Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/178

 Imitation of Christ, a copy of the Anabaptist translation of the Prophets by Ludwig Hetzer and Hans Denck, four editions of the hymn book of the followers of John Huss, which is a great rarity in Europe, a manuscript of the hymn written by George Weiss for the first Gedächtniss Tag in 1735, many manuscripts written upon the paper made at the Rittenhouse Paper Mill on the Wissahickon, the earliest in America.

Among the Mennonites along the Skippack, a thrifty and more numerous but less literary people, I found a copy of the first German edition of the Fundamentum of Menno Simons, published in the Palatinate in 1575; the two editions of the Schulordnung of Christopher Dock (the earliest American essay on pedagogy); the Geistliches Magazien of Saur (our earliest religious magazine); a copy of the work of Henry Funk, the Mennonite preacher on the Indian Creek in Montgomery County, Pa., printed by Armbruster in Philadelphia in 1763; but most important of all, the great Martyr Book of Van Braght, the most imposing literary production of colonial America, printed at Ephrata in 1749. I wrote an essay upon it and made it widely known. Henry Funk and Dielman Kolb of Skippack supervised the translation and I was fortunate enough to find the specially bound copy which belonged to Funk with his autograph in it and likewise the copy which belonged to Jacob Kolb, brother of Dielman, and the copy retained in the cloister at Ephrata by “Bruder Amos.”

There had been a long-standing controversy in Holland over the dates of the birth and death of Menno Simons, the distinctive Reformer of the Netherlands, one set of scholars contending for 1492-1559 and the other for 1496-1561. When I first became interested in the subject I wondered how it arose, since in the Dutch edition of his works in folio, published in 1681, there appeared his statement of when he left the Roman Catholic Church and how old he was at the time. Later I discovered, however, 164