MENNO SIMONS, Dutch religious former: b. Witmarsum, Friesland, 1492; d Oldesloe, Holstein, 19 Jan. 1559. He was or dained priest in the Roman Catholic Cburch and took pastoral work in the village of Pingium (1524), and from a study of the Nev Testament, undertaken (1530) to solve hi doubts about transubstantiation, he was induced to become an evangelical preacher and finally left the church of his ordination. The martyr dom of Sicke Snyder at Leeuwarden for Ana baptism impelled him to consider the Scriptural grounds for infant baptism. He was finally converted to the cause of the Anabaptists, bet never sympathized with the excesses of Minim. and wrote a diatribe against John of Leyden (1535). In 1537 at the request of a num ber of Anabaptists of Groningen he sumed the functions of an Anabaptist preacher and exercised, by his moderation, a most sal" tary influence on his fellow-ministers. now married, his change in faith having super seded his vow of celibacy, and began to tral as an evangelist not only in Friesland bc. throughout Holland and Germany as far as Livonia. Being persecuted from place to place he finally settled in Oldesloe in Holstein. whe:-: he closed his ministry with the consciousness of having founded a large and flourishing sec' whose subsequent history is related under the title Mennonites (q.v.) Views of Menno Menno was rather a preacher of a system of persona: sanctity than either a dogmatist or a fanatic like some of the Anabaptists. He was a man of pure moral and devotional enthusiasm whose account of his own conversion reads like a passage from the 'Confessions' of Augustine He sums up the results of his labors as consist ing in the conversion and recovery of the wicked. Yet he formulated a somewhat vague
profession of faith. He believed in the divinitr of Christ, who was born on earth in Mary that is without taking upon him human flesh and blood. He rejected infant baptism, and baptized those only who made a personal pro fession of faith in Christ. He particularly emphasized the power of excommunication possessed by the Church, without which •the spiritual Kingdom of God on earth cannot,* he said, °exist in purity and piety.' He be lieved in the coming millennium (q.v.) ; he ex cluded civil magistrates from church member ship on the ground that the church was a theocracy whose magistrates were the ministers. He declared that war and all taking and ad ministering of oaths were unlawful, and re garded human science as useless, even per nicious to a Christian. These decrees, how ever, as modified by the explanations of Menno, differed little from those generally promulgated by the Reformed bodies • of his day. His prin cipal teaching was of a moral and practical char acter. He was a meek, humble, noble-minded man, carried away with the spirit of his times, encouraging all that was good and pure among his followers, and sternly rebuking the guilty. The best edition of his work is