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

whole work of reform in the summer of 1865 would most certainly have come to nothing at all. On the one hand, Claassen was accepted by Abraham Unger, Daniel Fast, and Abraham Comelsen, and on the other hand also enjoyed the complete confidence of men such as Benjamin Becker and Heinrich Neufeld, and both sides could respect his innate honesty and Documentary Supplements 443 purity. His sympathetic manner, his warm “love for the brethren,” his ability to be flexible and gentle like a fine diplomat, yet always for the supreme purpose of discovering God’s will only, and to fulfill it, made him , in the hands of God, into the savior of the M.B. Church. That the consequences of the “June Reforms” were more far-reaching than the wording of the minutes and sharper in their effect than had been intended is typical of such situations. They were sharper than Br. Claassen wished them to be, since he was a man who always dealt with a soft touch in church matters (as we have discovered from personal experience). Every major statement of a reforming idea arising from the necessities of life results in more drastic consequences, in both the smaller and larger circles, them the tone of the statement itself: Luther, in his Theses of 1517, did not yet have the Confessio Augustana of 1530 in mind. In any case, after this event the M.B. Church in the Molotschna and in a few years’ time the whole M.B. Church in Russia and North America became more like the Kleine Gemeinde (more puritanical in attitude, somewhat melancholic and formalistically-ascetically pious) rather than like the “Huepfer.” That was the way the author found it when he became a member of the M.B. Church in the summer of 1866 at the Molotschna— only one year after the June Reforms! Mennonite to the core, in temperament. For example, with respect to music there is not one church amongst fifty M.B. congregations in Russia that uses music in the regular services (although in some private meetings and for special festivities some choirs made up of the music groups of the younger members of the local church do participate). In contrast to this, the Mennonite Church at Gnadenfeld— once the mother church but now the strong opponent of the M.B. Church— has placed an organ in its sanctuary— probably the only (?) Mennonite church in Russia to own one. 222 Thoughts concerning the right use or misuse of expressions of joy in Christian meetings are expressed by a contemporary of the movements of “excessive joy” and the “despotism” by Br. Johann Wieler, now deceased, in his “My Thoughts,” from whom we have already quoted earlier, of July, 1882: “. . . If we ask in the light of God’s Word: Does the church of God not have the right to rejoice in the Lord and to express this joy in singing, shouting, clapping of hands, or dancing and leaping in a circle as the Israelites did in the Old Testament when they were saved from the power of Pharaoh and escaped through th