Yet our Amish are not a highly-educated people. Some years ago I inquired of a neighbor (who did not speak English fluently) on the subject of education. He said that they were not opposed to school-learning, but to high learning. “To send children to school from ten to twenty-one, we would think was opposed to Holy Scripture. There are things taught in school that don’t agree with Holy Scripture.”
I asked whether he thought it was wrong to teach that the earth goes round the sun. “I don’t know anything about it; but I am not in favor of teaching geography and grammar in the schools: it’s worldly wisdom.”
All these Baptist sects have an unpaid ministry. Dr. H., of Bucks County, had a patient who was a Mennonite preacher, and the doctor refused to receive payment, saying that his father had taught him never to take pay from ministers of the gospel. The preacher looked sober and worried, but left quietly, and not long after he came bringing oats and corn for the doctor’s horse. Afterwards he would bring flour or buckwheat-meal and choice bits about butchering time. Thus he seems, without entering into argument, to have relieved conscientious scruples about taking pay for preaching.
The ceremonial of these plain German sects is not formal and stately, like that of the Romish Church. A Moravian of Bethlehem was amused with one of their ministers, who, in ordaining a preacher, said, “Nau kannscht du taufe, und nau kannscht du copulire.” (Now you can baptize, and now you can marry.) Then turning to a brother, “Hab ich net ebbes vergesse? Oh, ya; nau kannscht du auch beim Abendmahl diene.” (Haven’t I forgotten something? Oh, yes; now too you can serve in the Supper.)
Perhaps I would better translate the foregoing, “Thou can serve in the Supper,” for our Pennsylvania Germans generally use the pronouns thee and thou.
The Mennonites have not a great yearly meeting like that of the Dunkers. In 1874 a correspondent of one of our Lancaster papers spoke of a national meeting held in Illinois by the Dunkers. He said, “They had abundant provision for the comfort of the brethren. The tent held ten thousand people. Eighty beeves were on the ground for steaks and roasts, and one baker had orders for eleven thousand loaves of bread.” This year I see a statement that the national Conference was held in Indiana, and that twenty thousand people were on the ground. Dr. Seidensticker (Century Magazine, December, 1881) states the number of the Dunkers in the United States at about two hundred thousand, with nearly two thousand ministers, none of whom receives a salary. They pay more attention to education than the Mennonites, having now three collegiate institutes.
Mennonites are still found in Europe; in Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the Palatinate, etc. They are sometimes distinguished in Germany into Heftler and Knöpfler, or Hook men and Button men; whence it seems that one of the distinctions here is widespread and of former origin. In 1881 I visited a family in the Palatinate, where I was shown a black satin waistcoat which the father had once worn, with hooks and eyes down the front; but none of our Amish here would wear anything so showy as a black satin waistcoat.
In the same year, 1881, a Mennonite preacher in the Palatinate gave me a list of many of the European communities, with names of their officers, such as preachers, deacons, etc. Many of the same names are found in Lancaster County, though not generally spelled in the same way. Such are Frantz, Lichti, Landes, Lehmann, Bachmann, Oesch, Bähr and Bär, Zercher, Krehbiel, Neff, Binkele, Muselmann, Brubacher, Staehly, Wickert. The family of Stauffer, in my own immediate neighborhood, has possessed for several generations the given names John and Christian. On the European list I find two Christian Stauffers, and one marked Johann Stauffer II.
I met in the Palatinate one who had travelled in Switzerland, and who had seen Mennonites there. All that he met there were farmers, who sold milk when near towns, or made butter and cheese when at a distance. They were mostly Amish. One Amish family, who still wore hooks and eyes, were named Stauffer. Other families whom he knew or heard of were named Wenger, Schwartz, Rettiger, etc.