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provides the student with much insight on how religion was planted and its influence, nurtured by frontier churches. German-speaking people of the churchly and nonsectarian tradition planted churches on the frontier and their experience affords some interesting comparisons and contrasts to that of the Mennonites. The manner in which German churches established themselves on the frontier in a new type and status without surrendering their inheritance is well told in Carl E. Schneider's The German Church on the

American Frontier: A Study in the Rise of Religion Among the Germans in

the West (St. Louis, Missouri: Eden Publishing House, 1939).

Sociological Interpretations

Sociological interpretations of religious groups such as the one investigated in this study owe something to Max Weber and his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958). His numerous references to Mennonites bespeak a careful perception of their faith and life. The sociologist of religion who would interpret the history of the Ohio and Eastern Mennonite Conference will, of course, find even more insight and stimulation from Ernst Troeltsch's Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. by Olive Wyon (2 vols.) (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931). For an illuminating essay on Troeltsch's philosophy, psychology, and sociology of religion as well as his philosophy of history the student should consult James Luther Adams, "Ernst Troeltsch as Analyst of . Religion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, I (1961), 98-109. For Robert Friedmann's favorable evaluation of Troeltsch see his article, "Ernst Troeltsch," Mennonite Encyclopedia, IV (1959), 749, 750.

Ernst Correll, a student of Weber and Troeltsch, has applied insights from both in his Das Schweizerische Taufermennonitentum (Tübingen: J. C. Mohr, 1925).

Values and limitations of Troeltsch for the church historian are noted in Roland Bainton, "The Sectarian Theory of the Church" and "Ernst Troeltsch -Thirty Years Later, A Critique of The Social Teaching of the Christian Church" in Christian Unity and Religion in New England (Boston: Beacon, Press, 1964).

Franklin H. Littell's critical use of Troeltsch is noted in the foreword and throughout his The Origins of Sectarian Protestantism: A Study of the Anabaptist View of the Church (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Another helpful application of Troeltsch as well as Weber is found in H. Richard Niebuhr's Social Sources of'Denominationalism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). Niebuhr is especially provocative in the chapters on "The Churches of the Disinherited" and "Sectionalism and Denominationalism in America."

From the abundant literature on this subject two additional works may be cited. Oliver R. Whitley in Trumpet Call to Reformation (St. Louis, Missouri: Bethany Press, 1959) and J. Scott Miyakawa Protestants and Pioneers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) are among the more recent works, both with ample documentation and the latter with extensive bibliography, which notes the sectarian. process tin the American frontier.

_.   Historians and sociologists have increasingly since 1928 used Troeltsch and