The Crisis Years of 1915-1930 / 193

cation dated October 28, 1924, in which the suspension was cited as a "painful duty" but one necessary as a "safeguard to the church and conference."'

Both the Chapel and Zion congregations felt their congregational rights had been ignored and that procedures had been irregular. They affirmed their loyalty to the church and its confession of faith and hoped for a reconsideration which was not granted.'' There was also the feeling that the investigating committee was inconsistent and was in actuality "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel." In the same year the Sugarcreek Mennonite Church was disowned by the conference, a congregation which had been formed by a group which withdrew from the Walnut Creek congregation. The pastor of the Walnut Creek Church tendered his resignation and later became pastor of the Sugarcreek congregation."

Defensive Literature

The role of the Mennonite Publishing House during these critical years can now be seen as an important if not a decisive one. Daniel Kauffman, as editor of the church's organ, wrote pamphlets which strengthened the conservative cause and opposed the forces of change. In 1918 he published The Conservative View

point: A Message to Members of the Mennonite Church. In 1923 he wrote a work on The Mennonite Church and Current Issues, followed in 1924 by The Two Standards. Kauffman was a widely

respected church leader and his forthright conservative position on education, missions, publication, youth, and other problems was persuasive and stabilizing to confused leaders. He reaffirmed historic and traditional Mennonite views and attacked vigorously the modernistic trends as he saw them in the religious world, and especially as they threatened the Mennonite Church on various fron ts.

Also important were the writings of John Horsch, the Germanborn Mennonite historian, who for some years had been rekindling interest in the historic background of Mennonitism. In The Mennonite Church and Modernism (1924) Horsch came into sharp conflict with those persons, influences, and writings which he was sure were inducing the American Mennonite Church to "go the way the Church in Holland and North Germany had gone." He saw no middle ground; he could tolerate no compromise, for he saw the very