THE MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD IN RUSSIA (1789 - 1910), P. M. Friesen, 1911

t; by 1812 he had become the elder. Scores of people from other faiths thronged to hear hiin speak. His preaching tours in West Prussia were well-received and very successful. It was he who, at a time of extreme need and despair, during which a large part of the congregation was about to be scattered in all directions, successfully negotiated with Tsar Nicholas I for permission to migrate to Russia. This permission was granted in the form of a large letter sealed with the imperial seal, which Lange was able to lay before his distressed congregation, thus saving it from ultimate dissolution. In 1835 he arrived in Russia with the first group of immigrants. Here too he served, a patriarchal, priestly gray -haired man with a flowing white “Menno- beard,” 22 to the benefit of all in his own and its sister congregations, loved and acknowledged by all until 1841. Later his nephew, the minister Wilhelm Lange, became a similarly gifted and beloved personality. 11. Because of these men, Gnadenfeld became the center for a religious movement of greater warmth, the magnetic center for those who called themselves “brethren” long before the M.B. Church was organized. Many members of other Mennonite congregations formally joined Gnadenfeld because they sympathized with its position; but even more came as guests to the Sunday and festive services, especially to the Bible studies and mission festivals. 23 Here too private study groups sprang up, as did mission sewing circles, although the first experienced considerable opposition from the very beginning. Gnadenfeld gave birth to the M.B. Church of 1860, and we impart more details about this congregation first because none of our other immigrant congregations possesses such a wealth of evidence regarding its former way of life, its trials and tribulations, and, secondly, because the history of the M.B. Church cannot be separated from the history of the Gnadenfeld congregation. Our story is based on the archival material mentioned 100 IN RUSSIA 1789-1860 earlier, the oral and written communications of the founders of the M.B. Church— Heinrich Huebert (Liebenau-Kuban), Jakob Reimer (Gnadenfeld-Wiesenfeld), Johann Claassen (Liebenau-Kuban), among others— and from the things I have seen and heard. The “pious” or “Bible students” of the 1850s spoke of Gnadenfeld in the spirit of the song: “To Mount Zion I am Bound”; the opponents of this movement nicknamed those from Gnadenfeld the “Lutheran Mennonites,” “Mora- vians,” “enthusiasts,” and with great contempt, “the pious ones!” 12. It was one of the peculiarities of this congregation that it had its own confession of faith, 24 probably in common with that of the Alexanderwohl congregation. The archives contain two such confessions: the first, according to the title-page, consisting of forty short articles was “translated from the Dutch into High German by Elder Peter Jantz of Franz tal (Prussia) and copied in 1812 by El