Page:Complete Works of Menno Simons.djvu/715

415 AN EPISTLE TO MARTIN MICRON. 415 writing, I will leave to Almighty God and his judgment. Dear friend, ponder upon what is here said. First, you have made yourself to be an open, perfidious falsifier; for you call on God as a witness (which in my opinion is the same as an oath), that you have given a true narration of the discussion; and the first thing you wrote in your book is an un- truth. For yon write: "A true Narration." And how quite nntrue it is, God knows, as also you yourself, and we. We have also partly touched on this, above, in the de- scription of the discussion. Secondly, you have quoted in your book my first words and very brotherly admoni- tion: "If you now hear more powerful truths and surer foundation from us than you have heard hitherto, then you ought not to seek your own praise and honor; but you ought cordially to seek the honor and praise of the Lord, &c.," and have coupled a gross falsehood therewith, and rendered it as if I should have stiid, that you had sought your own honor and praise by your writing, in England. Something which, at that time, I had never thought about; for I knew no more about you than I would have known had you never been in the world. Yet, you garble my words to make it appear so. I will leave yourself to judge whether it was the Spirit of truth and of godly, faithful love, or the spirit of impure falsehood and faithless envy which inspired you thus to write. Thirdly, you write, "That Herman Back- ereel had already proved to me that Mary was a daughter of David." It seems that you are not at all ashamed to tell a false- hood, if it can but make your cause appar- ently true. He who can prove to me, by virtue of the Scriptures that Mary was a daughter of David, must have a Bible and Scripture different from ours; for it can not be found in our Bibles and Scriptures. I asked no proof of you nor of Herman, as it was irrelevant. And now you make it falsely appear that I should have said that she was not, and that Herman proved to me that she was. This is certainly a false- hood. Fourthly, you write, " That you frequent- ly confessed to us that the Son of God died for us;" while I dare say and testify with a good conscience that you never touched up- on it during the whole discussion. But when I asked you at the last discussion, whether you did not still call the man Christ (who you said had no Father) the Son of God? you answered, yes. When I asked again, why you called him so, what kind of an answer I received to that ques- tion, was related above. Yet you dare falsely write down, "That you frequently confessed it to us," as has been heard. Though you were not ashamed of telling gross falsehoods against us before men, because you are aware that you can not sufiiciently abuse us, in the sight of the world, which is your church; yet one would reasonably expect that you would be ashamed to do so before your God who tries the hearts and reins; and that j'ou would remember that it is written, that "A thief is not so bad as a man accustomed to lies;" "for he can never attain to honor," Eccl. 20: 27, 28; that the lying mouth kill- eth the soul, Wis. 1: 11; that God will de- stroy the liars, Ps. 5: 6, and that their part will be in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone. Rev. 21 : 8. Fifthly, you vmte, " That you maintained the purity of your Christ against us;" while, before the Lord, before you, and be- fore us all, it did not occur otherwise than I related in the narration of the first dis- cussion, concerning the inconsistency that you had an impure Christ. I was also surprised at the fact that there was not sufficient common sense left in you to consider that you might have made it so by your partial writing and gross false- hoods, that many of the readers, and par- ticularly of those present at the discussion, might suspect you of writing falsehoods out of mere partiality, and might thereby leave your church. But the spirit of wis dom, alas, has not kissed the dwelling- place of your soul, nor greeted it with the friendly lips of its truth. Fourthly, you have also made yourself a very unsteady, wavering and inconstant person, whom one can not overtake on one foundation and doctrine. For, at the time of the discussion you confessed, "That