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178 name of the city of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia). The province itself received the name of Pennsylvania from the man who brought its settlers over from a land of persecution to his own estate, and has borne it to the present time, though its boundaries have been extended on the north to Lake Erie, and on the west beyond the Allegheny mountains to the present Ohio.

In accordance with the fundamental law established April 25th, 1682, complete freedom of conscience was assured to all religious communities, and William Penn and his associates saw a stream of those who had been persecuted and oppressed for their belief pour into the colony, among whom were many Mennonites from Switzerland and the Palatinate.

In Switzerland for nearly half a century religious intolerance had been most bitter. Many who had remained there were then persuaded to abandon their beloved native country and betake themselves to the distant land of freedom, and others, who had earlier emigrated to Alsace and the Palatinate, and there endured the dreadful horrors of the war in 1690, joined them, hoping in a province described to them as a paradise to find the needed comforts of life. The travelling expenses of these exhausted wanderers on their way through our fatherland were furnished with a liberal hand from the “funds for foreign needs” which our forefathers had collected to aid the Swiss, Palatines, and Litthauers. These emigrants settled for the most part at Philadelphia, and to the northward along the Delaware.

One of the oldest communities, if not the oldest of all, was that at Schiebach or Germantown, The elder of their two preachers, Wilhelm Rittinghausen, died in 1708, and in his place two new preachers were chosen. The same year eleven young people were added to the church