in the deity of Christ only as a symbol of his high significance. We might call those men Unitarians if they dared to speak in the common words instead of in old phrases.

In view of these things, I believe that this century will see a mighty progress of liberal religious thought. There are sufficient proofs that the majority of the members of the church do not really understand what it is to be orthodox. They judge from external things. A minister is looked upon as quite orthodox if in the services he asks the people to sing psalms and no other hymns.

I once preached for a friend of mine and gave a liberal sermon. Some weeks afterwards I received a call to an orthodox community near the place where my friend lived. This was astonishing to me; but I learned by information that some of the members of that vestry attended that service. I accidentally had taken the hymns only from the psalms, and so they supposed me to be orthodox!

We have good hope. In places where we are the majority we are already perfectly free; for our service consists only of singing and the delivery of a sermon. No Creed is read, no Confessions answered to; we are free in the use of the old ritual. If we like it, we may do so; if we do not like it, we are allowed to make our own ritual.

So there is actually no difference between us and the Remonstrants, the Mennonites, and the liberal Lutherans. No walls of different doctrine separate us. The various ministers very often preach in the

churches of other congregations. One day we must come to a great union of all those churches. The time for that is not yet come. There are too many circumstances prohibiting it now; and one of these is that liberal religious thought is not popular enough among the bulk of the members of some churches. The people are not yet ripe for it. This is a matter of generations and not of years. We must go on working, teaching, and preaching. In looking forward to this future, we know that we are not working for the glory of our own particular ideas; we are impelled by the deep conviction that it is only a pure and free faith in the living God, who loves all his creatures, that can give mankind happiness and peace.

THE DUTCH MENNONITE COMMUNITY. BY THE REV. F. C. FLEISCHER, BROEK-OP-LANGENDIJK.

N undertaking to speak of the place of the Dutch Mennonites in the struggle for religious liberty and betterment, I find I have a very difficult task to perform. For I must try to compress a history of nearly four centuries into the brief space of time allotted to me. And yet it must be done.

For if it be accepted as a fact, that it is next to impossible to understand any community without full knowledge of its past, this is most decidedly the case with the Mennonite congregations. What they are, what they aim at, what they promise for the future-it all lies in their past.

I purpose to throw my searchlight upon this chapter of ecclesiastical history from two sides, so that the Dutch Mennonites may appear before you as a community of religious radicals, and as a community holding free individual convictions.

I.

A COMMUNITY OF RELIGIOUS Radicals.

The great reformers-Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer with one hand took what was new, and with the other they clung to what was old and established. Hence many of the institutions, practices, and dogmas of the Roman Catholics have been preserved in many of the Protestant Churches.

But there were other friends of the new light who could not allow Protestant principles to suffer, and not to be acted up to consistently. They were perhaps the most independent, also the least organised tenacious, indomitable minds, but forsaken by the majority in days of persecution.

Among these radicals there were some who were anxious to reform, nay to renew the Christian life— the Baptizers; and others who wished to reform. the Christian dogmatics-the Antitrinitarians. Both these radical sections aimed at the Apostolic principle of purification. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are past away; behold all things have become new.'(II. Cor. v. 17.)

In the long run these two currents were sure to meet. And so it happens, as a living proof thereof,

1 I use the term 'Baptizers' (Doopers, Täufer), in order to distinguish them from the well-known 'Baptists,' with whom we are sometimes very unjustly confounded.

P

that I, a twentieth-century Baptizer, am here to-day amongst twentieth-century Antitrinitarians.

These religious radicals did not originally stand on any other foundation than the great Reformers. Luther himself hesitated long. So did Melancthon. At first the Baptizers confidently approached the Evangelicals, until the latter, led by considerations of prevailing political wisdom, strongly opposed the radicalism of the former.

The Reformers as well as the Roman Catholic Hierarchy upheld the error, that not only is there a general religious truth, but also that this may be fixed so clearly, so convincingly, and so indisputably, that no one can be allowed to have an opinion of one's own. Those who ventured, nevertheless, to have such a particular opinion, were liable to the death penalty. And where the Reformers held the legal sword, they did not hesitate to use it against such intolerable sinners.

On January 5th, 1527, their first victim fell. This was Felix Manz, a young and learned man of a distinguished family in Zürich, who had committed. the crime of controverting in public Zwingli's theses on Christian Baptism, and of disapproving of cruel, abominable war. Manz was drowned in the beautiful lake of Zürich. Mergatur qui iterum mergit or Mergatur qui mergitur, Zwingli is asserted to have said.

This first victim of our community was followed by hundreds of others in nearly every country: persecution drove a portion of the Baptizers to despair,