PREFACE.
The philologist, who seeks to know something of the language
of the primeval man of Europe, finds amid the mountains of the
Pyrenees, the Basques, who have preserved down to the present
time the tongue of these remote forefathers. The ethnologist
studies the habits of prehistoric races not by the uncertain light of
early legends, but by going to the Islands of the South Pacific,
where savage life still exists, as it was before the dawn of civilization.
The historian, who pursuing the same methods of investigation,
would stand face to face with the Reformation, need only
visit the Mennonites of Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania, where
he can see still rigorously preserved, the thought, the faith, the habits,
the ways of living, and even the dress of that important epoch. The
hymn book in ordinary use by the Amish was written in the 16th
Century, and from it they still zealously sing about Felix Mantz,
who was drowned at Zurich, in 1526, and Michael Sattler, who
had his tongue torn out and was then burned to death at
Rottenburg in 1527. Whether we regard their personal history,
or the results of their teachings, the Mennonites were the most
interesting people who came to America. There is scarcely a family
among them which cannot be traced to some ancestor burned to
death because of his faith. Their whole literature smacks of the
fire. Beside a record like theirs, the sufferings of Pilgrim and
Quaker seem trivial. A hundred years before the time of Roger
Williams, George Fox and William Penn, the Dutch reformer
Menno Simons contended for the complete severance of Church
and State, and the struggles for religious and political liberty,
which convulsed England and led to the English colonization of
America in the Seventeenth Century, were logical results of
doctrines advanced by the Dutch and German Anabaptists in
the one which preceded.
