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

been deprived of the rewards of his sacrifices and the victory of his ideals. He was and remained an advocate of cultural improvement (and as such an admirer and student of Johann Comies), as is indicated by his activity on behalf of the Kuban settlement (XXV, B) and many other incidents. It also needs to be said that in spite of all that had happened, Claassen and Reimer entrusted the education of their own sons to Lange’s school. And when their plans in Gnadenfeld had completely failed, Claassen, Reimer and some others founded a school for the poor amongst the German (nearly exclusively Lutheran and Catholic) foreigners in the market town of Grosstokmak, situated between Ladekopp and Fuerstenau. This school collapsed in 1861 due to an inadequate teaching staff, support and, perhaps more importantly, due to a lack of interest, since purely religious concerns stood in the forefront of the battle and early life of the new M.B. Church (XVII). i) The great harm derived from the fact that the “brethren” of Claassen ’s stripe could not work together with the “Templers" of his time cannot be described. An immense latent intellectual wealth was contained in the latter’s pedagogical, ethico-religious and social goals. We will be able to touch upon the “Templer” movement only several more times, and that only in passing; enough, however, to allow— for the purposes of this book— their true nature and, sadly! their degeneration (in our view) to be expressed. A sense of profound sadness overcomes us whenever we deal with the contentions and divisions of these three groups of “brethren,” and during the quarter century which we have spent on this study we have not learned how to remove this sense of grief from our soul. For some of the best men given to us in Russia during an entire century were to be found in all three groups! Men who rank next to our two most prominent ones: Johann Comies and the minister Bernhard Harder. The evil, apparently incurable “Anabaptist illness,” the passion to divide, drove them apart and diminished each individual’s strength considerably. Documentary Supplement 109 19. While this “brotherhood strife” and the consequent schism were §52(2) taking place within the bosom of the Gnadenfeld congregation, the Ohrloff congregation was experiencing its own ugly period of turmoil during which a number of important members separated themselves from it. The initial strife erupted in the so-called “barley dispute” 32 and was continued in the “church-building” quarrel of Neu-Halbstadt. Since this strife was not spawned by a dispute over principles but by human evil and selfishness, or shortsightedness and weakness, we shall not discuss the matter here— which was in any case carried on by both sides in an unholy maimer 33 — and refer to it only in the footnotes where necessary in order to clarify other matters (in the documents) in Chapter XVII, etc. The consequence was that Ohrloff and its