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

ivate school. From the beginning, he had great success. Many eager students, well-attended inspirational evening meetings, 12 mission gatherings and other similar endeavors, a “literary society” for the dissemination of Christian and educational literature; these were new. An active participant in all these was Johann Comies. Yet Voth could stay for only six years. His family did not ease his position and his work. He later went to Schoenwiese, with great sacrifice established his own private school, and finally had to leave there also. Then he worked at Steinbach and died in Berdiansk. He must have been a sincerely pious man of deep sensitivity. An aura of moving legends surrounds his memory like a halo. “Should this be dying?” 13 — he is supposed to have said in a state of bliss as life ebbed from him. He was a man of many talents: musically and poetically gifted, and an outstanding artist; it was he who gave us the powerful portrayal of Johann Comies. The seed Voth sowed in his lifetime did not die. The late Heinrich Huebert, first elder of the Mennonite Brethren Church, as well as many of his other students and friends, received their first indelible Christian impressions and their love for education and culture from him. Even at an advanced age, Huebert liked to sing Voth’s songs and tell of his work with sentimental affection. Voth’s literary society, in which Comies, Sr. actively participated, existed for many years, especially chaired by the dear, pious Minister Jakob Martens of Tiegenhagen, also a student of Voth’s. Up to the time of his blessed death around 1870, Martens was an untiring disseminator of good literature. Understanding for the Christian life, deepened through growing knowledge and inner experience, has never been extinguished in the Ohrloff Church since the time of Voth and Bernhard Fast. §41 7. Though struggling and occasionally defeated, the Ohrloff school system remained a strong force for education and progress, a role it Unrest and Reform 97 has retained to this very day. One cannot conceive of the Molotschna Mennonite community without this school. Voth’s successor was Heinrich Heese, Sr. Although he lacked Voth’s religious depth and sincerity, he saw the Mennonite position in Russia as well as the necessity of acquiring the Russian language with greater clarity. He was the first to offer instruction in the Russian language. In this regard, as the school society had pointed out, Voth had left something to be desired. Heese was a conscious and spirited Russian patriot to his death in the 1860s. 8. Tobias Voth was the first among us in Russia to put into practice what we today call “brotherhood,” a warmhearted Christian fellowship, something that is now. found in the M.B. Church as well as in all truly vital Christian circles of the “old” or Mennonite Church. Voth had had close contact with the Prussian evangelical Pietists, both laymen and pastors. The seed Voth h