Page:Historical and biographical sketches.djvu/163

Rh biographical sketches of a number of the early martyrs of the Doopsgezinde or Mennonites, a sect which was the antetype of the Quakers, and these sketches were accompanied by hymns describing in rhyme not only their piety and sufferings but even the manner and dates of their deaths. To publish such a book was then punishable by fire, and the title-page therefore gives no indication as to where it was printed or who was the printer. Meeting together in secret places and in the middle of the night, the linen weavers of Antwerp and the hardy peasants of Friesland cherished their religious zeal and their veneration for Menno Simons, by singing and reading about their martyrs. Next to the Bible this hook was most in demand among them, and later editions were printed in the years 1567, 1570, 1576, 1578, 1580, 1589, 1595, and 1599, but many copies were, along with their owners, burned by the executioners, and the book is now very scarce. It was followed by a large quarto of eight hundred and sixty-three pages with an engraved title-page, written by Hans de Ries and Jacques Outerman, and printed at Hoorn, in 1617, by Zacharias Cornelisz, called “Historic der warachtighe Getuygen Jesu Christi;” and this again by a handsome black-letter folio of ten hundred and fifty-six pages, printed at Haerlem by Hans Passchiers von Wesbusch in 1631, entitled “Martelaers Spiegel der werelose Christenen.” The subject was capable of still more thorough treatment, and in 1660 Tieleman Jans Van Braght, a Mennonite theologian at Dordrecht, who was born in 1625 and died in 1664, published “Het