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by John L. Ruth
The writer of Psalm 78 proposes (in the King James idiom) to speak of "dark things." Luther translates it as "riddles of old things" (räterchen von alten dingen.) Riddles of old things are dark in two senses. Old things are dim because of their distance from our time. Especially are origins hard, if not impossible, to understand.
And second, "The dark places of the earth," to quote another Psalm, "are filled with cruelty." Thus the past we probe to appreciate God’s great works is full of things to be regretted, things that don’t fit our present mores. Things, even in the Bible, that we don’t approve of. Things in our own past which do not please us. The Book of Revelation shows us a writer puzzled by his own vision. John tells us he "wept much" because there was no one capable of opening a book that contained the meaning of history. This weeping represents our existential need to understand the riddle of human existence, the story of which we are characters.
In my own surveying of life in the two oldest American Mennonite conferences, I’ve noted the persistent emotion of yearning for access to the book of history. There is a wistfulness for and relief in learning a person’s story. While my most recent manuscript has been incubating, I’ve gotten impatient letters from people who say they need it so that they can place their own family stories in context. I have often gone to funeral memorial meals, simply to offer the healing balm of memory. Without story, something within our hearts and communities starves.
Clifford Geertz, in a review of Jerome Bruner’s recent The Culture of Education, notes its conclusion that "Growing up among narratives ... is the essential scene of education . . . . `We live in a sea of stories.’ Learning how to swim in such a sea, how to construct stories, understand stories, classify stories, check out stories, see through stories, and use stories to find out how things work or what they come to, is what the school, and beyond the school the whole `culture of education,’ is, at base, all about. The heart of the matter is that `humans beings make sense of the world by telling stories about it — by using the narrative mode for construing reality ...." 1
In working on two conference histories, I’ve reflected on a paradox in our eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite memory. On the one hand, our people were full of history, and on the other most did little or nothing to consciously record it. The record may be quickly summarized.
In 1727, within decades of their arrival, they had placed a version of their history before the public in an appendix to their Confession of Faith containing an essay of 1664 by the Dutch Tieleman T. van Sittert. In this van Sittert argued that the violent Münsterites had been an aberration from the peaceful streams of Dutch Mennonites and Swiss Baptists, from whom governments had less than nothing to fear. By 1742, the parental longing of Pennsylvania Mennonites was calling forth the publishing of a German translation of the Martyrs Mirror. At the same time they reproduced in their hymnal the 1645 Berichte of Jeremias Mangold, narrating the persecutions of their great-grandparents in the Canton of Zurich.
But alas, when Morgan Edwards of Philadelphia published a history of Baptist-related communions in Pennsylvania in 1770, he reported little "readiness" among the Lancaster Mennonists to give him the statistics he sought. They seemed suspicious, he observed, that if others had information about them it might "be to their prejudice."2 In 1773 the Franconia bishops wrote that they had been too busy to keep records — all they had was a page from their first bishop, who had died ten years earlier, taking them up to the year 1712 in Germantown.
A Mennonite from Hamburg trying to piece together a record of his clan’s American diaspora did elicit from a woman at Skippack — Magdalena van Sinteren Kolb — the first American Mennonite genealogical roster. But for over a century thereafter one finds very little surviving record-writing among Magdalena’s people in Pennsylvania. There is certainly evidence of living oral tradition. In 1826 schoolteacher-historian-translator I. D. Rupp, of the Reformed faith, was able to take notes on Lancaster Mennonite memories, even though the stories were already somewhat shaky. A few years later we find Deacon John Lederach of Salford (in the Franconia Conference) telling German visitor Jacob Krehbiel that "the documents dealing with the original American ordination [1698/1708] at Germantown were still preserved in Germantown." The deacon had often thought, he said, that he should ask for these papers, to be kept for historical reasons "in one of our congregations in Montgomery County."3
But it would be over a century before his descendants would take the trouble to gather documents systematically. In such correspondence as has survived one finds occasional intriguing comments on concerns brought from the old country. As late as the 1880’s there were fragments of legend afloat in our community about our memorable schoolteacher Christopher Dock, who had died a century earlier. But the connections became so tenuous that even an intelligent progressive like John H. Oberholtzer in 1849 knew little history. He did not know who his American pioneer ancestor of 1732 was, nor even his own grandmother’s first name. He imagined that one reason there had been so little "Gelehrsamkeit" (learning) among his American ancestors was that danger from the "tomahawks" of "wild" Indians on the frontier had made an orderly life difficult.4 He wrote in the vaguest of generalizations about the "Franconia Conference," which he viewed as formed just in the generation previous to his.
Benjamin Eby of Ontario, a native Lancaster Countian, did pull together a survey of Mennonite history in 1841, and I. D. Rupp tried to do the same a few years later in his Original History of the Religious Denominations ... of the United States (1844). But the Lancaster Conference’s most intelligent leader, Bishop Christian Herr, supplied to Rupp only a quite unoriginal and hazy overview, with the Dordrecht Confession of Faith. Controversies such as those of the Montgomery County "Funkites" of 1777-1811, the Lancaster "Herrites" of 1812, and the Groffdale community in the 1840’s all left paper trails valuable to historians.
These survivals remind us of an issue of balance which historians must deal with. It became personal for me in the comment of an old mentor, Noah G. Good, after he had read a version of my forthcoming manuscript, The Earth is the Lord’s: A Narrative History of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference. "I get the impression," wrote Noah, "that so much space is given to recording bitterness and quarrels because you can get hold of that, and the quiet sober growth gets little emphasis. Perhaps this is so natural that it cannot be avoided, but I feel I get a distorted picture of tension. These things are all so very true, much too true to be missed or avoided; but are we missing something because it did not produce noise?" Again: "This is church history. It needs to be told as it was. [But] Even at this long time afterwards we must be careful not to rankle or stir up old sores. Is this what we want to say?" My generation is not as afraid of examining "old sores" as Good’s. And I tend to go with what I consider the biblical model, which has the advantage of letting the readers feel that they are getting more than one side of the story. But I am very much concerned with his question, "Is this what we want to say?" One is always choosing what one wants to say about the past.
In 1856 I. D. Rupp went through ship-records kept after 1727, and published his Collection of Thirty Thousand Names of Pennsylvania German pioneers. This was a helpful beginning, but already so much had been forgotten that the names themselves could hardly provide any "picture." By the time of the Civil War, our people had effectively lost the story of their great-grandparents’ migration. Those few who still knew it were not writing it. In 1864, John L. Delp of Chalfont wrote plaintively to the new Herald of Truth, "I have for some time been trying to collect some of the early history of our Church in Pennsylvania ... but thus far I have met with rather ill success." Delp hoped that others who were "better informed" might "bring to light what appears to be so much in the dark in our country."5
In the same year miller Isaac Tyson of near Royersford mourned, "My poor heart often feels sorry that so little is known about our ancestors. All the old people are gone, and no one is here anymore to give me the desired information. What might have been handed down to the coming generation with ease is now out of reach ...."6 Isaac then joined the "River Brethren" whose historians, one notes, have precious little written record to deal with of the origins of their own fellowship in the late 1770’s. In this vacuum, other voices spoke. The Reformed Mennonites certainly did a better job of explaining their birth than did the larger body of 19th Century Mennonites with their own story. But other interpretations tended to confuse our own self-perception. In my community J. K. Harley, the worldly son of a Brethren preacher at Indian Creek, wrote a little history of Montgomery County for the public schools, in which he set the meaning of our region primarily in terms of what the American Revolution had done for it. There was nothing at all about our people’s spiritual life.7
Amusingly, when one looks with the eyes of a local at the actions of General George Washington while he was staying at the home of a Mennonite miller on our Perkiomen Creek, a revealing historical irony emerges. One of the "dark things" historians like to mention is that our Mennonite farmers were very loath to sell their produce to Washington’s Army for fear that its paper Continental money would not reflect the full worth of their butter and veal. Rather, they carried produce on their backs to Philadelphia, where the occupying British Army had the King’s gold to buy provender. This is offered as an illustration of a crassness unable to recognize the emerging noble dream of an independent America. But if so, what about the instructions Washington himself, while at Pennypacker’s Mill, wrote home to a relative in Virginia? When the agent would rent some real estate the General owned, he was to make sure that any currency used would allow the Father of his County to "really, and not nominally, get what was intended as a rent."8
A century later, while Americans were inspiring themselves with fables of "Washington praying at Valley Forge," came the first stirrings among Mennonites to recover the memory of their ancestry. But prolific genealogist A. J. Fretz, who began his search in 1880, lamented that he "should have ... begun years ago, while there were yet living those of the third generation, who could have given more satisfactory information of the early ancestors ... but which with their demise is forever lost. Already the ancestral thread was lost to many who were unable to trace their lineage farther than to the grandfather ...."9 Although in 1895 the story of our Bernese past was sympathetically laid open by the Reformed Pastor Ernst Müller at Langnau, using Dutch records,10 when A. D. Wenger of Lancaster came through Langnau five years later he could not recognize the historical story spread around him. Nor did M. G. Weaver use Müller’s quite essential account when he published his own history of Lancaster Mennonites in 1931. And strangely we of the 1990’s have still not done our homework on this, i.e., we have not systematically translated the rich collection of correspondence involving our Swiss/Palatine ancestors, still awaiting our mature attention in the Mennonite Archives in Amsterdam. (Author’s note: Since giving this talk, I am happy to report that a significant initiative is under way to correct this historic neglect.)
In 1906 young Illinois native C. Henry Smith, who had been teaching at Goshen College and was researching his Ph.D. thesis (Mennonites of America) for the University of Chicago, was bemused by his experience of the Lancaster Mennonites. In a stay of several weeks in what he called the "original nest of the Pennsylvania Mennonites," the midwesterner found the scene to be "one of the most charming as well as the most prosperous rural bits in all America." With hardly a weed in the fields, the "substantial stone houses and capacious red barns full of well-groomed horses and well-fed cattle ... spelled thrift and industry in every detail." But in the midst of "the charm of the landscape and the fine hospitality of the people," Smith could find "no records" to consult nor even gravestones for the first settlers. He concluded somewhat understandably though prematurely that "the Mennonites here ... were not much interested in their ancestry."11
This seemed true again in 1910, as historians gathered at the Willow Street Mennonite Meetinghouse to celebrate the Bicentennial of the first white settlers’ arrival in what had become Lancaster County. The local Mennonites actually tried to distance themselves from what they considered a worldly and inappropriately proud observance. While "the religious meaning" of "our 200 years" was left to the oratory of secularized descendants, the Mennonite leaders were occupied with concerns about the clothes requirements for participating in communion. After the celebration, they expressed "sorrow" at Conference that such a proud "anniversary display & Celebration" had taken place at one of their meetinghouses. "Such things," recorded Bishop Benjamin Weaver, are "unbecoming for us. We hope they may never be repeated on our church grounds any Place."12
But that same year of 1910 had seen the beginnings of two decades of research on Lancaster Mennonite history by scrivener Martin G. Weaver. By the time his Mennonites of the Lancaster Conference appeared in 1931, the yearning for the lost story had grown quite wistful. Bishop Noah H. Mack was pleased with what Weaver had been able to construct around a core of brief congregational sketches, but in his "Introduction" commented, "What a volume of family history" our ancestors "could have conveyed to us, but they are all silent, and the past gives us no answer ...."13 Author Weaver himself confessed to wondering how it was "that our fathers all passed so quietly ... without telling us more about their trials, experiences, and triumphs." It would have been "important and uplifting," he thought, to "know more about the privations and hardships which tried their souls, and of their successful efforts in preserving their faith so precious to them ...."14
A similar complaint was that of progressive Lancaster Mennonite John Hershey Mellinger, writing in the 1940’s. "I am unable to learn anything," he wrote, "of the Mellinger ancestry beyond my grandfather."15 The ancestor in question, born in 1790 in Manor Township and farming in Strasburg Township after 1815, had apparently left his descendants with no connection to family lore. A great language-change stood like a Chinese Wall between his understanding and the quiet era before the days of factories and higher education. No wonder an author of a history of the Byerland congregation, "forced ... to condense her research to a ten day period," would entitle her book Out of the Silent Past.16
Thus for most of two centuries our people lived without access to even the outlines of the founding of their American communities. That story lay obscured amidst vague and often misleading phrasings like "bloody persecution," "the briny deep," "seven brothers who came across," "savage Indians," "primeval forests," and "a sheepskin from William Penn."
The way our own projected scrim patterns what we see in the past is neatly illustrated in the "Wall of Memory" placed in our Heritage Center at Harleysville several years ago. Stones from here and there in our experience were supplied to a mason, who mortared them into a pleasingly variegated formation. The memory was solidly there. But was it? The granite block that one of our first African American members had chiseled out was now unrecognizable, since its corner had been knocked off to fit a non-square slot. The bit of African petrified wood, in the shape of its continent, had been flipped to fit another opening, which made it resemble South America instead. And an Indian pestle had been inserted the long way to fit a narrow opening, leaving only the blunt end showing, so that the profile of its functioning was invisible. Having been set to our pattern, those stones of memory had no voice.
Part of the historian’s work is to make one story out of many stories. Although any human family needs this, in doing more imposing than listening we design inauthentic family crests — the American one-size-fits-all, mail-order family history that can be bought when there is no real memory. I live on the remnants of an old farm. No matter how much renovating or cleaning up we do, the detritus of 160 years persists. Periodic farm auctions, when everything was sold, have far from eradicated all the evidence of what happened here. Load after load of old iron has been hauled away, pile after pile of wood gone through the Franklin stove: beam, brace, cornice, crate, dowel, jamb, joist, lath, lintel, moulding, panel, plank, rafter, rung, shingle, sill, stud, wainscot. What a susurrus of whispered voices from the fireplace! Then there are initials and dates scratched in wood or stone! Year after year they tell me about what my grandparents knew, placing my life in the perspective of theirs. I perceive differently when I walk from the modern addition of our house to the older side, where I am transferred out of the end of the 20th century into a more organic-feeling ambiance. A dropped marble rolls on the old floor, the walls too are not abstractly plumb. The plaster has hog’s hair in it. The cellar-steps are worn irregularly concave around the dense wood of knots, forcing me to feel, especially if barefooted, with those who descended and climbed here over five lifetimes. In the old attic, I must walk with lowered head. Dark aureoles on the floor mark the drip of smoked hams through winters that never dreamed of supermarkets crammed with a gross array of pre-processed delicacies from around the globe. Sometimes these darker rooms give me the creeps. They challenge me seriously to transcend my provincial absorption in the end of the 20th century. They insist, if I will listen, that my time too is an interval, a transition. My artifacts too are quickly replaced by sleeker, more digital ones. When I stand with head necessarily bowed in these humble spaces, I look at "history" and its contents differently than when pecking at a keyboard to extract information from an electronic databank.
I’ve mentioned the fear of worldliness that influenced the 1910 Lancaster County Bicentennial. Interestingly, when the Mennonites themselves gathered again at Willow Street in 1960 for the 250th anniversary, and could name the topics for themselves, the main speaker chose to dwell on a historical review of "nonconformity." The same man, Bishop J. Paul Graybill, tried very diligently to stamp that interpretive principle on the thinking of a committee that soon began to project a history to get beyond the bounded 1931 chronology of M. G. Weaver. Sitting on that committee was Noah Good, who would outlive Graybill and bring his perspective to bear on the new history. After perusing my manuscript, Good expressed surprise. "As our Publication Committee sat together many hours," he recalled, "we saw the history as a rather serious thing in prospect. We idealized many of the leaders as persons of serious and spiritual character. You have been successful in ferreting out so many amusing incidents that we never thought of when we first contemplated this work."
Good’s choice of the word "amusing" brought me a mild shock. Having tried so hard to get beyond the former limitations of pious lists, had I fallen into a merely entertaining mode? Had I spoken at so many congregational anniversaries that the need to catch listeners’ attention had moved me too close to humor? Good continued: "This does make the story more factual and realistic." But "Is the leadership contest between John Mellinger and his group and the rather staid and outmoded bishop body intended to be amusing, or is it an illustration of God working in spite of human hindrances? So often the human or amusing aspect is highlighted more than the less tangible aspect of seeking God’s leading. I am rather sure this emphasis will capture the attention of many readers. Will the reader be influenced for or against the Conference and its work by reading this book? I would hope that each serious reader would come away from this book with deeper appreciation than before."
On that last note, I could not have been in more agreement. But the difference of stance of two persons who love the Church of Christ and its story, one born in 1904 and the other in 1930, is definitely in play here. I devoutly hope that future readers will appreciate Robert Frost’s dictum that they must recognize the inward seriousness of what may be said with outward humor.
Perhaps the most obvious force that turn things past into riddles is the simple stark process of loss that leaves every community with its horror stories. From my own old community, six decades ago, many important materials went to the Bluffton College Library hundreds of miles distant. In two swift visits there I found uncatalogued John Oberholtzer manuscripts, N. B. Grubb correspondence, and hymnals with forgotten inscriptions, but missed a set of revealing Abraham Hunsicker letters to Oberholtzer which would have thrown sharp light on the 1847 division I was trying to interpret. In Lancaster County the crucial "Pequea" Christian Herr family papers turned to mush in a barrel under a leaky attic roof. The papers of John Shenk, Secretary of the "Russian Committee," were thrown out, and those of Treasurer Gabriel Bear were carelessly burned only weeks before historians came looking for them. You can provide illustrations from your own communities.
Yet in all our struggle with the riddles of our past, we find it unexpectedly disclosing rich meaning. To quote T. S. Eliot, "What the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."17 And in a strange way time itself becomes the historian’s ally. For time is not only a distorting, but a focusing lens. To change the metaphor, time sieves away a lot of litter, thus letting us concentrate on a few themes, rather than an incomprehensible clutter of data. The closer the period we write about, the harder it is to see what is of lasting importance. On the other hand, whatever evidence survives the rude wasting of old time stakes a special claim to our attention.
Another paradox I’ve often reflected on is the way a parochial community like mine, which has come only very late to its historical self-interpretation, and is thus comparatively penalized by having to scrounge its evidence from sparse, neglected sources, nevertheless has an advantage. That is, where there has persisted an unusual sense of spiritual family, even where records have been few, they can be disproportionately gathered. Thus the forming of many Mennonite archives across this country since 1950 has been enhanced by an unusual awareness of where people have gotten to. If you doubt this principle, I advise you to visit the Muddy Creek Farm Library assembled by Old Order Mennonite farmer Amos B. Hoover since the 1960’s, and see what persistence and imagination — and love for the heritage — have accomplished, out of all normal scale. Beyond this, of course, the copying/ digital revolution is now erasing distance and unavailability, bringing us closer to our forbears’ thoughts as we move farther away from them in chronological time.
In the riddles of our past we find our own issues foreshadowed. For example, the unresolved fracturing of Menno Simons’ spiritual family in the Netherlands is a commentary on our own multiple groupings, all still claiming Menno’s name. The repeated departures from our own covenanted body toward other models of Christianity are re-experienced today. The gradual, drawn out process of compromising our forbears’ blood-bought espousal of Christian nonresistance, finds ever new occasion and form.
On another level, my old friend Warren Rohrer (recently deceased Philadelphia artist with roots in Lancaster County), surprised himself and those who appreciated his increasingly abstract painting, by an atavistic tendency to imitate the gestures of his inexpressive Mennonite ancestors. He had come to realize, he observed, that his inarticulate forbears, in their repetitive stroking of the earth or caressing of the fabric on their spinning wheels and looms, were engaged in the same drama he was rediscovering. It was this evocation of a wordless depth that powerfully draws those who recognize it to Warren’s subtly shaded canvases. As he would stare at a plowed field until it glowed on his canvas, so I have found that even the "quiet in the land" part of our heritage yields meaning in proportion to the intensity of the interpreter’s attention.
The riddle of things past often turns out to be the familiar but unexamined reality of the very moment from which we try to look back. The more we reflect on the paradoxes of history, the more recognizable the strangeness of our own moment becomes. And the more deeply we muse, the more likely we are to see the fundamental themes of history rising like those designs that entertain our children — configurations that emerge, depending on how our eyes focus, from among the distracting welter of more obvious imagery.
The Lion/Lamb of Revelation reappears in the horrific experience of Rwanda, ironically the most Christianized of African countries. Here, in the matrix of the East African Revival whose reflex influenced Lancaster Mennonite spirituality, the first to be killed were the most spiritual Christians. With the eye of faith, the Lion of the Dark Past is revealed as really the Lamb, whose sacrifice is rooted in Creation itself — "the foundation of the earth." For thoughts such as this the shallower word "riddle" must give way to cosmic Mystery. Something basic was indeed brought to Moses’s people — God "established a testimony in Jacob." But something greater was established when a Special Person emerged in that people’s story. The life and death and resurrection of this Person brings to focus the stories of all tongues, tribes and nations. To see this, our vision must be, as the writer of Hebrews put it, "mixed with faith."
Lesslie Newbigin has recently written that "The community of the Christian church" is incomprehensible apart from its story. Its two basic themes of creation and redemption are presented in narrative form. It was actually the biblical narrative, muses Newbiggin, that "made Europe a cultural entity distinct from Asia, of which it was and is simply a peninsula."18 The church is shaped, Newbiggin holds, by the story it bears. But do we know that story beyond superficiality?.
Several years ago my wife Roma composed a "fraktur" representation of the vision in Revelation 5, based on a conception of the Flemish artist Hans Memling in the 1590’s. Most visitors to our dining room, where it hangs, don’t linger long over the depth meaning of the Fraktur, centered as it is around a seven-horned Lamb in a circle of singing elders. Having admired the intricacy of the drawing, guests tend to ask less, "What does it mean?" than "How long did it take you to make it?"
Similarly, sometimes after I tell a string of stories, hoping with outward humor but inward seriousness to flesh out and make palpable the fellowship of our forbears in the faith, listeners ask not about the meaning of our dialogue with those forbears, but "Where do you get all these stories?"
Another effect I muse on is how so often historians give us interpretations of church life as a set of interweaving ideas built around a very skimpy story line. On the Internet’s "Mennolink," there is a stimulating flow of ideas, interpretation and debate, but a fairly low quotient of story. When story does appear there, it often has a bracing impact. Many of the interpretive patterns on the "Link" have a resonance of the academy, where schemata abound.
In such a context a comment of Arnold Snyder, a teacher himself, is wise: "It appears that the love of Christ as revealed in His words and His life provides a heuristic principle that survives the interpretive predilections of any age." Just as insightfully he adds, "One lesson of history is hard to miss: Christians should exercise a profound dose of humility concerning what they claim to know, biblically and spiritually. This humility needs to be exercised especially in our relations with those who disagree with us."19 In other words, there is a humble stance of faith from which even the dark riddles of the past can disclose spiritual meanings.
It was in 1990 at Harleysville that we built our new Mennonite archives, a treasury of things both bright and dark: ledgers, singing school books, hymns, deeds, letters and diaries. Here one could commune with the past in the mood of poet Czeslaw Milosz: "At Salem, by a spinning wheel, / I felt I, too, lived yesterday."20 As a volunteer community gathered one evening to landscape the new grounds, I was touched by the sight of this circle of work and hope, caring about what our fathers and mothers had told us about God’s doings among us. Of course here, in our storing and cherishing the sayings of our heritage, we hadn’t gotten everything right. Our "Wall of Memory" already obscured some of the very truth we were hoping to testify to. But it was all done as an offering, a sign that we wanted to tell the story that God’s covenant had been known here for a quarter-millennium. It was high time we did this. People moving in from every direction were building around us in patterns reflecting no focused memory. They too needed our story. Perhaps it would become spiritually theirs, by adoption.
As we worked through lowering weather, the sun was setting behind us over the Moyer homestead of 1717, soon to become a Wal-Mart. How dark that home’s history would become! But just then a rainbow appeared. As my friends worked on, I walked backward for an overall look at the scene, and sure enough, I could find a stance from which our house of memory was serenely arched by a rainbow of promise.
John L. Ruth presented this meditation at The Riddle of Things Past Conference, Harrisonburg, Va., May 9, 1997.
Notes
1 Clifford Geertz, "Learning With Bruner" (review article on Jerome Bruner’s The Culture of Education), The New York Review of Books, April 10, 1997, 24.
2 Morgan Edwards, Materials Toward a History of the Baptist Denomination (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1770), 97-98.
3 John C. Wenger, History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference (Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937), 91-92.
4 John H. Oberholtzer, "A Letter of John H. Oberholtzer to Friends in Germany, 1849," ibid., 420.
5 John L. Delp, "Facts relating to the early History of the Mennonites," Herald of Truth, II (January 1865), 4-5.
6 Quoted in John L. Ruth, Maintaining the Right Fellowship: A narrative account of life in the oldest Mennonite community in North America (Herald Press: Scottdale, PA, 1984), n.p., from Tyson’s ms in the Library of the Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Harleysville, PA.
7 J. K. Harley, A History and Geography of Montgomery County, PA (n.p.: author, 1882), 16-27.
8 George Washington to John Parke Custis, September 28, 1777, quoted in Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker, "Pennypacker’s Mills" (Part II), Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, XXII (Spring 1981), 305.
9 Abraham J. Fretz, "Preface," A Brief History of John and Christian Fretz (Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Publishing Co., 1890), p. 6.
10 Ernst Muller, Geschichte der bernischen Täufer. Nach den Urkunden dargestelt. Frauenfeld: J. Huber, 1895.
11 C. Henry Smith, Mennonite Country Boy: The Early Years of C. Henry Smith (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1962), 217-218.
12 Benjamin W. Weaver, Diary, October 7, 1910, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, Lancaster, PA.
13 Noah H. Mack, "Introduction," M. G. Weaver, Mennonites of Lancaster Conference (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1931), xiii.
14 Ibid., 338.
15 John Hershey Mellinger (b. 1858), "An Autobiography" (facsimile of excerpt from a handwritten MS at the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society), Missionary Messenger, "Special Memorial Supplement" (September 1952), 8-9.
16 Rhoda H. Campbell, "Introduction," Out of the Silent Past (Lancaster, PA: Feldser, 1950), n.p.
17 T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," II, 51, Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 51.
18 Leslie Newbiggin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 52.
19 C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press, 1995), 381
20 Czeslaw Milosz, "In Salem," The Collected Poems 1931-1987 (Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1988), 412
This article was published in Mennonite Historical Bulletin, January 1998.
Last updated 7 September 1999