surnamed SIMONIS, the founder of the sect of the Mennonites, was born in 1505 at Witmarsum, a village near Bolswerp in Friesland. At first he was a Roman Catholic priest, and was remarkable for nothing but gross sensuality. He then became a secret convert to the opinions of the Anabaptists, and in 1536 openly joined that body. With a change of opinions a change of morals had been simultaneous. He was now meek and gentle in disposition, kind and courteous to all men, blameless in his conduct, and full of apostolic zeal. With these qualities, a real though undisciplined genius, a rough and forcible eloquence, and a considerable amount of learning, combined to raise him to a high position in the sect which he had recently joined. He was accordingly requested in a short time to assume the functions of a public teacher. In this capacity he travelled with his wife and children through East and West Friesland, Groningen, Holland, Guelderland, Brabant, Westphalia, and the German provinces on the coast of the Baltic. By rejecting most of the extreme tenets of the Anabaptists he attracted towards his ministrations the judicious and liberal-minded of that sect, and thus became the acknowledged head of a new body of separatists. As yet, however, the civil authorities recognised no distinction between his followers and the radical Anabaptists. Some of the Mennonites suffered martyrdom, and others, including their leader, escaped the same fate only by being received into the mansion of a kind-hearted nobleman in the duchy of Holstein. There they found a safe asylum from persecution, and there Menno Simonis died in 1561.

The Mennonites receive the old Anabaptist creed in a form modified and considerably altered. The dogmas regarding the millennium, the exclusion of magistrates from the church, the abolition of war, the sinfulness of taking oaths, and the vanity of human science, have lost much of the harshness of their original features, and appear in an aspect more conformable both to reason and revelation. At the same time, the distinctive doctrine of the Anabaptists, which declares that converts from other Christian churches ought to be rebaptized, is repudiated. The blind fanaticism that impelled the disciples of Anabaptism at the beginning of the sixteenth century to believe in the divine appointment of polygamy, to hold up the liberal arts to scorn and hatred, to encourage the assassination of impious magistrates, and to attempt to establish the kingdom of Sion in the city of Munster, is likewise utterly disowned. Indeed, so far have the Mennonites separated from the Anabaptists, that the former disclaim all connection with the latter, and believe that they have derived their origin and opinions from the ancient Waldenses. (See ANABAPTISTS.) The Mennonites are subdivided into several sects, slightly differing from each other. Of these the principal two are the Flandrians or Flemingians, and the Waterlanders. (Schlym's Mennonitarum Historia, and Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History.)