Page:Mennonite Handbook of Information 1925.djvu/12

 Netherlands, about 1496. Originally a Catholic, he served as a priest from 1524 to 1536. In 1536 he was converted and baptized by Obbe Philips. That same year he was ordained to the ministry and became the most influential representative of the Church in Holland and North Germany. His writings and those of his faithful co-worker, Dirck Philips, are of great value. At the time of Menno Simon's conversion the Church in Holland was numerically weak, though the Swiss Brethren had numerous congregations in Switzerland, France, South Germany, Tyrol and Moravia. A bitter wave of persecution had swept over these churches and the principal leaders of the Swiss Brethren had suffered a martyr's death, but the attempt to destroy the Church proved a failure.

It was some years after Menno Simons' conversion that the name "Mennonite" was applied to this body of believers in Germany, Poland, and Russia, and later in America; but to the present they are known in Switzerland as Taeufer (or Alt-Taeufer) in France Anabaptists, and in Holland Doopsgezinden.

There is good reason to believe that the influence of the Waldenses (one of a number of the older nonresistant sects) was largely responsible for the organization of the first congregation of the Swiss Brethren. The most characteristic and essential points on which they, and later the Mennonites, differed from the leading Protestant churches of the same period was the principle of nonresistance and the doctrine of infant baptism. At that time the laws of the several states and provinces required membership in the state churches. All, except the