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

ot be with you in the way in which you are now against each other .... Katharina Claassen.” b) This summons to an accounting is also mentioned in a letter from Heinrich Huebert, January 13, 1865. This one, and the next letter of January 2, which present this worthy man in his most unfavorable light, as weak and yielding, as was stated in a previous footnote, and as is abundantly apparent from a comparison of his letters with Jakob R’s diary notation of December 6, and B.B.’s letter of the 14-19th of the same month. Only after God, through Claassen, had tamed the “inflated apostles” and leaders of excessive exuberance, his former “closest brothers,” could Huebert, supported by the circle of men mentioned in section 4 above, become for the M.B. Church that for which God had given him to the church. He writes: “Liebenau, January 2, 1865. (1) To the church on the Kuban, in God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ! With this greeting of the Apostle Paul in the second letter to the Thessalonians, verses 1 and 2, I, your servant, come into your midst in the spirit. My deepest wish would be that I might be able to say in truth about you what the apostle says in the following section of Chapter 1! I expect to send this letter from Berdiansk, for I have discovered that my letters have not come to you. Concerning this I can only assume that they have been held back in Halbstadt. From Br. Benjamin you will probably receive at the same time an earnest exhortation and a list of members who have been excommunicated by us. [Compare the letter of December 14-19.] This writing has been read to the whole church and approved by all. I would like to report something, from my viewpoint, of the events which have occurred here since the absence of Br. Benjamin. Several of you who were still here know of the relationship between Brother Benjamin and myself until the time of the meeting of the brotherhood in Landskrone on July 13. All of us who were opposed to him, acknowledged our error, humbled ourselves and were reconciled. But this had not happened according to the devil’s wishes; his plans, as always, were to divide and separate the flock of Christ. The matter was to be raised even higher on the pinnacle of the temple. New reports from the Old Colony, no doubt brought here by impure souls, of excommunications of many members again aroused the suspicion that autocratic methods by Brother [Gerhard] Wieler and Benjamin 205 had crept in there, especially since according to the teaching of the apostle, there is a possibility that false teachers and deceivers will arise from among the believers. The time came when Br. G. Wieler also came here to put everything on the right track. I and Br. Jakob Franz spent the night of December 15 to 16 in Ladekopp; then the brethren of the Old Colony also came there: G. Wieler, Peter Neufeld and 428 THE MENNONITE BRETHREN CHURCH Benjamin Nickel. I did not find in Br. Wieler that which I had e