CHAPTER I
LIFE AND LABORS OF MENNO SIMONS
This man of God from whom the Mennonite Church takes its name was born at Witmarsum, Holland, located about four miles from the eastern shore of the North Sea. The waves also of the great Zuider Zee roll not far away over a large district of country where, nearly five hundred years ago, seventy villages were overflowed and in which many thousands of people perished.
Menno Simons was born near these shores in the year 1496. His father and mother were members of the Roman Catholic Church. He was educated for the priesthood, and into this office he was installed at the age of twenty-eight years. In time, however, he came to have some positive convictions of his own—relative to infant baptism, the eucharist partaking of the properties of flesh and blood, and elemental water having the efficacy to wash away sin.
He finally made the Word of God and its plain teachings, rather than the dogmas of Catholicism, his guide to truth. In later years, because of his social and religious prominence among the peaceful Anabaptists and Waldensian believers, these people as a class became known to their friends, and especially to their enemies, as "Mennonites."
Historians inform us that Menno Simons received baptism on confession of faith from Obbe Philip, one of the peace-loving Anabaptist ministers
