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

have known that for a long time.” He was not as ignorant as he had appeared after all, she concluded, and she liked to hear no one preach more than brother Heinrich, despite the fact that she sometimes blushed with embarrassment when reminded of youthful pranks. But now she understood what Hofacker’s book of sermons, Menno Simons’ Foundation of Faith and The Wandering Soul, as well as other books, had been doing in Heinrich’s bam bedroom, and why his songbook 180 IN RUSSIA 1789-1860 appeared so used! Yes, that is how our earlier "Ohms”: Elder Jakob Dyk, Sr., of Chortitza, Elder Bernhard Fast of Halbstadt, Elder Peter Wedel 91 of Alexanderwohl and others grew. Do not t hink for a moment, you young gentlemen and ladies— children of today’s Mennonite farmers dressed in hats and gloves and wearing watches with chains— that the people of thirty, fifty or seventy years ago were, in their own minds, less well-dressed or less happy and respectable than you! Perhaps it would be healthy for you and succeeding generations if many of you would do a little more back-bending work than you now do! By all means, many of you could study better in the village, secondary, girl, and preparatory, etc. schools at home; and more of you could study in the high schools and universities than is now the case— not in order to act arrogantly or become estranged from the village and the faith of your fathers, but in order to bring that into the Mennonite village which it lacks: good Christian male and female doctors, deaconesses, teachers, engineers, technicians, agriculturalists, linguists and historians prepared to study and interpret the Bible, female teachers and women prepared to lead Bible studies and children’s worship services, and good God-fearing lawyers. We have many, far-reaching and very serious church, civic and economic interests that need to be represented both among ourselves and to governmental agencies: millions worth of common property in land and money, etc., responsibilities toward one another, toward the emperor and the fatherland, toward God and His church and all of His people in the world! We live widely spread out in this dear Russian fatherland: on the Dnieper and in the steppes of Asov and the Don, on the Inguletz, the Kuban, the Terek and in Turkestan, in Poland, in the Urals and in Southwest Siberia, and our first pioneers are probably already probing the soil on the Amur and Ussuri rivers. And we all have the spiritual interests directed toward eternal goals, the same obligations of service toward the emperor and country— out of grace and favor, thank God!— and that without "Bloodied garments” (Isaiah 9). The responsi- bilities are constantly becoming more complex and more difficult: therefore— voluntary intelligence, come forth! And whomever God sends more deeply into this common Russian fatherland as doctors, engineers, female teachers and doctors, etc., or as messengers of the Gospel into the