First World War, Mennonites frequently met with persecution in the army camps if they refused to accept noncombatant service. Although this abuse was not sanctioned by the War Department, it nevertheless occurred. In the Second World War the Mennonites met with greater understanding and fairer treatment. A small number of extreme paci- fists who refused to register for the draft were jailed; but most of theMennonites. along with Quakers. Brethren. and other conscientious objectors. were sent to Civilian Public Service camps.

The Mennonites also object to taking an oath. an objection shared by the Quakers and the Brethren. This was a minor matter that got them into no serious difficulties. In Pennsylvania they were granted the right of affirmation as early as 1717. In Maryland "Quakers. Tunkers and Mennonites" were given this right in the Constitution of 1776.

In so far as possible the Mennonites avoid going to law. Instead they settle their differences among themselves. Even those Mennonites who leave the church and take up a profession give law a cold shoulder; most of them become teachers or doctors. Bankruptcy laws are regarded as new. frivolous, and evil; members of the church are urged not to take advantage of them. Life insurance is opposed: to insure life is to show no faith in God's goodness. Yet to soften the blow of death the Mennonites see to it that widows and children are adequately provided for: none go to the poorhouse or the orphans' home; none go on relief.

The Mennonites think of themselves as a peculiar people separate from the world, a people avoiding worldly pleasures and worldly sins. This is a view that has come down through the centuries from the Anabaptists and, to a certain degree. from the Waldenses before them. It is a part of primitive Christianity that has never wholly disappeared.

Among the Anabaptists the plain and simple primitive church was contrasted to the wealth and pomp of Rome. The lowly Christ, born in a stable, who chose as His disciples such plain people as fishermen, seemed far removed from the pope in his jeweled tiara amid the rich pageantry of St. Peter's at Rome. Simplicity marked every day of Christ's life. When He rode it was on an ass; when He spoke, it was the speech of His neighbors and not a learned alien tongue. In their criticism of the magnificence and the involved doctrines of the medieval church, the Anabaptists inevitably met with opposition, just as they did when they expounded their belief in the "inner light" or when they attacked the use of force. By no means all Anabaptists held these doctrines, for under the name Anabaptists forty or more sects were linked together. All of them rejected infant baptism, as the word Anabaptists, meaning to baptize over again, suggests. When a man was baptized and received into the church, he must have reached sufficient years to know what he was about. He must not have his religion forced on him when but a puling infant. This point of view was opposed by the great Reformed leader, Zwingli, who argued, oddly enough, that infant baptism took the place of circumcision. The Anabaptists thought they could dispense with both.

Anabaptism from the start had its strength among the peasants. The terrible slaughter that marked the Peasants' Revolt in 1524: and 1525 only tightened the hold of the Anabaptists on the peasants, for it was then that Luther, in a shocking pamphlet, urged the nobles to have no scruples in putting the rebels to death. By aligning his church on the side of the princes, Luther lost his hold on the peasants. The nobles took his advice seriously enough to kill off at least fifty thousand peasants. As the more militant of their leaders were killed, the Anabaptists turned more and more toward pacifism. With persecution their lot, they stressed humility. Put up with the sufferings of this world, they preached; only make certain your life is as pure and Christlike as possible. Thus the Anabaptists became increasingly unworldly. At the same time persecution and death taught them to look upon the state with fear and suspicion, a lesson all too well learned and never forgotten to this day. In Germany the ruthless suppression of the Peasants' Revolt encouraged the common man to put up with whatever rulers happened to be in power.

Yet in censuring the Mennonites for their suspicions of the state it must be borne in mind that for at least a century and a half in Europe they were a persecuted people cut off from the protection the state normally gives its citizens. In 1520 the Diet of Spires ordered all Anabaptists to be executed without a trial. Protestant and Catholic alike looked upon them as disloyal, heretical, rebellious, and untrustworthy subjects of the state. Even in Switzerland burial in consecrated ground was forbidden them.

The tendency of the Mennonites to shut themselves off from the world, even in this century, has sometimes resulted in narrowness; and occasionally self-righteousness has reared its ugly head. Fortunately, most of them are far too unassuming, kind, and generous to be self-righteous. Nor have the Mennonites often been austere, although at times their condemnation of the innocent pleasures of the world, such as the celebration of Christmas by hanging up a stocking or decorating a tree, has struck the rest of us as robbing their lives of color. Furthermore, their suspicion of all formal systems of theology has led to division and subdivision into sects, even to the point of absurdity. Near Ephrata, for instance, is a small group of Mennonites known as "the Pikers"-a name given not to brand them with the stigma of stinginess but because they live along the pike. This is but one of many subdivisions. In its most extreme form the church unit is reduced to a single family-a perfect illustration of the impulse to decide that all the world is wrong and only I am right.

The Mennonites were not always the simple, unlettered people that so many of them are today. In the early days they had learned leaders-this in the time when the Mennonites were still Anabaptists. Especially noted were Balthasar Hubmaier, professor of theology at Ingolstadt and cathedral preacher at Ratisbon, and Johannes Denck, the celebrated humanist of Basel; but most leaders of this caliber were put to death in the persecution that aimed to wipe out the Anabaptists. For a time Moravia, East Friesland, Augsburg, Worms, and Strasbourg gave them sanctuary until the higher authorities forced these districts and cities to join the persecution.

The tragedy reached its climax in the City of Munster, the last Anabaptist stronghold. Refugees from all of central Europe, especially from Holland, had streamed into Miinster. When the Anabaptists got control of the city, it was at once besieged by the troops of the bishop of Miinster, who was also a temporal prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Every Anabaptist who could be found was put to death. Under the duress of the siege the Anabaptists within the city adopted a form of communism. Even polygamy was practiced during the last months of the siege. Although polygamy had never been an Anabaptist belief, Jan of Leyden, one of their Ieaders, persuaded the city, in which there were three women to every man, to decree its practice by law. Every man was ordered to take wives and every woman a husband. Jan of Leyden himse!f took the text, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and rep!enish the earth," so seriously as to marry sixteen women. When at last the city was forced to surrender, most of the Anabaptists were summarily slaughtered. No attention was paid to the promise of safe-conduct to leave the town, one of the terms of the conditions of surrender.

In spite of this disaster Anabaptism was not wiped out. A new leader, Menno Simons, drew the remnants together. Born the very year in which Columbus discovered America, Menno Simmons was a Roman Catholic priest who left the Church in 1536. Rejecting polygamy and retuming to the older Anabaptist beliefs, he spent twenty-five years visiting scattered groups of Anabaptists and in uniting them in the church that bears his name. Although the Mennonites met with severe persecution, the church grew rapidly. The very persecution that scattered the Mennonites spread the movement, particularly in Holand and in the Palatinate, to both of which places many Mennonites had fled.

The long and bitter story of the persecution of the Anabaptists and the Mennonites was compiled by Tieleman Jansz van Braght and published in 1660. This is the Blutige Shau-Platz or MartyrsJ Mirror, commonly known among Pennsylvania Mennonites as The Martyr Book. The monks of the Ephrata cloister printed an edition of 1,300 copies of this huge volume of over 1,400 pages for the Mennonite churches of Pennsylvania. The most recent edition of The Martyr Book appeared in 1950. Through this book, which is commonly found in every Mennonite home, the sufferings of their remote ancestors have been kept alive for the Mennonites and Amish of this century. For many it has made the past more real than the present. It has served to convince them that the world is evil, that they are right in keeping separate and apart.

All the books in a Mennonite household are religious books. Most important of all is the Bible, on which from early days they put their reliance. When their leaders were killed off and their religion was driven underground, the movement was able to survive as long as there was one among them who could read the Bible. As it soon became the ambition of every Mennonite to be able to read the Bible, illiteracy among them was rare. In Germantown they started a school even before they built a meetinghouse. In 1743, long before the first Amcricar; edition of the Bible in English, they commissioncd Christopher Sauer to print a German Bible, both Old and New Testaments, after the translation of Martin Luther. Three other books widely read by early Mennonites were The Wandering Soul by J. P. Schabilie, a Mennonite minister; The Spiritual Flower Garden of the Inner Soul, which in 1800 went through its eighth American edition; and Golden Apples in Silver Shells, which was printed at Ephrata at Mennonite request as early as 1745.

As the Mennonites are one of the oldest Protestant groups, they have had a wide influence on other Protestant churches. Their view of baptism, that of the Anabaptists, as a rite that could be administered only to a person who had reached years of discretion, crossed the narrow seas that separate Holland from England. The Baptist Church stems directly from the Dutch Mennonites. The very first Baptist church was formed in Amsterdam in 1608, the second in London in 1611. John Smith, the father of the English Baptist Church, was baptized in the Mennonite Church of Amsterdam. In addition, the Baptists borrowed from the Mennonites their belief in universal atonement: that Christ died to save all men and not merely the elect. Even more significant to the history of America was the Mennonite insistence on liberty of conscience; this doctrine, too, the Baptists borrowed. I twas this principle that Roger Williams established in the Providence Plantations: complete religious freedom for all for the first time in the history of the world. This is one of the brightest pages in the story of mankind. It could be the proud boast of the Mennonites-if the Mennonites were given to boasting-that it was they who first evolved this principle of religious freedom. The Quaker borrowings from the Mennonites have already been listed; but still another Protestant group, the Congregational Church, is indebted to the Mennonites, and for its most characteristic feature, the large measure of independence possessed by each congregation. The Mennonite influence on other Protestant churches is less obvious, but their interest in working out rules for human conduct rather than in drawing up theological statements had a profound effect on the religious thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In America the Mennonites have been largely a farming people.They lead good Christian lives, for they are a people who live their religion. They are gentle and long-suffering they are hard-working and practical; they are as stable as the Alleghenies. In Pennsylvania the Church is ultraconservative. Largely because of the uneducated ministry they have clung to the old European ways. Both the Mennonites and the Amish try to live in the eighteenth century; the modern world is not for them. The Franconia discipline, which regulates the conduct of the most conservative group of Mennonites in the state, forbids attendance at political meetings and membership in labor unions. These are put under the same ban that moving pictures, secret societies, horse races, county fairs, excursions, picnics, and surprise parties are. This attitude toward politics is particularly vulnerable. In the early years of the Mennonite Church in Europe there was good reason for forbidding any member of the church to hold political office, since there a magistrate was the tool of the state church and by virtue of his office was compelled to persecute dissenters. That a new country and another century have not changed the Mennonite attitude is one of their most serious defects.

In a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" the of mennonites have ignored the second of these three phrases and put too littIe emphasis on the first. Except for the most advanced groups, among them, such as the New Mennonites, they refuse to take their rightful share in democratic government. The church permits its members to hold only such minor public offices as school director and road overseer. Yet little by little the Mennonites are coming to recognize that whether they like it or not they are a part of the world and that it is neccssary to combat rather than withdraw from "the world, the flesh, and the devil." But with evil so strong and flourishing, any compromise with their ancient belief in the wisdom of withdrawing from the world is bound to be beset with difficulties. Expediency is all too often a sweet-smelling name for surrender.

The Mennonite opposition to education is another serious weakness. No Mennonite and no Amishman have ever been prominent in the nation's history, yet many men of Mennonite ancestry have become renowned. Rittenhouse, Pennypacker, Frick, Cunard, Hershey, Landis, are all Mennonite names. Young Mennonites of talent and ambition leave the farm to go to the city, and leaving the farm they leave the church as well, for the Mennonite way of life is that of the farm and the small country town.

On the other hand, the Mennonites have achieved a far greater measure of social equality than most groups in America. Almost none are rich, although one Lancaster Mennonite in the feed-and-grain business became a millionaire; and almost none are poor. In the world of the Mennonites one man is as good as another. Among them there is no keeping up with the Joneses. "All men are created equal" is far truer with them than it is with the average run of Americans.

Though the Mennonite way of life may at first sight seem harsh and ascetic, neither of these adjectives is just. True, their family life is marked by a high moral standard seldom matched by other groups. Honesty, integrity, and simplicity have long been and remain Mennonite virtues. Yet there is an unusual gentleness and serenity among them, and among the other "plain people" as well, that sets them off from the Puritans. Their faces and their manner show that they have discovered at least one or two of the secrets of the good life. The fundamentals are theirs: they have clothes enough to keep them warm, tight roofs over their heads, and food in the larder. And possibly what is more important, they have stopped with the fundamentals. They have not asked for more. In abjuring luxury they have escaped many ills-above all the great sin of the century, materialism. Yet since they are their brother's keeper, old age, illness, and unemployment hold no terror for them. Hard work they accept cheerfully as the natural lot of man. Although they abstain from smoking and drinking, although 'they never go to the movies or listen to a soap opera or read a detective story, they have the cardinal pleasures of life. With an unusually fresh enjoyment of visiting, they make many friends. They partake freely of the bounties of the table. The pleasures of the marriage bed they view as natural and right. There is neither smut nor Victorian prudishness here; instead there is a pronounced earthy streak, which is not altogether unexpected in a farming people. Among themselves the young men are fairly frank about sex. They jest about it-sometimes in a fashion surprisingly broad, even Rabelaisian. It may be that their view of sex, which, I venture to say, most doctors and psychologists would judge eminently sound, is the secret of their vitality. Few Mennonite couples produce one child only. Many of their families are large: five or six sturdy boys and girls are common; nine or ten are not unusual. Here, too, they may show more wisdom than more highly educated people.

The Second World War has proved the mettle of this people. Throughout the war they clung tenaciously to their pacifism. Any man accepting service in the army or the navy was expelled from the church. Though this stand would seem to doom the world to Nazi enslavement in a crisis like that of the last war, war is so monstrous an evil that perhaps it is well for the country at large to be brought up short by a group irrevocably opposed to war as the Mennonites. Their stubborn condemnation of war makes the rest of us consider the evil nature of war more thoughtfully than we would have done otherwise. Like Edith Cavell they would say, "Patriotism is not enough."

In war relief the Mennonites, like the Quakers and the Brethren, have been of great service. The world has long known of the work the Quakers have done; the Brethren, too, attracted attention because of their gift of heifers to war-torn countries. The work of the Mennonites alone has gone virtually unnoticed. This has been by their own choice, for remembering Luke 17: 10, "So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded yoU, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do," they have shunned publicity. If anything, they have been all too modest in keeping their good works under a bushel.

The great contribution of the Mennonites has been in their gifts of food and clothing. Like the heifer project of the Brethren, the Mennonite work in relief has been intensely practical. Even during the war, before it was possible to ship food and clothing abroad, they had many relief workers in the field. Fully aware of the widespread suffering in the world, the Mennonites looked at their laden shelves at home with troubled hearts. At first there seemed to be no way to share this plenty with the starving. Tin was one of the wartime scarcities and glass is apt to break. Almost as a forlorn hope they sent to Holland a test consignment of thirty-six cases of glass jars, all of the same size and packed in the original cartons banded with wood, which in turn was reenforced with metal strips. If 90 per cent got through unbroken,they decided, they could go ahead and ship food canned on the Mennonite farms. When the report came that the consignment had arrived without a single jar broken, the Mennonites were jubilant. A way to share their food had been opened to them. In later shipments many jars were broken, but never as many as 10 per cent.

With this trial shipment a success, the Mennonite women set to work. From the time the first asparagus poked its spears through the earth in the spring till the last winter pears ripened in the attic, these farm women toiled over their stoves. Jar after jar was filled with all the fruits and vegetables their farms would grow: strawberries, cherries, peas, beans, raspberries, currants, blackberries, plums, tomatoes, corn, peaches, crab apples, pears, beets, applesauce, apple butter, quince chips-right through the calendar from April to November. Much of the food was put up in large two-quart jars, but food for babies was canned in pint and quart sizes. More than 800,000 quarts of food put up at home was the product for the season of 1945. A standard label was pasted on each jar; on the label were written the contents of the jar and the name and address of the woman who had filled it. This personal touch must have meant much to many of the recipients abroad. Here was proof that not all the world was indifferent to their plight. This food went to Holland and France, for under the direction of UNRRA Mennonite relief was centered on those two countries.

Such generosity had its effect on the Mennonites themselves. There was a growing enthusiasm for giving. Many families, often in extremely modest circumstances, gave far more bountifully than anyone would have asked them to. Often they went without things themselves to help feed the hungry abroad. As they worked in their fields growing the food or in their kitchens canning it, there was a broadening of horizons. For many of the Mennonites the larger world had hardly existed; but now, faced with the world's need, they did all in their power to feed the hungry and clothe the cold, and in doing so they felt a sense of brotherhood with them.

During the winter months, when the men had more free time from the work on the farm, they turned their attention to the canning of meat. Fortunately, they were able to get tin cans for the meat. They took over for the winter months a cannery in Smoketown in Lancaster County, one near Franconia Meeting in Montgomery County, and an- other at Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley. In addition they had two portable canneries, one in Ohio and one in Virginia. Individual Mennonites or several joining together or whole meetings gave or bought steers, hogs, and poultry, which were slaughtered and then cut up, cooked, and canned. Most of this meat was raised on the home farms.

The cannery at Smoketown was run by five men who were appointed as the Food for Relief Committee by the Lancaster Conference consisting of seventy-two churches, Amish and River Brethren as well as Mennonite. It was this committee's duty to supervise the work, to see that there were enough people to help, and to make certain of supply of meat. Extra equipment for the cannery was bought with money given for that purpose. A company in Lancaster very generously slaughtered all the hogs free of charge, and an equally generous plant in Bird in Hand provided cold storage. Six mcn worked regularly at the more highly skilled jobs at the cannery in order to keep things running smoothly. All the other help came from Mennonite, Amish, and River Brethren volunteers, men and women. Usually fifty to sixty members of a particular meeting took over for the day. The men performed the heavier tasks, disjointing the steers and hogs. The women cut up the meat into two-inch squares and did much of the cooking and canning. They worked from seven-thirty in the morning till all the work for the day was done-usually well along in the evening, sometimes as late as ten. From the beginning of November to the beginning of March the cannery was in full operation five days a week. For the four months from November I, 1945, to March I, 1946, this one cannery produced, all in No.10 cans holding three and a half quarts each, 21,861 cans of beef, 16,780 cans of pork, 9,036 cans of poultry, and 1,264 cans of fats. Into those cans of poultry had gone 20,308 chickens, 109 turkeys, and 112 ducks.

To look at the larger picture of the Mennonite contribution as a whole instead of just one cannery, 69 shipments of food, weighing 3,259,482 pounds and valued at $210,952.13, were sent abroad between April 10, 1945, and March I, 1946, a period of less than a year. In addition to the home-canned fruit and vegetables and the meat in tins there were flour, wheat, dried milk, evaporated milk, and raisins. The home-canned food came largely from the East, the dried fruits from the West, and the flour and wheat in carload lots from the Middle West. Except for 6,162 pounds of tools and utensils valued at $1,707.20 all these shipments were food. And except for 17,423 pounds valued at $1,060.29, which went to Puerto Rico, all of this was shipped to Holland and France.

The Mennonites sent clothing, blankets, soap, and medical supplies as well as food. From January I, 1945, to March 13, 1946, clothing weighing 460,127 pounds and valued at $449,174.82 was shipped abroad. When the Mennonite Central Committee put a small notice in four church papers that blankets were badly needed, thc post office and the express office at Akron, Pennsylvania, were snowed under. The postmaster and express agent, in distress, begged the Central Comfmittee to send men to dig them out-figuratively, at least-from under the piles of blankets. Some of the clothing shipped had been worn, some was brand-new. All the used clothing was cleaned, mended, and ironed before it was sent. All sorts of clothing, including layettes for babies and special bundles for hospitals, were made by local sewing groups. Quilts were made by these groups too, while sweaters, scarfs, caps, mittens, and afghans were knitted at home.

One of my friends, a Quaker engaged in work for the Friends Service Committee, told me of her delight in visiting a sewing group, made up that day of Amish women from Paradise. Black bonnets and shawls hung from pegs along the wall. The women in their white house caps and their kerchiefs and bright dresses of violet, green, blue, and wine-red and aprons of black made a picture worthy of Pieter Brueghel. One can't help wondering, though, how the little Dutch and French boys and girls looked decked out in broadfall trousers or bonnets and kerchiefs. Not that the Amish are likely to carry their ideas on unworldly dress that far, but the vision of little Dutch and French children in bonnets and broadbrims is too attractive to be easily resisted.

By the middle of 1947 the various branches of the Mennonite Church, though comprising only one-tenth of I per cent of the population of the United States, were sending 40 per cent of all nongovernment relief supplies to foreign countries, a record as magnificent as it is astonishing. No wonder that Bishop John Lapp of the Mennonite Church was able to say, "We no longer live to ourselves nor die to ourselves."

In part the work of the three "peace churches"-the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Brethren-has been an attempt to justify themselves in the eyes of the world, to demonstrate that though they may refuse to fight they can be of service in binding up the wounds of humanity. But to ascribe the relief work of these churches to an inferiority complex is a mistake. To some degree it is very likely that; but kindness of heart and pity and even a feeling of guilt for what man has done to man all play their part.

One of the most striking features in the history of the Mennonites is the divergent paths taken by the church in America, Holland, and Germany. In Holland the Mennonites from their earliest years have played a prominent part in the government, while their contribution to Dutch culture has been as noteworthy as that of the Unitarians to New England and the Quakers to Pennsylvania. They have furnished many eminent judges and several cabinet ministers to the kingdom as well as a governor general to the East Indies and the first president to the World Court. Oddly enough, they have been so given to finance that many of Holland's most powerful bankers have been Mcnnonites. In Holland they have been a people of the city rather than of the country, and as an urban people they have long been noted for their intellectual attainments. Painters, physicians, and scientists of the first rank have been Mennonites. The Dutch Mennonite Nickolaus Bidloo was the director of the medical school Peter the Great founded in Moscow. His brother, Gottfried Bidloo, was body physician to William III of England. Rembrandt's famous painting " A Mennonite Preacher and the Widow" portrays the noted Dutch Mennonite Cornelisz Claesz Anslo and his wife. The principal park in Amsterdam bears the name of the Mennonite poet Joost van den Vondel. Beyond any doubt the Dutch Mennonites have been yeast in the dough of Holland-not the only yeast but a goodly portion of it.

In Germany, too, the Mennonites have had a history very unlike that of the Mennonites of America. Since most of the Mennonites of the Palatinate emigrated to Pennsylvania, the German Mennonites of today are largely Holland Dutch in origin. The small meeting at Emden, established in 1530 and the oldest Mennonite congregation in the world, had among its members during the First World War an admiral and a major general. The Krefeld Mennonites, although conservative and simple in their mode of living, included some of the wealthiest people in the country, captains of industry as well as burgomasters and civic leaders. Several German Mennonites became shipowners ; several became even brewers. Hermann Sudermann, the dramatist, was the son of an East Prussian Mennonite who combined farming with bre\ving. Most German Mennonites were set off from the rest of the people by their wealth and conservatism. By the time of the First World War pacifism had completely disappeared among them. In the Second World War their money and conservatism made them ardent Nazis.

The arresting differences of the three Mennonite cultures provides a nice problem for the sociologists. What was it that made the Mennonites of Holland intellectuals and leaders? Why did the Mennonites of Germany set their hearts on wealth? Why did the Mennonites of Pennsylvania eschew it? Why did not the freedom and boundless opportunity of early Pennsylvania bring forth a great Mennonite culture comparable to that of the Mennonites in Holland? What is it that has caused the Pennsylvania Mennonites to lie fallow for two and a half centuries? Perhaps in light of their many fine qualities that phrase, "lie fallow," is overly harsh. Yet like the Puritans, theirs is a world without Shakespeare. Just as the Puritans closed the theaters, broke the stair.ed-glass windows in the cathedrals, and ripped the organs out of the churches, so too the Mennonites have opposed all the arts and even the sciences. Though Mennonite virtues are admirable and many, there has been no place in their world for the intellectual life; and without an intellectual life can a culture, extraordinarily flue though it may be in certain aspects, exist on a truly high level? ..

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