Note 13 — SWISS EXILES.
Reading edition
One of Menno’s brothers is said to have been connected with the Anabaptists of Münster, those who took up arms, etc. Of these, whose course was so very different from the lives of our pacific Baptists in this country. Menno may have received some, after their defeat, to come under the peaceable rule. There are in the Netherlands, says a recent authority, 40,000 Mennonites. They are a true, pure Netherlandish appearance, which is older than the Reformation, and therefore must not be identified with the Protestantism of the sixteenth century.
Menno does not merit to be called the father of the Netherlandish Mennonites, but rather the first shepherd of the scattered sheep,—the founder of their church community.
The ground-thought from which Menno proceeded was not, as with Luther, justification by faith, or, as with the Swiss Reformers, the absolute dependence of the sinner upon God, in the work of salvation. The holy Christian life, in opposition to worldliness, was the point whence Menno proceeded, and to which he always returned. In the Romish church we see ruling the spirit of Peter; in the Reformed Evangelical the spirit of Paul; in Menno we see arise again James the Just, the brother of the Lord.
See articles Menno and Mennonites, and Holland, in Herzog’s “Real-Encyclopädie,” Stuttgart and Hamburg, 1858.
Many of the Mennonites of Holland at the present day seem to have wandered far from the teachings of Menno, and to be very different from the simple Mennonite communities of Pennsylvania.