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Rh sect which in creed and observances the Quakers much resemble, and which, according to some authorities, they have followed. The Mennonites call themselves “Defenseless Christians,” being strictly opposed to all warfare, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they suffered terribly at the stake and by other methods of persecution. It was of Dirck Willems, a Mennonite burned in 1569 for having been rebaptized and holding meetings in his house, that Motley tells a pathetic story, copied from Van Braght. To escape threatened capture he fled across a lake covered with thin ice. One of his pursuers, more eager than wise, followed, and breaking through was unable to extricate himself. Willems, seeing the danger of his adversary, returned and assisted him to the shore, when the base wretch, with unequalled ingratitude, arrested his rescuer and hurried him away to prison. There were very nearly as many martyrs among the Mennonites in the city of Antwerp alone as there were Protestants burned to death in England during the whole reign of bloody Mary.

Willem Rittinghuysen, the first Mennonite preacher in Pennsylvania, came with his family and others of the sect to Germantown in 1688, and on a branch of the Wissahickon Creek, in Roxborough Township, built in 1690, the earliest paper mill in America. It is with reference to this mill that Gabriel Thomas, a quaint old chronicler of the seventeenth century, says, “All sorts of very good paper are made in the German Town,” and it supplied the paper used by William Bradford, the first printer in Pennsylvania, as well as the first in New York. Here, on the 8th of April, 1732, David Rittenhouse, a great-grandson of the emigrant, was born. His mother, Elizabeth Williams, was the daughter of Evan Williams,