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

tements and insisted on their rights." Nevertheless, the good work that Br. Liebig was doing did not last too long on this occasion. He had only been amongst the brethren for two weeks when the local Mennonite authorities noticed that “he was unifying the scattered children of God.” He was arrested by the Area Administrative Office of Chortitza and taken to Ekaterinoslav; from there he was sent to Odessa and thence across the border. “So there we stood without a leader once again. However, his visit had been a great blessing to all of us.” (Epp.) Documentary Supplements 341 3. With the departure of Br. Heinrich Neufeld from the Einlage congregation and Br. August Liebig’s first visit, the first developmental period for the congregation closes and the second begins— in essence in accordance with the views of Abraham Unger, though not without considerable opposition from a number of brethren. NB! In the history of the Mennonite Brotherhood of South Russia §154 there are three occasions on which restitutionist Mennonite groups turned to spiritually related confessional comrades of other churches for help in their own church matters: 1) The Brenckenhofswalde Church of Gnadenfeld, while still in Prussia, requested protection and guidance for their private meetings, etc., from the Moravian Brethren (see above #47); 2) the M.B. Church turned to the Baptist Brotherhood Church in Hamburg; and 3) the Brotherhood in South Russia, as the largest (Mennonite) group, made a request to the Mission Society of the Rhineland for a missionary (in the person of Br. Irle— Dutch Reformed) to fill the vacant post at the “Pakanten” mission station in Sumatra after Missionary Dirks left and before Missionary Nickel began his services. And all three groups acted in the manner of a healthy, unprejudiced alliance, for their own real benefit. XXV. DOCUMENTARY SUPPLEMENTS TO THE HISTORY OF THE SOUTH RUSSIAN MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD AND SPECIFICALLY OF THE M.B. CHURCH TO 1866 We present these supplementary documents essentially for the years § 155 1860 to 1866 (even though here and there some of them reach back to before 1860, while others go beyond 1866), that is for the first, early years of the M.B. Church. With the “June Reforms” of 1865 and the departure of the advocates of the exuberant movement, and all that was connected writh it, under the leadership of Herm ann Peters in the winter of 1865/1866, who were dissatisfied with this reform, the Molotschna congregation was finally and forever healed from the more gross expressions of its “false movement,” 133 its despicable childhood illness. The same thing was accomplished in the Einlage congregation by those same “June Reforms” of 1865, Heinrich Neufeld’s departure and the first period of August Liebig’s activity in those same years of 1865/66. The Kuban congregation, consisting of emigrants from the two above-named Mennonite Brethren congregations, had joined those