European Background of the Ohio Mennonites and Amish / 25

was to be applied without compromise by the church, but they did not envision that the whole or unregenerate society could be governed by its precepts." They were therefore nonpolitical and withdrew from politics and separated themselves from a society they considered evil in order to build what they considered to be the true church or the kingdom of God.

It was in the practice of brotherhood among the members of the church that other traits of the Anabaptist movement began to show. It is necessary to see these traits in their original form if one is to understand later Mennonite and Amish history. Even as the early church "had all things common," so did some of the first communities of the Anabaptist believers. Hans Leopold, who in 1528 suffered a martyr's death at Augsburg, said of the Swiss Brethren, "If they know of anyone that is in need, whether or not he is a member of their church, they believe it their duty, out of love to God, to render him help and aid. Another record of the time states that in 1557 a member of the established Protestant church of Strassburg in Alsace attended a baptismal ceremony of the Swiss Brethren. Before the applicants were baptized it was necessary for them to answer in the affirmative "whether they, if necessity required it, would devote all their possessions to the service of the brotherhood, and would not fail any member that is in need, if they were able to render aid."' While only the Hutterian branch of the Anabaptist family practiced actual community of goods, all sixteenth-century Anabaptists placed great emphasis on sharing and on what today would be called Christian mutual aid. Out of such faith and life was to come one of the important examples of the economic consequences of religious faith in modern times.

From their beginning the Swiss Brethren believed and practiced what their descendants came to call "nonconformity to the world." In certain respects it resembled the practices that the English Puritans later insisted upon. Some of its conspicuous aspects are to be seen in the documents of the early decades of the movement, and later nonconformity in its several expressions was incorporated in the confessions of faith and official statements. One of the opponents of the Swiss Brethren was Heinrich Bullinger and in his first book against them, published in 1531, he points out that they disapproved of dancing and all other forms of worldly amusement. He adds that they insisted on a modest dress and condemned outward adornment of jewelry. In his larger work in 1561 he cites