Pennsylvania Spiritual Lawlessness

Spiritual Outlaws
This population was not good humored. Touch not the Lord's anointed they would say. Death threats among principals were exchanged long before Pennsylvania when Beissel and Zinzendorf did so, before and after between establishment charismatics and opposing voices, not that one should have to read the death threats (xvii) against Hanegraaff and his children by Paul Crouch, Benny Hinn, et al, or the endless justifications. It might chafe, calling baptism, chastity, Sabbaths and communal living (they were ordered in confessionals to publicly weekly read their private thoughts, lectiones, Sectarians 261) forms of spiritual lawlessness. You'd think it should be called spiritual inconsistencies anyway not lawlessness since it is so difficult to establish spiritual laws, yet comes the notion that the first such spiritual law, like gravity, must address pride and so we are away and find something of spiritual laws in the ten commandments. That wasn't hard. What is hard is to apply such principles to a life when knowledge is incomplete and not impartial, even if the facts are partial, so what can we know of anyone when we excuse ourselves? Such logic pertains to this inquiry as if it were political not philosophical. No such deliberations afflicted the characters. Convinced they were right they headed east and called it west or west and called it east.

Take for example the baptism of Conrad Beissel. Beissel, to give the short of it, is one of a stellium of monastic, celibate, radical artists who operated under the guise of prophetic religion in 18th century Pennsylvania. He attracted genius too, founded and sustained a flowering of illuminations of all kinds, especially in book arts and prints that set Ephrata apart from anything before or since. Baptism and rebaptism in Pennsylvania found its new world home. They who were baptized once, perhaps as children, believed the formal act insufficient and had it redone from either a new attitude or they considered the manner incorrect. Beissel later enacted baptisms in and for the dead. Why would they douse with buckets of water three times in the middle of the night a sick girl, except to be able to say at her funeral that they did it just in time before she died? Inconsistencies as great as sins! Whether to sprinkle or plunge, forwards or backward, one time or three, and that's just obvious. As the long title to Beissel's Mystyrion says, the "Lawless ANTICHRIST discover'd and Disclos'd, Shewing that all those do belong to that Lawless Antichrist, who wilfully reject the Commandments of God, amongst which, is his holy, and by himself blessed Seventh-Day Sabbath." So if such extremities can be summoned for the Sabbath what would they say and do of baptism?

Beissel's ritualistic mentality and isolation were so extreme that he attempted to baptize himself. Even he could not believe (German Sectarians, I, 102) it efficacious, but on the other hand he did not respect his associates enough to ask for anything, "too great a humiliation for his proud spirit to receive baptism at their hands." Sachse, himself a Rosicrucian brother, empathizes with Beissel and the process, as he "plunges beneath the flood, and through it again enter[s] the material world cleansed from all taint and sin...yet his pride forbade him to humble himself, as he considered, to bow to his old master [Peter Becker] and receive the rite at his hands" (103). Like being born. Of course when he did do it it must be "apostolicwise," as Sachse says. The apostles appeared in Pennsylvania then as much as they did in later Scottsdale, so they say. So down he went after remembering what John the Baptist did, "face forward, under the cold flood." Well that's done, so on to the second act, but not so fast. Even if "this baptism in the Pequea was the most noteworthy one in the history of the sect-people of Pennsylvania," (104) it was redone, like those later also who were baptized in mud, as happened to converts, had after to be washed.

Lawlessness had other peculiarities than baptism, most extreme of which was the denial of their sexuality in their celibacy, the communion love feast, foot washing, not to speak of fervent separation from the world, whether it be husband from wife or goose from the table, that ridiculous "luxurious indulgence." Only Buñuel's Simon of the Desert captures it. Maybe it's hard to know when they're serious, but they were. The first baptism of Beissel was November 1724. About four years later his pride reasserted, along with that dialectic of the sabbath, so much so that the Germantown Baptists under Becker disagreed with Beissel. Imagine disagreeing with a prophet! Lest there seem any taint of his authority and aposticity in having first been baptized by the group from which he now severed, he rebaptized again, though it violates the law of redundancy, like saying he returned again, except he did, that is, back down the river, but not the same river, with some mishmash of Rosicrucian fours and sevens, squares and triads that Sachse best understands, for he reports it. Beissel actually got rebaptized twice. Who couldn't see it coming, first backwards to wash off the former, that is, he went under thrice, and why not think they spoke the words backward too in a banishing ritual, just set up the spiritual laws of high places and Ashtaroth sticks, and then immediately flip over and down he goes another three times. Apparently backwards means face up in renunciation and frontwards, or face down, in restoration. [To be fair, elaborations on these practices up Felker's Schwamp practiced a deep pit baptism where celebrants with feet tied to a rope suspended from the branch of a tree over water were raised and lowered three times in the appropriate manner head first. Among Oley Judizers left and right side baptism after Ezekiel was practiced. There is mention of foot first baptism, this being reserved with those sects for a final planting of burial, thus ready to be raised it was thought. Not.] Whether these were efficacious in the fourth dimension implied in all of this rhetoric is a futile inquiry. Whether the end sought was salvation, sanctification or membership was endlessly debated.

It would seem that some kind of law of opposites in this environment must prevail as if he is writing in code where yes means no, whore means bride, rest means turmoil. So in the preface to the reader of Mystery of the Lawless Beissel invests in his own word, invoking the editorial we a couple dozen times in two pages with the notion that you tell a thing is apostolic if it has been first spoken before it is written, that is, by himself. The law of the facetious returns in his words as he indicts those who seek "the Whore and her Cup," and "explain the Words of God after her crooked Serpentine Will" who must "withdraw with all his Heart and whole Mind from all Vanity, and Love of Creatures, and from all Worldly and carnal or fleshly Desire," all under the rubric of "denying the world," a favorite topic of the sanctified even if they were embroiled in their own thoughts, and of the whole subculture of Pennsylvania, even if in its art it celebrated the very world its religion forswore. So in truth the words often mean the opposite of what they say. You have to get used to it that "the Whore together with the Antichrist" is the facetious Beissel himself, which kind of makes Nietzsche and Kierkegaard prophetic in regard to their thinking that the church as the problem as much as the world.

Baptism morphs with the Sabbath in 1728 and 29 when Beissel's confederate Michael Wohlfarth made an equal insistence on his own inspired authority in Philadelphia, "I have a message to you from the Lord" (150) and exchanged broadsides with opponents. The upshot being that Wohlfarth and Beissel found themselves on the court house steps arguing about the days of the week (154). The odd thing in this mix of genius and idiocy in Beissel is that while he is proclaiming himself sultan, introverting his sexuality, baptizing again and again, he is early associated with Franklin who becomes his printer, coins the atonal music of his later community and fosters the decorative art there to the nth degree. All this is active simultaneously more or less with Beissel's theosophical second work in print, the first with Franklin (c. 1729), also of 32 pages, of which 99 were printed because, as Sachse helpfully explains, "the figure 1 stands for the finite or man, while the 0 represents the infinite, and to make the number 100 would have been to place the finite before the infinite" (162). We can't have that. These NINETY NINE MYSTICAL SENTENCES exist translated by Peter Miller in part (1768), issued by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1912. So Beissel in quick succession in two years published four books, the Mystery of Lawlessness, 99 Sayings, a hymnbook of 62 hymns, 31 of his own, Gottliche Liebes (Franklin, 1730) and one on Matrimony, Ehebuchlein (Franklin 1730) in addition to Wohlfarth's Seventh-Day-Sabbath (1729). These would be the points of contention to occupy him the rest of his years: baptism, the Sabbath, wisdom, hymns and music, celibacy.

Denial of sexuality is best called perversion of the human being. It seems to have opposite programs in Beissel and Zinzendorf, celibacy on the one and tanticism on the other. Turning all the freedoms of inquiry on their heads and substituting their own systems of control, meanwhile their supercharged terms for sexual denial were similar, from the celestial virgin on. The harm and productivity of it is measured by their autocracy and amazing outputs of energy, which should not seem necessarily a product of sublimation. Beissel kept publishing with Ben Franklin prolific editions of his hymnbooks of 1730, 32, 34 (ms. edition), 36, most of the hymns written by Beissel. All told in those years he was a propaganda machine, published the Mystery of Lawlessness, German and English editions of 1728, 29, the Ninety-nine Mystical Sentences of 1729-30, a book on marriage as the penitentiary of man, Ehebuchlein...Menschen of 1730 and the hymn books. The First Century of German Language Printing attributes eight of the twelve known printed works in the colony to Beissel and Wohlfarth (2) before 1738. He and his community built houses for neighbors, held theater even when they marched the road.

The community was in many ways analogous to a large family in the support they gave one another. One feels like a large issue lies under this surface in how this substitute for the real family functions like a gang. Celibacy's extremities. How to explain such things. There is a prejudice against life. You can see it in theosophy in the cycle of death and rebirth. One life is never enough. Those dying generations at their song says Yeats, dying generations, entropy, never sufficient. From another point of view all the generations are living, alive and well, functioning as steps toward the ultimate delivery of some package. Celibacy, tantricism, magic rituals, incantations, death and rebirth, drug use are wholly negative toward life, which exists in and of itself right now and has no before or after because it is alive. How can you expect such an idea to be understood in a (present) society that on the one hand films the corpse of a stillborn child so the mother can mourn but revokes the licenses of healthy fetuses?

The huge force of negativity is so strong it casts itself as positive and maligns the postive as negative. How theosophy contributes to this occurs in a range from the dictates of every cult leader like Beissel to every popular media view. That negativity also produces huge creativities is something to come to terms with. The negative produces the positive. Is that in itself necessary, polarized or natural? We are a long way from being able to think about it when the poles are reversed! Some commonplace phrases from these esoteric teachings, mystic rites, secret rituals, mystic theosophists, altar of mysticisms, fires of theosophy, esoteric speculations are Celestial Eve, heavenly virgin, spiritual virgin, celestial virgin, virgin Sophia, all mixed up with mystic dogmas, spiritual awakening, primitive Christian simplicity, extraordinary revival powers, fervent spirit. As if all you need do to attract a following is yoke disparates in a smock and call it love. Merely saying this is called negativity, but it is positive. These paganisms do everything except marry and give birth. If there is a negative join it to its opposite, also negative, thus comes the sensational claim that St. Paul had a agapetae, being a live-in snuggle bunny the real version of which might be David's pal girl on his deathbed. Is there a priest, give him a bastard. Is there a romance of Thecla, make it historical. The root of negativity is overturn authority to create undue authority. Error goes in every direction. The one thing none of this bears is the thought, from the apposite Beissel condemnation of those who profane his sabbath to those seduced by women, that the universe, all human relation, every act, every thought, each moment is infused with redemption and the spirit of redemption, so no matter what you have done, thought or said, there is redemption for it.

Even if Beissels's tract against marriage has no copy known there is plenty of evidence of his view. About 1735 he was awakened in his hut by intruders who whipped him presumably for seducing one of the Reformed wives to seek her virginity with him (Sectarians, 254). All opposites! Along with chastity came mortifying the flesh, full beards, pilgrim costume with the implicit violence of that garb, whether to be a full hermit or merely a monastic seemed the choice in their minds. Of our immediate temptations in this melancholy we have Buñuel again to thank.

To borrow from 8/11 conspiracy theory, the processes of control through sexual repression are mesmerist, patterning and depatterning, inversion techniques, hypno-illusions, etc., and even if we question the applications in politics, the techniques are there to see in the Pennsylvania communes.

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It's easy to exaggerate liberty, from Gottlieb Mittelberger (1756) to Jack D. Marietta and Gail Stuart Rowe's Troubled Experiment (University of Pennsylvania, 2006), which is just shocked to learn that the crime rate among Germans was greater than among English, as if there were such statistics. But Pennsylvania includes more notable lawless mystical hard cases than libertines. These made a work of love and roaring contradiction. What makes up spiritual lawlessness can be left to the induction from cases interesting in themselves, but it is a little ironic that one of the first publications in Pennsylvania was Conrad Beissel's The Mystery of Lawlessness (Andrew Bradford, 1729), translated by Michael Wohlfarth.

Zinzendorf

There were many of these mystics. The meditations of Zinzendorf riding horseback to take the gospel to the Indians are like the meditations of Crashaw and Donne, but Zinzendorf is a consumed megalomaniac. His mysticism was tantricism, his community autocracy. Pennsylvania is more than toy statistics in the bathtub however. Christopher Sauer's wife went one snowy night to become the spiritual bride of Conrad Beissel at Ephrata. Alexander Mack, Brother Timotheus (Sectarians, 88) got baptized for his godly father of the same name, founder of the Baptists. Conrad Weiser bounced from Lutheran to Beissel to Zinzendorf and back to Muhlenberg's daughter after burning all his prayer books. The New Mooners of Pennsylvania, played trombones at the new moon in the wilderness, holding that prayer ascended in the waxing but descended in the waning moon as did deceased souls (Sectarians, 431). The entrance to the doorway of the Ephrata chapel was low to force the entrant to bow (404). Iron was prohibited in their building because it was unholy in the Temple, as Sachse says in reference to Nebuchadnezzar's dream, "that even in Babylon iron was known as the symbol of destruction" (402), but while iron may have been destructive it was not deceitful. When it served them to spurn Babylon they did, and turning on their head would confirm their learning with Rosicrucian Egyptian-Babylonian ritual. Even while surrendering their so called "Babylonian names given them by their parents at baptism they substituted new spiritual names" (305) embracing Babylon at every turn, admitting Eckerling (Onesimus), Miller (Jaebez) and Weiser (Enoch) to the grandiose Order of Melchizedek (386). The Zionitic Brotherhood at Ephrata could in as little as 40 days so completely physically and spiritually rehabilitate as to lengthen your years to 5557 in perfect health and contentment. The initiate restored to the state of perfect innocence of Adam, reborn by fasting, chanting, and drugs, was a perfect Casteneda of the 18th century (361f). The good news for historians is that these elites must still be alive to be interviewed. Of course they are yet in their baby hood, so may not be compatible with rational discourse. The underlying purpose of these efforts, as reported by Sachse of Johann Frantz Reguier, was the good Pennsylvania quest that "by a strict life and bodily denial one may grow and increase in sanctification" (362). And when the self-administered treatment failed and he had after some time regained his senses, what did Reguier do but go off "on July 15, 1735…for Georgia in the hope of meeting Count Zinzendorf and through him learning the way to perfection and sanctification' (quoted by Sachse, 364). "The fortunate adept who had thus successfully completed the ordeal, with physical body as clean and pure as than of a new-born child, his spirit filled with divine light, with vision without limit, and with mental powers unbounded…should finally be able to say to himself, I AM, THAT I AM."

Sachse says they aped the monastic customs of the Middle Ages in night vigils, tonsures, regalia, priesthoods (375), a mystical theology that included baptism for the dead, an even more primitive than reincarnation, the most absurd instance being the creation of "immunity for deceased or absent kinfolk" (366) gained by the outer faith. Medieval except that in his high calling and self esteem Beissel was forced to adopt the office of Vater instead of merely Brother, a title "too commonplace" (367). Such orders, rituals and hierarchies of law and outer ceremony were just opposite the Oley Newborn so totally dominated by inner vision. Signs, countersigns and mystics, how embarassed was Yeats when he practiced the rituals of the Golden Dawn?

The words of Beissel and Zinzendorf held the flower of peace but beneath was a bite. They could not mutually humble themselves enough to even meet in the flesh. Beissel "regarded himself as of a higher rank in the theosophical fraternity, considered it against his dignity to call on Zinzendorf (Sachse, 448) who responded by letter that Beissel "should descend from his spiritual height, that others might sit alongside of him without danger to their lives" (449). This from the one who threatened to kill Weiser. The two are paired. Both loved secret orders, the paraphernalia of medals, robes and rituals and the power that the command of others conferred on them. The Moravians had the Order of the Mustard Seed and the Order of the Passion of Jesus (Sachse 4548f). Both were social visionaries. Zinzendorf had his seven ecumenical conferences to found "one congregation of God in the Spirit" (442). Throughout these things their words about Christ and love are enticing to the extreme, but the liberty and love they speak are completely opposite their autocratic practice. 440. Bethlehem and Ephrata communities (435)."The tail of a comet portended switches with which God would lash and judge them with great "calamities, 417, compelling Beissel to issue Mystische Abhandlung uberdie Schopfung und vondes Menschen Fall (1745), A Dissertation on Mans Fall, Englished in 1765 (433) which Peter Miller (Agrippa) says "has gone further than even the holy Apostles in their revelations" (422). No wonder Christopher Sauer says, but not in devotion, "this one must be regarded as a God" which he calls "spiritual harlotry and idolatry" (343, 44) in regard to Beissel's hymn to himself, Hymn 400 in the collection Sauer printed for Ephrata in 1739, Zionitic Incense Hill, (Zionitischer Weyrauchs Hugel) (320). But of course this is a god-awakened soul, that word, awakened, being the favorite of them all, but it had several meanings. Peter Miller in the Ephrata Chronicon supports the mythology. He says the claims that Beissel can render himself invisible are true, "the spirit under whose guidance he was, at times made him invisible" (332).

If it is a mystery how Blake yokes such disparates in his visionary poems, bespeaking at the same time primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man, describing his Fall in mysterious quaternaries, he is just the most lovable case axiomatic of 18th century minds where renaissance cabala remarried a pietistic lifestyle. Were there such extremes in England as turned up in Penn's Woods of a mix of emotion and pietism with the renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride? Blake got it from Swedenborg. Swedenborg got it from Zinzendorf. Thus the teachings of "the occult philosophy of the Mystics and Cabalists of the Middle Ages [were joined] with the severely simple Sabbatarian worship and tenets set forth in their primitive Bible teachings" (German Sectarians, 31). There was always a heavy blend of Rosicrucianism in Boehme, in the mystics of the Wissahickon, in Beissel, Zinzendorf, in them all, Muhlenberg aside.

Theosophists are well loved nor confined to particular time, place and station. Percival Lowell in Occult Japan makes what we can only call a space jump when he undergoes possession in the Shinto ritual. Whether to be possessed by food or the gods? Shall we be satisfied merely to say our names in sobriety and let that be enough?

Sauer's sour grapes, for "all was well between the two men until Sauer's wife left her husband and family to follow…a stricter observance (313). This is one who "journeyed towards the valley of the Pequea to bring about an awakening among the Mennonites, who had settled there, many of whom had become followers of the seductive Bauman and his noxious "Newborn" teaching.

"Many thousands of these people cared so little for religion [or so much] that it became a common saying in reference to such, who cared neither for God nor His word, that they had the Pennsylvania religion" (Spangenberg as quoted by Sachse, I, 442).

Hawthorne's Dimmesdale impregnated a naif to prove that human nature can neither be created nor destroyed by ordinary means.

There was a continual flow between the Moravians at Bethlehem and Beissel at Ephrata about 1742 (Sachse, German Sectarians, 424).

Esoteric teaching, secret ritual, mystic behaviors have much invaluable surface truth meant as bait for all poor flies who find the sweetness bitter as they dive, but with enjoyment skim the surfaces. Deeper dived bitter truth, which is so sweet and satisfying beneath, is the way of opposites in earth.

Nothing is so important as the principled conflict of principals.

Megalomania is incomplete without projection, that holiest of psychological mechanisms where the outer world is inflicted with the inward state.

The comet must be punitive if Beissel is so and his word greater than God's.

It's very rare to find someone who writes who does reveal their disease in the writing.

Outbreaks of Pennsylvania Lawless

Outlaw Religion

Lawless or lawful, pre-colonial religious history of Pennsylvania is a pastoral of eclogues dominated by feuding shepherds, each with a say, superceded by another. The pastors and their parties feud for the same reasons as their shepherd analogies, for fame, for boredom, for spite, for glory. Who shall the authors of our pastoral be but they whose quarreling was simultaneous, dialogue intruding upon interrupted dialogue, alliances shifting with the moment, friends at one, enemies the next and back again in the order in which history introduced them, until it seems so comical that we are not tempted to invest our own passions with theirs and make their mistakes live even longer. These shepherds, pastors and people, escaped the tyranny of oppressive old world traditions to the new of milk and honey, golden ideals, peace and hope, and there find not plenitude without labor or freedom without discord, but the opposite of the golden age singing. Quarreling they go, arguing the smallest details without the immediate comforts of the past life they knew.

The religious and political fratricides of early Pennsylvania are further supercharged by later religious and historical partisans. On the one hand contemporaries perversely uphold the law of grace and love by assassinating each others character, ideas and activities. On the other hand biographers and historians of the institutions these activities founded take parochial positions based upon those beliefs and not on an examination of the evidence. It matters little today whether any were right or wrong, their causes have long since outworn with their passions. Principals, antiquarians and historians enrich and complicate the narratives producing the most startling effects of light and dark. The early religions of Pennsylvania are something like pathologies, sociopathic anomalies piled upon dysfunction and jealousy. The more they claim the right the more wrong they become. This being so we go in search of one who admits his wrong.

Pennsylvania Religion

"If the head of a house should give offense to some insolent Irishman or brutal German, he may very likely find that some harm has been done to his cattle or crops during the night, since everything stands out in the open, exposed to the revenge and spite of such callous people… before he is able to summon the aid of a neighbor or the justice of the peace, the enemy may already have perpetrated the utmost damage and fled several miles away into the forest" (Journals, I, 136).

Muhlenberg gives examples from intruders at a wedding who "scoff at churches and preachers," to his son-in-law, justice of the peace Conrad Weiser who had Adam Hains (Wallace, 208), attempt to burn down his house at night with his family in it (I, 136). The lawlessness that thrived in "Pennsylvania liberty" fit nicely the Newborn philosophy of religious irreligiousness, that is a dogma of violence and intimidation, an important background to Newborn success. Muhlenberg says tolerance of lawless behaviour stemmed from fear. The pool of anti-clericalism masked personal vengeance, which implies a positive and a negative expression of Pietism, positive since many people, generating so many sects, sought spirituality with an emotive base, negative when enflamed emotions were turned against neighbors in criticism religious and irreligious alike.

A more common explanation from Sachse to Mittelberger's lament is that in the new world they lost their faith. The two are often one. The tautology and nihilism of the Newborns was a tip of the branch of liberty and license. "Even the most exemplary preachers, especially in rural districts, are often reviled, laughed at and mocked by young and old, like Jews" (Mittelberger, 48). How then to distinguish the newborns from the unborns, so to speak, when the newborns seem to speak for all? "Such outrageous coarseness and rudeness result from the excessive freedom in that country, and from the blind zeal of the many sects" (Mittelberger, 48). Thus the much-quoted phrase: "Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers." A broader case for Newborn membership includes every anticlerical spirit focused by the more spectacular Newborns. Mittelberger laments:

"In Pennsylvania there exist so many varieties of doctrines and sects that it is impossible to name them all. Many people do not reveal their own particular beliefs to anyone. Furthermore there are many hundreds of adults who not only are unbaptized but who do not even want baptism. Many others pay no attention to the Sacraments and to the Holy Bible, or even to God and his Word. Some do not even believe in the existence of a true God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, Salvation or Damnation, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment and Eternal Life, but think that everything visible is of merely natural origin. For in Pennsylvania not only is everyone allowed to believe what he wishes; he is also at liberty to express these beliefs publicly and freely" ( 22).

In the days before 1750 Muhlenberg says that makeshift preachers did "not know the fundamental truths of religion, but they affect only the outward forms and dispute about such matters as altar and table, the bread and the host, the preacher's robe and vestments, about whether to say Vater Unser or Unser Vater. This gives rise to heated religious disputes and disgraceful word battles among the common people—between husbands and wives, among neighbors, parents, children, relatives, and friends" ( I, 152). Mittelberger illustrates how ridiculous the religious confusion became: "I knew an old German neighbor of mine very well. He had been a Lutheran. Then he rebaptized himself in running water. Some time later he circumcised himself and thereafter believed only in the Old Testament. Finally, just before he died, he baptized himself again by sprinkling water over his head" (84).

The difference between the Newborn arrogation of authority to themselves and other rhetorical lawlessness was narrow. Beissel, founder of the Ephrata Cloister, and Newborn founder, Baumann, both insisted absolutely upon their authority in everything. Reformed founder, Boehm had to have his way, and his usurper Weiss, his. Each arrogated his own law. They said they were following God in overthrowing men. Zinzendorf, Moravian scion, had the sweetest tongue to speak the redemption and the most autocratic command of the redeemed. He tells "'Benedict, I am giving your daughter to Eschenbach; you and your wife I am taking with me to Germany, and your estate belongs to the Saviour'" (Muhlenberg, I, 150). The various sects held power over the minds of their followers. Conrad Weiser bounced from Lutheran to Beissel to Zinzendorf' and back to Lutheran through the offices of his father-in-law, Muhlenberg. When the much reconverted Indian scout, severed from Beissel it was because he was "compelled to protest for a considerable time against the domination of conscience, the suppression of innocent minds, against the prevailing pomp and luxury…" (Weiser, 128). When he severed from Zinzendorf that cult prayed for his death! The choices were either subscribe to the old world church view, the newer hyper-religion of the Pietists, the religious no-religion of the Newborns, or simply no religion, called the Pennsylvania religion: "It had become proverbial, respecting any one who cared not for god and his word, that 'he was of the Pennsylvanian religion'" (Spangenberg's Life of Zinzendorf, in Wallace 246).

A Pennsylvania Dada Cult Der Neugeborene

This rhetoric seems more Elizabethan than Pennsylvanian. The apparent secular irreligiousness, of say a "Spinoza, Collins, Spenzer, Bayl," (Muhlenberg, I, 139) is notwithstanding religious. In May 1747 Muhlenberg mentions a woman in "Oley, where practically all the inhabitants are scoffers and blasphemers. It is a place like Sodom and Gomorrah and I have preached there several times for the sake of a Lot or two who live there, but the wanton sinners only scoffed and jeered at me" (I, 146). In June, "we stopped in at the home of an old man, one of the sect called Newborn…he will listen to no advice, accepts neither reason nor a higher revelation in all its parts…when he came to this country, he joined the turbulent sect" ( I, 149). Presiding at the funeral of an ex-Newborn member in 1753, Muhlenberg says, he had "lived in a region inhabited by people who hold all kinds of curious opinions, despise preachers, churches, and sacraments without discrimination, and pride themselves in their own righteousness" (I, 357). During the service, "an old man, who called himself Newborn, stood outside, before the door, and began to preach to several people of his persuasion with noisy blustering which was intended to disturb me.…"

Under normal circumstances, monopolizing the term Newborn to denote a sociopath would seem a cruel exploitation of the desire of these pietistic people to get some emotion and integrity into their religion. Pietists believed in a new birth, a spiritual regeneration leading to a changed life, an unworldly life. The Newborn, wrenching the term, made it virtually opposite and overwhelmingly antagonistic. New born of course signifies something other than a physical birth. Despite the similarity to evangelical parlance the Neugeborene founded no denomination or seminary. Among the host of visionaries they were reputed most bizarre of all. Starting about 1714 Baumann began to travel from Oley into Philadelphia for dialectical maneuvers against Quakers and the populace on the courthouse steps, promising to walk on the Delaware river. His detractors do not say whether this was in winter. His comeuppance came from one even nastier than himself, Beissel, when Baumann went to visit at Ephrata (c.1722). Nothing offended Beissel more than freedom from sin. Thus Beissel offered his own stink (literally) as a remedy and repudiation of Baumann's sinlessness. Beissel could do rhetorical turns in his head. Was his seduction of other men's wives with promises of spiritual intercourse less a danger than Newborn profaning their religious practices?

Muhlenberg (June 10, 1747) gave a contemporary explanation of Newborn theology: "this sect claims the new birth which they receive suddenly through immediate inspiration and heavenly visions through dreams and the like. When they receive the new birth in this way, then they are God and Christ Himself, can no longer sin, and are infallible. They therefore use nothing from God's Word except those passages, which taken out of context, appear to favor their false tenets. The holy sacraments are to them ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (I, 149). Heavenly visions and inner light preoccupy what Muhlenberg says of the old man who disturbed Philip Bayer's funeral: "this was the basis of his authority: one night, many years ago, he saw a light in his room. He claimed that this light revealed to him, that he was a child of God, that the magistracy, the ministry, the Bible, sacraments, churches, schools, etc. are of the devil, that all men must be like him, etc." (I, 357-358)

The reasoned response to the Newborn from George Michael Weiss, Reformed pastor, who issued Der In Der Americani Schen Wildnusz in 1729, has been lost. In the guise of a visit to the farm of a Newborn adherent the central point is the Newborn's denial: "I have worked hard and that is the result, but I do not see any reason why I should thank God" (summarized by Hinke in Sachse, 157-59). "I do not need all that, for I am a New Born. I am perfectly without sin. God is in me and I am in God," presumably quoting John 14:20, "I am in my Father, you are me and I am in you." When the narrator poses four ways God could be in him "the New Born then claims without hesitation that He is in him in the most perfect way, because He is perfectly sinless." There being no greater authority than himself he "answers by denying the authority of the Bible," that is, he is his own Scripture. Trumping the objective universe, in answer to the query, "How do you know that you are new born?" he answers, 'I feel it within me by a peculiar illumination of God's Spirit.'" Cautioned about the danger of self-deception, "the New Born answers that he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for such outward things as have been mentioned. Especially does he object to divine worship in a church and to ministers." Finally, QED, "it is all the same whether you talk or don't talk."

Such speaking would easily lend itself to "Pennsylvania liberty," hence the groundswell supporting the Newborns, a patina to justify lawless acts. Dreams, visions and inspirations have a particularly modern appeal, so the 20th century provides a greater context for 18th century Pennsylvania setting out to "confound men," in the religious customs of his day. Baumann is a Pennsylvania Dadaist.

The Dada Manifesto of the early 20th century writes large the thinking of the Baumann cult. When Tristan Tarza proclaimed that Dadaism "expresses the knowledge of supreme egoism, in which laws wither away" (Motherwell, 78-79) we hear echoes of Beissel and Zinzendorf too. It is the perfect religious credo: "everything one looks at is false" except the cultist. "Everyone dances to his own boom-boom." Tarza's aphorisms, the "abolition of logic…memory...unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity" (78-9) are very suitable for a zealot. Were we to substitute "religion" for "art" in the Neu-merz manifesto of Victor Zygouov (1997) we might have a reasonable approximation of the Neugeborene:

"In art, Dadaism is the concept of anti-art. All art that one sees is just a product of the society that created it. ( Because Dadaism is in opposition to all society, it is in opposition to the art which society produced as well." To spell it out, religion is just a product of society, and because the Newborn is in opposition to society he is in opposition to the religion which society produced. The only truth is the inward illumination, a particularly religious conundrum, kergyma vs. truth, me vs. thee, rhema vs. logos. The word fragment "merz" was discovered by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters in a Hanover trash can. Pennsylvania prophets and their sects resemble Dadaists who "express the knowledge of supreme egoism, in which laws wither away." This withering of law is a common denominator, among Labadists, Rosicrusians, various Pietists, Dunkers, German Baptists, Moravians, Ephratatites, Baumann, Beissel, Zinzendorf.

Oley

Oley had a territorial attitude of mockery: "Many agitators appeared among the backwoods, among them Matthias Baumann from Oley who came in 1719 (sic.) to conduct revivals among the godless settlers. A visionary, he taught that his disciples were free from sin and had no need for Scripture, sacraments or marriage. Many converts flocked to even Quakers, Reformed and Lutheran" (Earnst, 48). Mittelberger, three times references Oley and the newborn. (Philip E. Pendleton. Oley Valley Heritage. The Colonial Years: 1700-1775).

"One of our churchmen approached a rich scoffer in Oly Township and desired to borrow some money.
The rich man said to the poor man, "Do you know who my God is?"
The poor man replied, "No."
The rich man pointed to his manure pile outside the door and said, 'there is my God; he gives me wheat and everything I need" (I, 138). Wheat, of course, was the region's cash crop. Was this rich scoffer our Conrad?

Another, admonished to give thought to his death, laughed "that he had long since thought of his death and decided, as far as his soul was concerned, to enter into a swine, since he was fond of pork anyhow" (Muhlenberg, I, 138).

Mittelberger's homily against Conrad Reiff and Arnold Huffnagel for their contempt and mockery of the clergy is the most detailed report of Oley. (Journey to Pennsylvania, 84) In it we understand the fundamental mission of the Newborn to mock the clergy.

Mittelberger's example here of such an "objectionable preacher" has to be a Newborn parody.
"Alas, among the preachers there are also several quite irritating ones who offend many people, besides causing much annoyance to our ministers. At a gathering of young farmers from the township of Oley with whom he ministers. I will cite one example of such an objectionable preacher. His name was Alexander. At a gathering of young farmers from the township of Oley with whom he had been carousing he announced that with his sermon he would so move the people standing in front of him that all of them would begin to cry, but at the very same time all of those standing behind him would start laughing. He wagered these same young farmers a considerable sum that he would be able to do this. And on a certain agreed day he appeared at a church meeting, stationed himself in the midst of the assemblage, and began to preach with a great deal of power and emotion. When he saw that his listeners had become so moved that they began to cry, he put his hands behind him, pulled his coat-tails apart, and revealed through a pair of badly torn breeches his bare behind, which he scratched with one hand during this demonstration. At this those who were standing behind him could not help roaring with laughter; and so he won his bet. An account of this disgusting incident appeared both in the German and English newspapers of Philadelphia" (45).]

Following the riches theme, Muhlenberg says that life in Oley was "lucrative and lascivious." A third time, June 10, 1747, "eight miles from New Hanover we stopped in at the home of an old man, one of the sect called Newborn. . .he separated from the (Reformed) Church and the Lord's Supper and refused to give the oath of loyalty to the then ruling elector, for which he was examined by the consistory and imprisoned. According to his opinion he had been persecuted and expelled for the sake of Christ and the truth, but as a matter of fact he was only confirmed in his stubbornness. He will listen to no advice, accepts neither reason nor a higher revelation in all its parts, since he is weak in understanding, headstrong, and hot-tempered; and unfortunately he abuses the freedom of Pennsylvania. When he came to this country, he joined the turbulent sect of people who call themselves Newborn."

Truth is not obvious. We need a word like fact, but facts themselves are interpreted as many different words describe facts. It’s not really fiction if we use "day" in a generic sense, it’s just inexact. This inexactitude we loosely call fiction, but fiction has intention, whatever it is, however fact does too, selected to prove a point in disregard of all other facts. This affects every written account. To the mind of the reader factual assumptions are invisible and fictional ones obvious.

Confounding Men

With apology to Kafka, Matthius Baumann had his own metamorphosis during a sudden illness in 1701. His only publication was a tract written in Oley in 1723 intended for distribution in Pennsylvania, Ein Ruf an die Unwiedergebohrene Welt (A Call to the Unregenerate). Parts of this are preserved in the Chronicon Ephretense (1786). With a nearly unparalleled emphasis upon inner light, Baumann was "translated to heaven and given the power of prophecy" (Sachse, 73). He had trances for 14 days, saw the end of the world, had an interview with the divine. As Baumann's view emerged "all church and sect life as it was known - clergy, sacrament, ritual, catechism, scripture, prayer, communal worship-was an abomination before God and a waste of time. The only way to salvation was through a traumatic experience of spiritual death and rebirth, which incorporated an actual interview with the heavenly Being. Those who underwent this wrenching transformation emerged saved and, from then on, forever free of and incapable of sin" (Pendleton, 106).

The Newborn believed that this "perfection" was a massive internal revelation from which the proponent could not fall. They combined this inner light with an extraordinary ridicule of others, decreeing that whether the faith was Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian or anything else it was sin. The more traditional communities thought that "New Born beliefs more dangerous to people's souls and to the social order than those of any other sect in Pennsylvania" (Pendleton,106). The ridicule and blasphemy the Newborn urged was, in Baumann's phrase, first cited in the Chronicon (17), a result of their desire to "confound men," to disrupt their religious services and rhetoric. In the confounding, Oley and the Newborn joined at the hip. Oley, which derived from the Lenape name, meaning "hole" or "kettle," that is, a hollow ringed with mountains, in this period was a caldron of prophetic thornapple fermenting Pennsylvania religion.

Mockery had been a territorial attitude in Oley for many years. "Many agitators appeared among the backwoods, among them Matthias Baumann from Oley who came in 1719 (sic.) to conduct revivals among the godless settlers. A visionary, he taught that his disciples were free from sin and had no need for Scripture, sacraments or marriage. Many converts flocked to the Neugeborene-even Quakers, Reformed and Lutheran" (Earnst, 48). But while early it continued also. In 1753 (although the account is published in 1756), Gottlieb Mittelberger, three times references Oley and the newborn in his Journey to Pennsylvania. But Mittelberger gives the Newborn a current status, including them equally in his heterogeneous catalogue of "Lutherans, members of the Reformed Church, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites or Anabaptists, Herrenhuter or Moravian Brothers, Pietists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Dunkers, Presbyterians, New-born, Freemasons, Separatists, Freethinkers, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, Negroes, and Indians" (41).

Silencing the newborn

Boehm wrote of Oley in 1740: "The worst were those who called themselves 'The New Born.' Without hesitation they declared themselves to be equal to God and greater than our Saviour; they pretended to be free (from sin)…however, after God had removed such shameless blasphemers of His name, the true Christians met and desired to establish, by the help of God, a congregation according to our true Reformed doctrine" (Life and Letters, 1740, 278-79) He refers to the founding of the Oley Reformed Church in 1736. Boehm said he had been aware of the Newborn since he was first in the country, eighteen years before, that is, in 1722. He mentions them first in his letter of 1728 among "all sorts of errorists, as Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks" (Life and Letters, 1728, 161).

The multiple references of Muhlenberg and Mittelberger to the Newborn contradict Boehm's statement that they had been silenced, as does the Old Moravian record of the Oley church in 1736 that "there were at that time all kinds of spirits in Oley, of which the Newborn were the dominant party" (cited by Hinke in Life and Letters, 110). The Moravian version of the silencing is that it came about as a direct result of their efforts, namely of Spangenberg's, who in 1737 "…came to Oley and there he gave such testimony regarding the meritorious death of Christ, with such a demonstration of the Spirit, that the power of darkness received a severe blow. His first sermon was delivered in the house of Jonathan Herbein and the second in the house of Abraham Bertholet. He attacked the newborn in his discourse from the words of I John 1:7,8,9. Through this address the spirit of the Newborn was so broken that it could not gain strength again and is daily becoming weaker" (Hinke, Life and Letters, 111).

Everybody wanted a part, indeed the whole, of the Newborn's demise. Ephratites claimed "it was observed that from this time on [after Baumann's audience with Beissel] they lost all power to spread their seductions any farther, which finally died out with their originators" (Chronicon, 17). Thus Boehm must share with the Moravians and the Moravians with The Ephratites.
Newborn notoriety was much greater than their actual numbers, for as Boehm said, some partially agreed with them, swelling their ranks. We discern true believers, partial believers and like the pond that supports the lily pad, a great swell of anticlericalism, unbelief and antisocial freethinking that the Newborn focused and gave expression to.

Outlaw and Outtakes

Some of Conrad Reiff's biography fell to the cutting floor, but suppositions continue, for instance that he and Gottlieb Mittelberger were friends of a sort. Before he left Pennsylvania in 1753 for Germany Mittelberger must have attended the funeral service of Anna Reiff. Everyone else was there. The object of his pejorative, Conrad Reiff, was. We develop the likelihood of their contact in the article. At the funeral of their mother various contacts among the frontier brothers occured, at the funeral and also at the reading of the will of their brother George in 1759. There probably attended likewise the conflicted Balthaser Gehr, son of Anna Reiff II and Conrad Gehr, who had fiduciary and legal care of his cousin Philip Reiff, Conrad’s son, from 1786 to his death in 1815. Sort of like the son of the innkeeper in the Fellowship of the Ring. Balthaser Gehr (cf. Pendleton, 137, 147) married the daughter of that equally wealthy neighbor of Conrad Reiff, Antony Jaeger. In 1767 Jaeger's "sons Daniel and Henry, and his son-in-law Balthaser Gehr were tried for assault and battery on the Jaegers' lifelong neighbor, miller Heinrich Kerst. A neighbor, Jacob Silvious, also stood trial for coming to Kerst's defense" (Pendleton, 147). Balthaser exercised a power of attorney for his infirm cousin, Philip Reiff, second son of Conrad, in 1786 (Pendleton, 137). Baltes went Oley.

The disposition of another son of Gehr, Philip, is unknown. He appears in the ledger of the Old Salford Store (c. 1766-1774) reported as, "Gehr, Philip; Conrad Gehr's son of Germantown" (John R. Tallis, The Perkiomen Region, II, 33).] Near the bottom of the will of Hans George Reiff (d. 1726), a different handwriting than the will reads, "Cunrad Gehr married Anna," (Riffe, 20) suggesting this was written after probate. Gehr was issued a patent by the land office for 34 acres in the Salfords in 1735, the same year as Garrett Clemens, Christopher Dock, Peter Wentz and Hans Reiff among others (H. W. Kriebel in The Perkiomen Region, V, 11), but Heckler speculates he possibly there was confused with Conrad Custer (Heckler, Lower Salford, l1, 13). Gehr had at least two sons. Baltazar, or Baltes as he was called, served in the Pennsylvania legislature. He was mentioned in his uncle's will, (George Reiff) in 1759, "my will is after my sister's son Baltes should set up his trade, my wife shall give him twenty pounds to buy tools for it" (Riffe, 28). It should be noted that Anna was not called Anna Maria as her full name is suggested to be, but merely Anna, like her mother, who signed Anna in the Landes will and on the board in the attic.

Conrad Gehr's Peccadilloes

Geographically, Oley affected Conrad Reiff, brothers Peter and George, and Jacob's daughter Catherine. They all either lived there or owned land. Spiritually the effects of Oley were more serious in their effect upon Conrad's mother and sister (Anna and Anna Maria) through the sister's husband Conrad Gehr. Gehr's experience of the Newborn is important for his brother-in-law Conrad because they flesh out the satirical Newborn beliefs and show the influence of those beliefs in the family. The Reiff "family knew about Conrad's (Gehr) peccadilloes," says Harry Reiff, "as indicated in the will of Hans George's son, George (d.1759), who died leaving a legacy to nephew Baltazar with an admonition not to permit his father, Conrad Gehr, to have any of the legacy" (Letter of 2/13/2002). Gehr's peccadilloes were that he had operated a tavern in Germantown (before 1753) where the Newborn blasphemies were commonplace and that he had been imprisoned for fraud (Muhlenberg, I, 353). Gehr figures prominently in Muhlenberg's ruminations after the funeral of Conrad's mother, Anna. Anna Maria, the daughter, had been "attached to the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church," which means Muhlenberg must have heard firsthand the distress Gehr put his wife through by his behaviour. This distress was doubled because at that time the mother lived with her daughter:

"During my first years here [1742 and following] she was living with her daughter in Germantown…for the sake of her daughter the distressed old widow stayed at the former's home…she was obliged to listen to many a blasphemous utterance and witness many an offense on the part of her son-in-law, who was Reformed by birth, but in this country not only forsook the Word of God and the other means of grace, but also despised and ridiculed them" (I, 352).
Muhlenberg stipulates that the "offenses" included, that "the said man maintained a public house and it occurred to him that he might institute a so-called assembly of worship in his house on Sundays. For this purpose he associated himself with a half-educated but totally perverted Christian who was to deliver a sermon or address on physic or natural science at every meeting. The auditors were obligated to pay three pence apiece each time, and this money was to be consumed in drink after the speech" (I, 353).

New Born ideas and mindset gave a kind of metaphysic to generalized tavern talk, public misdemeanors, rebellion against authority. Even if it sounds like Tom Paine's later Age of Reason (1795) or other enlightenment doctrines such attitudes were earlier 18th century and German, the specific form Mittelberger saw affecting Conrad Reiff, Der Neugeborene. But it was not isolated from all the other revisions of traditional order in PA from Wohlfarth and Beissel standing on the court house steps to argue which day of the week was the sabbath (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 154) to Gehr's substitution of tavern for church, science for scripture and the price of a drink for the offering suggest that the 1701 Blue Law of the General Court of Germantown was not being enforced: "no inn-keepers on the first day called Sunday in God's service, shall hold gatherings of guests. . .on pain of whatever penalty the court of record shall inflict" (Pennypacker, Germantown, 283). Gehr had a public reputation and was the brunt of much gossip. Muhlenberg had heard further: "a trustworthy man named Georg Stoltz came to me and related the following incident. One evening he and a Swiss gentlemen were obliged to stop at the blasphemer's house and put up for the night. He went out of his way to annoy his two guests with sinful talk. Among other things he said that the context of nature is God, that the world came into existence by an accident in eternity, that the universe maintained itself, etc. What the parsons say about God, about a revealed religion, about a Saviour, and about heaven and hell, they have to say to make a living and in order to lead the masses by the nose."

Although Muhlenberg does not make the connection, for such views easily mask themselves as naturalism, Gehr's satirical raison d'être is very much in the Newborn manner, like his brother-in-law Conrad and those others to whom the sacraments were "ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Muhlenberg), who uttered "such blasphemous words against our Saviour" (Boehm), who theatrically mocked preachers in parody (Mittelberger), who "despise preachers, churches and sacraments without discrimination" (Muhlenberg), who scoff that manure is life and pig the destiny of the soul. The Newborn catechism, such as it was, was as active in the tavern of Gehr as it was in the township of Oley, except that the enterprising Gehr had thought to go his brother-in-law one better and mixed scoffing with drinking.

These ideas of tavern philosophy are reported in practically every contemporary account of the Newborn as attested by Boehm, Muhlenberg, Weiss, Mittelberger and others. The likeness of Gehr's metaphysic to Newborn utterance implicates both brother and brother-in-law in the Newborn species of the Pennsylvania religion. While Boehm's summary of the sects names Puritans, Baptists and Pietists, it is really the Newborn beliefs of Gehr's metaphysic that he exposes: "Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc., among whom dreadful errors prevail; indeed heinous blasphemies against our great God and Savior and their own exaltation over His Majesty; for they claim that they have essential divinity in themselves; that they cannot sin…they believe there is no other heaven or hell than what is here on earth; they even deny Divine Providence, and assert that nothing needs God's blessing, but that all products of the ground and all offspring of animals and of the human race, come simply from nature, without any care on the part of God, and that prayer also is useless. (Life and Letters, (1728) 161."

Prodigal Son

When the early settler of Oley, Pa., Conrad Reiff (1696-1777), became a prodigal son joining the virulent Newborn cult at midlife, he later seems to repudiate this act in word and deed, which suggests in the end that he was a prodigal who came home. Neither his going out nor his return have been well told. He was not a recent immigrant to Philadelphia, had lived in Skippack with his family from at least 1717, the first mention of his father's land. His brother Jacob was named in 1723 as an agent for the government. Though Reformed, his father, Hans George, was a signatory witness of the trust agreement for the Salford Mennonite Meeting House in 1725. There has been some suggestion that Conrad's mother, Anna Maria, was the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed church minion.

His first explicit mention occurs in his father's will of 1726 where the estate was equally divided between himself and his siblings. His name next appears with his brothers, Peter and George, in their petition to Governor Gordon of April 29, 1728 where 74 "Back Inhabitors," residents along Skippack Creek, sought protection against the Indians. He was an executor (with Henry Funk and Christian Allebach) of the will of Claus Upleger, drawn up August 3, 1730: "Guardians or Executors over my wife, children and all the goods which I left behind" (Heckler, History of Franconia Township, 10-11).

About this time he began to prepare to leave Skippack for Oley, where he bought 300 acres in 1730. Remaining yet a while, he again petitioned the Assembly with his neighbors in 1731 to be "permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of English subjects" (Riffe, 26). He is doubtless included with his brothers in the recriminations of the rival Reformed shepherds, George Michael Weiss and John Philip Boehm which preoccupied the founding of the Reformed Church in Skippack. These disputes began with Weiss's arrival in September 1727. Boehm includes them all in the phrase, "Jacob Reiff and his brothers" (Letter of 1730 in Life and Letters, 217). In these years, 1727 – 1731, Conrad probably took care of his brother Jacob's farm while Jacob was abroad, that is, from the end of 1727, with one six month respite, until September 1731 when he returned from his second voyage.

Conrad may have bought the land in Oley in anticipation of his marriage of 1733. Maybe he was tired of being of the "party of Reiff" that Boehm so incessantly argued his brother Jacob ran in Skippack, sort of an out of the frying pan into the fire thing. Maybe it was the expression of a pioneering spirit. If however he was seeking peace and quiet from religious disputes he could not have gone in a worse direction. He was one of those worldly sons that Muhlenberg disapproved. Ruminating over the matriarch Anna's obsequies in 1753 he says, "she had several married sons who are well thought of, and some of these profess the Reformed religion while others believe in nothing but the transitory riches of this earth" (Muhlenberg, I, 352).

Conrad moved to Oley in 1733 and married Anna Margaretha Kuhlwein, Mary, daughter of Philip Kuhlwein, brother-in-law of Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborn. Kuhlwein had pioneered that area as an advance for Baumann in 1709. When Kuhlwein chose the Oley Valley as the site for the perfectionist Neugeborene colony he and Jean LeDee were the first German-speaking settlers (Pendleton, 106). Since Baumann came to Oley at Kuhlwein's advise, it is no surprise that Kuhlwein took over leadership of the colony after Baumann's death in 1727.

We should probably assume Conrad Reiff's acceptance of Newborn beliefs, although they were pretty different from those in which he was raised. In marrying the scion's daughter, a family with no sons, he would have to inherit extensive land holdings. Marriage transported him into the bosom of the Newborn community. Thus, he immediately is identified with the twenty or so families that originally settled the north Oley valley starting about 1712 (Pendleton, 27): Baumann, Bertolet, Levan, DeTurk, Joder (Yoder), Kuhlwein, Huffnagel, Schenkel, Keim, Schneider, Hoch, Ballie, Peter, Herbein, Weber, Kersten, Aschmann, Ritter, and Kauffmann (Pendleton, 18). No one benefited more from the Newborn than he, who gained a wife, a homestead, two sons and inherited Philip Kuhlwein's estate in less than four years, ranking him among the largest landholders and candidate for richest man of Oley, far surpassing his brother Jacob down in Skippack. He had a little success in the "transitory riches."

Not only did Conrad Reiff inherit Kuhlwein's estate upon his death in 1736 (Pendleton, 108), he seems to have inherited Baumann's as well. Comparing Pendleton's maps of the Oley Zone of 1725 with 1750, the configurations of the Baumann and Kuhlwein estates of 1725, which adjoin on a southwest axis, are roughly equivalent to the Conrad Reiff estate of 1750. In the 1750 map which indicates Conrad Reiff's holdings (the estate of Philip Kuhlwein), the two tracts seem to join, as if Baumann's estate were inherited by Kuhlwein and then that augmented section inherited by Conrad Reiff. When Baumann died in 1727 did he deed it to his brother-in-law? The two estates that became one were then inherited by Reiff in 1737. Why wouldn't he remain stanch when after Baumann's death the Yoders, John Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, (c. 1736) founded the Oley Reformed Church ( Hinke, Life and Letters, 34)? Conrad must have seemed in 1733 a good prospect to his father-in-law for all that he, even then, intended to trust him with.

Conrad's Religion

We do not know what inner light or revelation Conrad Reiff may have traduced from his Newborn neighbors. The lesser and more outward ridicule of religious forms he took to readily.How much did the anticlericalism of the Newborn, affect Conrad Reiff? He is specifically indicted with Arnold Huffnagel as a paradigm of the negative aspects of that point of view. While Pendleton calls the report "apocryphal" because of its supernaturalism, he allows that it is about actual "Oley inhabitants who evidently were or had been New Born adherents," and that it "shows that Oley was still saddled with a reputation for irreligion in 1754" (108). The account occurs in the widely known Journey to Pennsylvania by Mittelberger. Mittelberger begins as though he had either been there during the event or it was so well known that the story was commonplace.
"Two very rich planters living in the township of Oley, both well known to me, one named Arnold Hufnagel, the other Conrad Reif, were both archenemies of the clergy, scoffing at them and at the Divine Word. They often met to pour ridicule and insults upon the preachers and the assembled congregation, laughing at and denying Heaven and future bliss as well as damnation in Hell. In 1753 these two scoffers met again, according to their evil habit, and began to talk of Heaven and Hell.
Arnold Hufnagel said to Conrad Reif, "Brother, how much will you give me for my place in Heaven?"The other replied, "I'll give you just as much as you'll give me for my place in Hell. "Hufnagel spoke again, "If you will give me so and so many sheep for my place in Heaven, you may have it." Reif replied, "I'll give them to you, if you will give me so and so many sheep for my place in Hell. "So the two scoffers struck their bargain, joking blasphemously about Heaven and Hell."

"When Hufnagel, who had been so ready to get rid of his place in Heaven, wanted to go down to his cellar the next day, he suddenly dropped dead. Reif, for his part, was suddenly attacked in his field by a flight of golden eagles who sought to kill him. And this would have happened without fail had he not piteously cried for help, so that some neighbors came to his assistance. From that time on, he would not trust himself out of his house. He fell victim to a wasting disease and died in sin, unrepentant and unshriven" (85).

The symmetry of Mittelbeger's narrative is appealing, for they do trade places. Huffnagel, giving up his place in heaven falls down to the cellar and Reiff, surrendering his place below, is visited from on high by the eagles. But it looks like Conrad Reiff got the better of the deal. Was his facetiousness his salvation? He cries out for mercy and is heard. What neighbors came to his assistance? It wasn't Huffnagel, who presumably had already departed. Was it Daniel Warlick, Johannes DeTurk, Samuel Hoch whose daughter later married Conrad's son Philip? Blasphemer struck down in field by the very forces of nature conjured in his idle talk! Oddly confirming one part of Mittelberger's narrative, Pendleton says that "Johann Arnoldt Huffnagel did die in 1753, and somewhat suddenly, judging by the fact that he died intestate (without leaving a will)" (108). But Conrad's death is only rhetorical for he did not die until 1777. But while there are obvious difficulties with Mittelberger's account, many details can be confirmed.
Both men were rich. Muhlenberg had said in 1753 that the affluence of some of the married Reiff sons encouraged a belief "in nothing but the transitory riches of this earth." The tax assessment of Oley of 1767, a short list of those who could qualify as "very rich," as Mittelberger says, has Reiff is on it. The only other super- rich were Johannes Lesher and Antony Jaeger (Pendleton, 45).
Reiff and Huffnagel were neighbors. Huffnagel owed a proportionate acreage of land to Conrad Reiff and their properties adjoined. The two, with extensive holdings, are neighbors on the 1750 Oley map. Huffnagel's land from 1717 "comprised 120 acres of arable land, 30 acres of meadow, and 380 acres of woodland" (Pendleton, 97). In addition, Huffnagel had sold 124 acres in Oley to Conrad Reiff on April 3, 1743.

They were coreligionists. Huffnagel witnessed Kuhlwein's will, April 7, 1737, which left that estate to Reiff.

As noted above, 1753 was the year of Huffnagel's death that Mittelberger alleges. Thus the "rich planters" can be located together in time and place with profession and attitude.
Unfortunately for Mittleberger's veracity, Conrad Reiff, the richest man in Oley, is brought back from the dead as a Pennsylvania Lazarus.
"The wasting disease," Mittelberger says, caused Reiff to die "in sin," but for Mittelberger, writing the account three years after the putative event, the end was premature. Maybe he wished he had died for the wasting disease drives the point of the homily: "these two examples had a visible effect on other scoffers, similarly inclined. For God will not let Himself be scoffed at."
People who speak for God can get in trouble that way. What the scoffing Conrad might have learned from this event was that God is merciful.
Whatever the outcome, the reputation of Conrad Reiff was materially damaged, for the Journey was "widely read and quoted" at the time of its publication in Frankfurt in 1756. "Writers in the latter half of the eighteenth century borrowed freely from it" and "the book remained well known in the nineteenth century" (Mittleberger, Handlin and Clive, xvii). Folks back home and in subsequent generations must have wondered what happened to Conrad Reiff. But folks closer to Skippack and Germantown also wondered what happened to him, as if the geography of Oley had spiritual connotations.

The Collection

That Conrad Reiff didn't die until more than 20 years after the report of his death suggests there may be more truth to the eagles than we can literally recognize. How dramatic did it have to be? His change of heart is evidenced in a collection taken in September 1764 for the building of the Wentz Church, successor to the previously established Reiff Church.

"The Evangelic Reformed Congregation in Skippack found themselves necessitated for building of a House of Worship by Reason of the Great Distance they have to church or meeting, which is Six miles or more." Their intention, "their indispensable Duty" was so that "their Youth might be the better brought up in the Nurture of the Lord and to the Praise of His Holy Name." The fundraising efforts however had fallen short, "they find themselves obliged to apply to the Charitable Benevolence of all well disposed Christians to contribute their Mite towards the finishing of the said Meeting House according to their good Will and Abilities-Knowing that the Lord will richly reward all Such Charitable Gifts or Alms, Which are given with a Simplicit Heart" (The Perkiomen Region, I, 38). Since the first collecting tour raised only 12 pounds, 4 shillings a second effort was made outside the immediate congregation. George Alsentz, the Evangelical Reformed minister, urged (August 1764): "In as much as the generous contributions hitherto received from kind friends were far from sufficient to defray the expenditures of our church we are obliged to turn to other benefactors to find out their benevolent disposition toward our enterprise…May the God of all mercy send his richest blessing upon all benefactors, such is my wish, and in witness of the foregoing I hereunto set my hand" (4l). This tour raised 15 pounds, 9 shillings.

Three collections in all were made, the first in New Jersey, the second throughout Goshenhoppen and the third "through Frederick township to Falckner's Swamp and then up towards Oley" (44). Over 400 names are listed with the amount of their contributions. For example, from Goshenhoppen, Philip Boehm gave l shilling, Peter Miller gave l shilling, Friedrich Hilligass gave 5. In Oley, Casper Griesemer gave 7 shillings and so did Abraham Lewan, a comparatively generous gift. This tour raised 14 pounds, 7 shillings.

The two largest gifts of 10 shillings each were given by Georg Welker and Conrad Reiff (39-44). Considering the language of the subscribing petition, its references to "pious exercises," "the Nurture of the Lord " and "the Praise of His Holy Name," it is obvious that Conrad Reiff is no longer sympathetic to Newborn practices which "called the Holy Scriptures old, outworn fables, tomfoolery, and the like, and said that the parsons had to make so and so out of it in order not to lose their bread and butter"(Muhlenberg I, 139). Not only does his acceptance of such pious language witness a change, but we also discern in the gift a reaffirmation of his Reformed roots, supporting the attempt to restart the Skippack Reformed Church in a permanent structure again: "When George Alsentz first reported this congregation to the coetus in 1763, he called it Skippack, a name which was often used during its early years to identify it" (Gladfelter I, 384). The Newborn were never politic in their beliefs but "harsh and uncharitable" as Philip Bayer had been before his reconciliation (Muhlenberg I, 357).

To demonstrate how short funds were when the first church was dedicated in November 1763, the "costs of this undertaking were greater than anticipated. Moreover, they were incurred just as a depression hit the colonies following the French and Indian War" (Gladfelter I, 384). The assembly authorized a lottery to pay the debt, since "the members of the German Reformed church in the township of Worcester, in the county of Philadelphia, have erected a church and school house in the said township, the expense and costs whereof have been so great as to amount to a debt of six hundred pounds more than they are able to pay" (Gladfelter, I, 384).

The Will

From following the money we can further appreciate the change in Conrad Reiff in old age by examining the language of his will, for it deviates substantially from convention, especially in the statement of faith that sometimes forms the preface of those wills.

The conventional language of these statements led to a generic form. For example, the will of John Pawling of 1733 is word for word identical to the will of Christopher Dock in 1762.

"That is to say, Principally and first of all I give and recommend my Soul into the hands of God that gave it, and for my body I recommend it to the Earth to be buried in a Christian like and decent manner at the discretion of my Executor, nothing doubting but at the general Resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mighty Power of God, And as touching such Worldly Estate wherewith it has pleased God to bless me in this Life I give devise and dispose of the same in the following manner and form."(The Perkiomen Region, III, 17, and II, 25).

Slightly different phrasings, spellings, a different order of sentences and a shortened order of divine disposition mark the statement of Gabriel Shuler's will of 1776:
"First, I recommend my Soul in the hands of God my Creator, and my Body to the Earth to be buried at the Discrition of my Executors. And as for my worldly Goods & Effects, wherewith it hath pleased God to bless me in this Life, I give and dispose the same in Mannor following…"(The Perkiomen Region, II, 45).

Nicholas Wohlfart, in 1788 is content merely to say that "first of all I commend my Soul into the Hands of Almighty God that gave it" (The Perkiomen Region, I, 129).
Mathias Sheiffle in 1790 says only that "first I Deliver my Soul in to the Hand of the allmighty god, and my body to the Earth to Be Buried in Christian Lick manner. . ." (The Perkiomen Region, I, 110).
Conrad Reiff's mind in this is even more evident if we compare it with his father, Hans George (1726) and his brother George (1759), neither of whom make any such statements: "I, John George Reiff of Salford Township for County of Philadelphia and province of Pennsylvania, Smith, being weak of Body but of Perfect Mind and Memory do make and Order this my last will and Testament. . ."(Riffe, 20). Conrad's brother George, proceeds: "Will of George Reiff, Germantown, Philadelphia County Pennsylvania…" (Riffe, 28).

Conrad's will of 1777 is as different from his father's and brother's as it is from the general community. This suggests there was a point he wanted to make. "In the name of God Amen. I Conrad Reiff of Oley township in the county of Berks and province of Pennsylvania, Yeoman, being infirm and weak in body but of sound mind memory and understanding blessed be God for the same. And well knowing that all flesh must die therefore do make my last will and testament in the following manner. I recommend my infinite soul into the hands of Almighty God who gave it to me and my body to the earth whence it was taken in sure and certain hopes of a joyful resurrection through the merits of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Four notable points of departure set the will apart. These affect the disposition of both soul and body.
1) His "infinite" soul he gives into the hands of God.
2) His body is not recommended "to the Earth to be buried in a Christian like & decent manner at the discretion of my Exects." He has no "decent manner" nor discreet executor. He replaces the negative "nothing doubting," with his "certain hopes,"
3) not of a "general" but of a "joyful resurrection" that has his body, taken from earth once, taken once again. Finally he concludes that this all will occur
4) "through the merits of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" and not through such efforts as those offered by the secretary of Mr. Penn, through "our good works and obedience," cited below.
He must be making this statement not only for his progeny but for the public as well. The import that he does not trust in his own merits, riches or wit, but in the "merits of my Lord" and in the "certain hopes of a joyful resurrection," are not the words or thoughts of a scoffer, but words that Muhlenberg would easily have ratified.

The important conclusions that emerge from this language are, first, that the words of his will are the best confirmation we can get that Mittelberger, if he had the details wrong, got the essence of the thing right. Conrad Reiff leaves just such a personal testimony in his will because he was guilty of the behaviour Mittleberger charged. He goes out of his way to contradict his past. A renunciation of the Newborn sinlessness is explicit in his statement, hence, we conclude, Mittelberger's report, at least the first part, is credible.

Second, the phrase "through the merits of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" is a polar opposite of the Newborn view reported by Boehm that "they claim that they have essential divinity in themselves" (Life and Letters, 1728, 161). As to the meaning of the phrase, Muhlenberg suggests that "the merits of my Lord" means "to wrap oneself in Jesus wounds…the words mean rather the perfect payment which our Mediator made for our sins, guilt, and punishment, the perfect righteousness which He obtained for us by His life, sufferings, and death. To inwrap one's self therein means to appropriate and assume Christ's merit and righteousness in faith. . ." (I, 123). To a Newborn such language would be repugnant, for as we have seen the Newborn would "pride themselves in their own righteousness" (Muhlenberg, I, 357). Conrad Reiff would not have been the first to have come full circle, as we saw above in those Newborn proselytes who founded the Oley Reformed Church, indeed he may have been the last.

In a larger context it is important to note that the phrase "through the merits of my Lord" had been a rallying cry of George Whitfield when he made his trip through Philadelphia in 1739. Distinguishing between the outward and inward fruits of faith, so important to the Newborn, who denied the need for the outward, was also a point of contention for the Quakers. Whitefield had exhorted a Quaker meeting "that they would talk of an outward as well as an inward Christ; for otherwise, we make our own holiness, and not the righteousness of Jesus Christ the cause of our being accepted by God." (Journals, 338). This self-righteousness had been the very crux of the Newborn's rejection of church and scripture. Following the theme further, Muhlenberg had said, "…first one must wrap one's self in the wounds, then Christian living must follow." As we have noted from the Weiss' dialogues, the outward, the living part was superfluous because "he has all the inner fruits, but he declares he can see no use for such outward things" (Sachse, l59). These outward things Conrad Reiff now affirms by this commitment to the outer Christ, the one whose external merits become the means of his hope for the "joyful resurrection."

Whitefield revisited this theme when he returned to Philadelphia that year, Sunday, November 25: ". . .after I had done preaching a young gentleman, once a minister of the Church of England, but secretary to Mr. Penn, stood up with a loud voice, and warned the people against the doctrine I had been delivering, urging, 'that there was no such term as imputed righteousness in Holy Scripture; that such a doctrine put a stop to all goodness; that we were to be judged for our good works and obedience, and were commanded to do and live.' When he had ended, I denied his first proposition, and brought a text to prove that "imputed righteousness" was a scriptural expression…I discoursed in the afternoon, and shewed how the Lord Jesus was to be our whole righteousness . . .the church was thronged within and without; all were wonderfully attentive; and many, as I was informed, were convinced that the Lord Christ was our Righteousness. (Journals, 352,353).

On April 24, l740 Whitefield preached thus also at Skippack, but of course the doctrine of the substitution cannot be thought peculiar to him, the Moravians, or anyone else who assisted in his Skippack visit (Journals, 410). It is likely Conrad Reiff had several chances to adopt such a phrase in his life and in his will. So it is a very loaded phrase that he there plants, one designed to demonstrate in a word that in his end he had come back to his beginning. He could have written his epitaph out of the Four Quartets:

…the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.

This “living” seems ultimately affirmed by Conrad Reiff in his will as a commitment to the outer Christ, the one whose external merits are the means of his hope for the "joyful resurrection." Conrad Reiff had several chances to adopt such a phrase in his life. The loaded phrase he plants in his will is one designed to demonstrate that he had returned to his beginning. The phrase infinite soul sticks outs. It exists in no other wills examined, as does through his merits, not that these others did not hold to such, to the contrary they considered it second nature and would have seen no need to say so since their whole lives were thus spent. But with Conrad Reiff it is the opposite case and the will becomes a true last testament of his faith where he feels compelled to spell it out, leaving us to consider his motive being that he wanted it clearly said at his death that he so believed thus, and not as otherwise before.

Wills could omit all or part of this. Nicholas Wohlfart (1788 ) says merely "I commend my Soul into the Hands of Almighty God that gave it," Mathias Sheiffle (1790), "I Deliver my Soul in to the Hand of the allmighty god, and my body to the Earth to Be Buried in Christian Lick manner." (The Perkiomen Region, I, 129, 110). The will of Conrad’s father, Hans George (1726) makes no statement at all: "I, John George Reiff …being weak of Body but of Perfect Mind and Memory do make and Order this my last will and Testament” (Riffe, 20).

On April 24, 1740 Whitefield preached again at Skippack the doctrine of the substitution, which he shared with the Moravians. (Journals, 410).

Notes


***

[Speaking of those pastors of the first Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, Boehm and Weiss, Sachse observes that it is "a strange coincidence that both Boehm and Baumann came to Pennsylvania about the same time from Lambsheim, in the Palatinate" (The German Sectarians, I, 157). Five years separated them. Hinke has Baumann arriving in Philadelphia in 1718, Sachse in 1719, but Pendleton (176) cites land office records that show Baumann already residing in the Oley Valley in 1714. Since Baumann had left Lambsheim in 1714 and Boehm did not resign his position as schoolmaster in Worms until November 22, 1715 (Hinke, 15) their paths did not cross in Lambsheim and at least his one indignity can be spared Mr. Boehm.]

If it is wondered why this sect rejected the Bible and its teachings, the text recorded above by Spangenberg (6) should be noted, that is, I John 1.8: "if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."

We don't really need to prove Conrad was a Newborn from his reputation or his speech. Interesting as it might be, it is a much bigger topic. We know he was a Newborn from his marriage and we know the Newborn mockeries of religions from testimonies from nearly every contemporary source.

Bauman died in 1727, his successor Kuhlwein in 1737 so when the Chronicon says the group died out "with their originators" (17) the point is well taken. The Yoders, John Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, founded the Oley Reformed Church about 1736 (Hinke, Life and Letters, 34). There are however a number of references to the Newborn in the next two decades, culminating with Mittelberger's of 1753, even though the group was gone by all accounts (Pendleton, ) the substance of their rebellion continued to find expression. Reiff and Huffnagel were just about the last gasp, for even Reiff ended up differently from what either Mittelberger or Bauman/Kulhwein would have predicted.

when the Yoders, John Lesher, Casper Griesemer, Gabriel Boyer, (c. 1736) founded the Oley Reformed Church (Hinke, Life and Letters, 34). By 1736 however, with both leaders gone, the Newborn were on their way out.
Muhlenberg does not mention him in his Journals, but Mittelberger seems to imply he brought the organ with him when he "held the post of organist and schoolteacher in the German St. Augustine's Church in Providence for four years." He resigned in 1753 but did not return until 1754. He says that prior to his first sailing, when he went to Heilbronn in May of 1750, "an organ was waiting for me ready to be shipped to Pennsylvania"(1).

History reads better as science fiction, anyway we have disposed of Huffnagel and Mittelberger has left the state, so dial forward. In spite of everything Reiff is chugging along. We pull up next to him ten years later in

A broader case for Newborn membership includes every spirit of anticlericalism and unbelief. As with Boehm's catalogue of sects, this seems to be focused by the more spectacular Newborns. Mittelberger laments: "In Pennsylvania there exist so many varieties of doctrines and sects that it is impossible to name them all. Many people do not reveal their own particular beliefs to anyone. Furthermore there are many hundreds of adults who not only are unbaptized but who do not even want baptism. Many others pay no attention to the Sacraments and to the Holy Bible, or even to God and his Word. Some do not even believe in the existence of a true God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, Salvation or Damnation, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgment and Eternal Life, but think that everything visible is of merely natural origin. For in Pennsylvania not only is everyone allowed to believe what he wishes; he is also at liberty to express these beliefs publicly and freely" (Journey, 22).

The reason the Newborn speak so fully for all such ideas is that they are a genera. Thus the farmer says his situation good is because "I have worked hard" and none other. "I am perfectly without sin" is the metaphysical justification. Being without sin had been the contention of Newborn founder Matthias Bauman, taught in his pamplet of ..... As the Chronicon says, "there arose about that time [1720] a people in the neighborhood of Oley" (16). Through a series of propositions Bauman ends with the notion that "with the body one cannot sin before God" (Chronicon, 17) which to the Calvinists was of course impossible. Worse that these "dangerous conclusions" (17) was their technique, "...to confound men, a work they also diligently carried on during ten years, so that their disputations at market times in Philadelphia were often heard with astonishment" (17).

The earliest discussion of Newborn ideas was by George Michael Weiss, first representative of the Reformed, who arrived in 1727 and immediately confronted the caldron. The title of his work Der In Der Americani Schen Wildnusz (1729) says it well, or, In the American Wilderness Among People of Divers Nationalities and Religions Hither and Thither Wandering and Variously Tempted.... a not unpuritan like stance except while Bradford focused on the danger of the natural wilderness, Weiss focuses upon the human one. The pamphlet engages the notion of intolerance generally, so it strikes sympathy from the modern ear. Weiss gives five "false doctrines" of the group, an attitude which could be summed up in Emerson's phrase "self-reliance." Is American transcendentalism a species of lawlessness and a genera of the Newborn?

Autonomous, sinless, the center of this anti-belief was its rejection of authority, whether Scripture, church or ministers. Hinke summarizes Weiss, "they reject the ministry and divine worship, together with everything connected with them" (Sachse, 159). But Weiss does not elaborate the NewBorn tactics which include ridicule and mockery of all aspects of authority, viz. Scripture, church, and especially ministers. Again, these things became a common metaphysic in PA to justify all manner of disrespect for order, a big temptation, one could even say a natural inclination of adolesence, which looked for evidence of hypocrisy in clergy especially to justify all manner of calumny. These beliefs and attitudes are at the heart of what Mittelberger calls the excessive liberties. The lawlessness that thrived in the "Pennsylvania liberty" fit nicely with the Newborn philosophy, and had a general and specific effect. Of the general (c. 1720), "the great freedom of this land was one cause of their being thus sold under the spirit of this world, throught which all Godly influences has been lost, and each one depended upon himself" (Chronicon, 15). Muhlenberg says that tolerance of lawless behaviour stemmed from fear: "If the head of a house should give offense to some insolent Irishman or brutal German, he may very likely find that some harm has been done to his cattle or crops during the night, since everything stands out in the open, exposed to the revenge and spite of such callous people… before he is able to summon the aid of a neighbor or the justice of the peace, the enemy may already have perpetrated the utmost damage and fled several miles away into the forest" ( I, 136). He gives several examples of this in his experience, from intruders at a wedding who "scoff at churches and preachers" to his son-in-law, justice of the peace Conrad Weiser, who had an arsonist, reputedly Adam Hains (Wallace, 208), attempt to burn his house down at night with all his family in it ( I, 136).

This pool of anticlericalism implies a negative expression of Pietism. So many sects sought a spirituality with an emotive base that when frustrated emotions easily turned against their neighbors. The many heterodox contentions made a ferment of lawlessness. If the Newborn were tautologists and nihilists, they were but the tip of a branch of the tree of liberty and license. While the shepherds attacked each other, the people, reviled "even the most exemplary preachers, especially in rural districts... laughed at and mocked by young and old, like Jews" (Mittelberger, 48). How then to distinguish the newborns from the unborns, so to speak, when the newborns seem to speak for them all? "Such outrageous coarseness and rudeness result from the excessive freedom in that country, and from the blind zeal of the many sects" (Mittelberger, 48). Thus the much-quoted phrase: "Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers."

In the early days (before say 1750) Muhlenberg says that makeshift preachers did "not know the fundamental truths of religion, but they affect only the outward forms and dispute about such matters as altar and table, the bread and the host, the preacher's robe and vestments, about whether to say Vater Unser or Unser Vater. This gives rise to heated religious disputes and disgraceful word battles among the common people—between husbands and wives, among neighbors, parents, children, relatives, and friends" ( Journals, I, 152).

The difference between the Newborn and other similar rhetorics was sometimes pretty narrow. Both Conrad Beissel, founder of the Ephrata Cloister, and Newborn founder, Matthias Baumann insisted absolutely upon their own authority in everything. Reformed founder, John Philip Boehm had to have his way, and so did his usurper, George Michael Weiss. They said they were following God in overthrowing their opponents' human authority. Zinzendorf, the Moravian scion, had a sweet tongue for redemption and a command for the redeemed: "'Benedict, I am giving your daughter to Eschenbach; you and your wife I am taking with me to Germany, and your estate belongs to the Saviour'" (Muhlenberg, I, 150).

Various sects held power over the minds of their followers. Conrad Weiser went from Luther to Beissel to Zinzendorf' and back to Luther through the offices of his father-in-law, Muhlenberg. When the much converted Indian scout severed from Beissel he was "compelled to protest...against the domination of conscience, the suppression of innocent minds, against the prevailing pomp and luxury…" (Weiser, 128). When he severed from Zinzendorf they prayed for his death! The choices were generally to subscribe to the old world Reformed or Lutheran view, take the newer hyper-religion of the Pietists, the religious no-religion of the Newborns, or simply none. This last was called the Pennsylvania religion: "It had become proverbial, respecting any one who cared not for god and his word, that 'he was of the Pennsylvanian religion'" (Spangenberg's Life of Zinzendorf, in Wallace 246). Mittelberger illustrates how ridiculous the confusion became: "I knew an old German neighbor of mine very well. He had been a Lutheran. Then he rebaptized himself in running water. Some time later he circumcised himself and thereafter believed only in the Old Testament. Finally, just before he died, he baptized himself again by sprinkling water over his head" (84).

All the Church folk, Lutheran, Reformed, non church sectarians say "Ishmaelites,
Laodiceans, Naturalists... Atheists, of whom the country was full... had forsaken their mother-church" Pennsylvania (Chronicon Ephratense. Translated by J. Max Hark. Lancaster: S. H. Zahm & Co. 1889, 71).

"An ordered church and an educated clergy in the face of the revivalistic disdain" (Wentz, Der Reggeboge 40 II 2006:6) was far from the doctrine held by the so called "sects" where implicitly every man was his own priest. "

How exactly Mittelberger knew of the attack he doesn't say. Embellishment may swell the breast. A provocateur of all that had gone wrong in his eyes with the freedoms and frail order of Pennsylvania, Mittelberger would not himself know what he would write when he began the following year. Presumably he was taking notes. The funeral occurred about a year and a half before he left to return to Germany.

Conrad Reiff's change of faith occured when he moved to Oley and married Anna Margaretha Kuhlwein c. 1733, Mary, daughter of Kuhlwein pioneered the area for Baumann in 1709, chose the Oley Valley as the site for the perfectionist Neugeborene colony. Kuhlwein and Jean LeDee were the first German-speaking settlers (Pendleton, 106). Baumann came to Oley at Kuhlwein's advise but didn't last long; it is no surprise Kuhlwein took over leadership of the colony after Baumann died in 1727. In marrying the scion's daughter, a family with no sons, Conrad Reiff became a rich planter. He was the richest man in the area.

(Raymond J. Brunner. "That Ingenious Business" Pennsylvania German Organ Builders. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990.

Not as the unshriven Moon's grandfather, or as Mittleberger's "victim to a wasting disease... unrepentant," but "in hopes of a joyful resurrection," as his will said.

Chronicon. Abstract of the diary of the Brotherhood, which had been kept by Brother

Lamech, and continued and edited by Brother Jaebez (Agrippa) i.e. Johan
Peter Miller. Brother Lamech has been identified as Jacob Gass by
Seidensticker (First Century of German Printing in America, p. 117). Evans
19558: "This biography of Johann Conrad Beissel, the founder of the Ephrata
Community, is the principal source of information regarding that remarkable
institution. Brother Agrippa is Johann Peter Miller; and Brother Lamech's
secular name is said to be Jacob Gass

ouˈgoost gôtˈlēp shpängˈənbĕrk, 1704–92, a bishop of the Moravian Church and a founder of that church in America, b. Prussia. While at the Univ. of Jena, he met Graf von Zinzendorf, and in 1730 he paid a visit to the Moravian colony, Herrnhut. In 1732, Spangenberg joined the theological faculty of the Univ. of Halle, but disagreement with the views of his superiors led to his dismissal. He became assistant to Zinzendorf and was sent by him on a mission to America in 1735. There, for a large portion of his life, Spangenberg was active in establishing settlements, churches, and schools in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In 1744 he was made bishop. Zinzendorf died in 1760; two years later Spangenberg returned to Herrnhut, where he held a place of leadership among the Brethren. His Idea Fidei Fratrum (1779, tr. 1784) was adopted as the declaration of faith of the Moravian Church. Among his other writings is a biography of Zinzendorf. If you read around the Blake entry in Flowering Heart you will find this Zinzendorf was a freak of tantric sex.

On Baumann, by Stroudt, xvii,
Further, “Herbein was hardly alone in suspecting that the real intent of the missionary effort was make everyone into good Moravians” Pendleton, 114

“One of the authors forebears was banished from Germany because he refused to accede to the magistrate’s domination of his conscience. On 3 January 1702 he told the Court at Grankfurt-am-Main that magistrates are established merely to punish evil and encourage good. In matters of faith they have no authority. This is an American principle, for Matthias Baumann became an American….

The lives of the Reiff brothers, especially Conrad (c. 1696-1777) are a target for social equalizers. Conrad was one of the richest men in Oley, but he and his younger brother Jacob (1698-1782) of Skippack so ran afoul of contemporary piety that they are both immediately likable to the modern mind. In matters of religion the Reiff brothers, Conrad (c.1696-1777) and Jacob (1698-1782) ran afoul of contemporary piety, but they are likeable to the modern mind. Their biographies document as much about Pennsylvania religion as about either of them. This stream of events concerning battling shepherds, religion founders and feuding families was pretty much concluded between the death of their father in 1727 and their mother in 1753. The mutual offenses of religious practices was enough for several lifetimes. Of the four sons, George was a Reformed elder and Jacob could "discern good as well as evil" (I, 353), but Conrad and Peter lived in the Oley of ill repute. That tears it. Also, the husband of the only daughter of that family, Conrad Gehr,gets significant mention, for he too had "despised and ridiculed," according to Muhlenberg, the "means of grace." When we compare Muhlenberg's description of Gehr with Mittelberger's of Reiff a pattern emerges. There are odd facts that seem to run counter to patterns, much as in real life. For instance how was Conrad Reiff executor of Claus Upleger of Franconia, when he then lived in Lower Salford, and that his co-executor was Henry Funk, the Mennonite Bishop. Common sense suggests that this was some other Conrad, except there was no other. Was he acting as a translator like his brother? Obviously the relations of the community were more wide than narrow. What did Reiff and Funk have in common that Upleger chose them, unless there was some Mennonite influence on Conrad, unlikely as this seems. In any case the question makes us take more seriously than we otherwise would the note in the Sunday Eagle Magazine (January 12, 1969) of Reading, PA, that Conrad was a "Mennonite preacher."

Peter Reiff had already taken a patent on 100 acres in Oley (November 1735) when Jacob Reiff deeded 193 acres on the Little Branch to him in August of 1737. Conrad sold Peter 300 more acres in 1742, certainly the same 300 he had initially acquired in 1730. On April 17, 1745 Peter and his wife Margaret sold the 193 acre Skippack property to John Ulrich Stauffer and went to Oley. Brother George lived in Germantown, but his transactions mimic Peter's. In 1734 he owned 100 acres in Skippack and Jacob deeded him157 acres in 1740. He acquired an adjoining 84 acres from neighbor Casper Ulstar making 241, kept this tract about a year and sold it in 1741 to Jacob Shoemaker. There is no precise record of George's owning land in Oley, but he appears on the tax list of Rockland Township (Oley) in 1757 and 1759. He went a little Oley. According to James Heckler, Jacob the Elder's daughter Catharine, was a widow living in Oley "at the time of her father's death," that is, in 1782. Holy Oley!

II. Some Sources for the Reiff brothers of Schuippach.

There were plenty of Reiffs in trouble in 18th century Philadelphia, especially the four sons of Hans George (c.1659-172 6) and Anna Reiff (1662-1753). The greatest attention attaches to Jacob Reiff, called the Elder, brother of Peter, George, and Conrad, and Anna, but we do not feel sympathy for his plight until we realize his underdog status.

1) His lengthy defense in the Answer (September 1733) to a court complaint against him the previous year is his only extant writing, for he seems to represent himself. He however is quoted frequently in the letters of Boehm.

2) The Wills of Hans George, Conrad and George are extant, with numerous deeds, records of transactions and agreements, formal petitions, newspaper notices and accounts, church records, and tax lists.

3) The Journals of Henry Melichor Muhlenberg is an important primary source for the funeral of Anna Reiff in 1753 and of events in general in Perkiomen (1742-87). Muhlenberg lived in New Providence or Trappe, 8 miles from Skippack where the four Reiff brothers grew up. He traveled extensively in that region and beyond in his service as a pastor, frequently wrote of the common people he met, of their problems, births, baptisms and deaths with names and details. His Journal was kept mainly as a record for himself, but he writes with veracity. Muhlenberg sounds a keynote in remarks in his Journal after the funeral address he gave to a "large and distinguished assembly" on the occasion of the Reiff matriarch's death, January 8, 1753 (I, 353). These reflections are an excellent jumping off point into the labyrinth of civil and religious fratricides of that day. Anna Reiff, widow of her husband, Hans George, who died in 1726, was one of three women at whose death Muhlenberg presided in the month of January 1753. The journal gives his private thoughts on the course and significance of her life, things he would not have said out loud. These are not the official remarks, except for the biblical text. His thoughts sum up the Reiff brothers' reputations:

"In the same month of January I was called upon to bury a ninety-year-old pious widow who fell asleep in the Lord. She lived eight miles from New Providence and was buried in the so-called Mennonite cemetery. She lived in this land for a long time.” Muhlenberg calls Jacob Reiff, his father's executor of years before, "her best and most reasonable son who cared for her as was right and proper." "At her son's request I visited her in this last home of hers and ministered to her with the Word of God and the Holy Communion." Continuing the meditation Muhlenberg says, "at her funeral her son, who can discern good as well as evil in others, testified with tears that she had been a pious widow, a domestic preacher, an intercessor, and a model of godliness (I, 353)." If Muhlenberg says Jacob Reiff can discern "good as well as evil" long after the many vicious allegations had passed, we take his judgment after the fact as evidence of exoneration of the many charges against his character.

4) John Phillip Boehm before 1742 in his Letters (1728-1748) gives a wealth of particulars concerning Jacob Reiff, notably his calling the Philadelphia elders “church robbers.”

5) Gottlieb Mittelberger's disgruntled record of his Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) where he had gone in 1752 to become the organist in Muhlenberg's church famously details Conrad Reiff.

George Reiff (1692-1759). The Innocent, we might christen him in contrast with his brothers, was among the elders and the early founders of the Reformed Congregation of Skippack, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania. This itself is evidence of his concern for a more unworldly way of way of life. With other elders he signed the authorization for his brother Jacob to go Holland with Pastor Weiss to collect the ill-fated funds donated to the Reformed congregations. (Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm, 209. He is sometimes confused with his father of the same name. Referring to Dotterer's report of the tradition that Hans Georg Reiff, arrived in Pennsylvania 'before Penn set up his government' " Boehm’s editor, Hinke, mistakes the father for the son, unless we consider the son a junior, saying in the next sentence that "in 1730 Hans Georg Reiff (d. 1726) was a member of the Reformed Church at Skippack" (21). That George had no progeny and seems at all accounts to have been a faithful and steady member of the community should not be held against him. He did sign the two petitions of 1728 and 1731 mentioned below. In 1757, two years before his death, he is taxed for owning land in Oley about eleven miles south of Reading, near Peter and Conrad. It would seem George was allied with Jacob in Muhlenberg's mind as one of the sons well thought of.

Peter Reiff (c.1694-c.1782) was a smith like his father (who however left his smith's tools to Jacob), but although he was the son of Hans George Reiff he managed to confound a generation of genealogists by founding a strain of Riffes in West Virginia. The antecedents of Daniel Boone also lived in Oley (Riffe, 29) and that association according to Riffe was the primary cause of Peter's childrens' southward descent. He did not leave a will but lived in Skippack from youth to sometime after 1745 when, having accumulated 400 acres or so in Oley near his brother Conrad, he moved there.

All three brothers, Conrad, Peter and George, appear on the tax rolls of Oley in 1757, the first year of the organization of that township (Rockland Township). Peter may have lived there some years prior, as perhaps had George. Before moving to Oley Peter was much involved in the area of his father's settlement in Skippack. His first son, Peter Jr. was born there (c. 1728). Peter Sr., with George, Conrad and 74 other inhabitants along Skippack Creek, calling themselves "Back Inhabitors," petitioned then Governor Gordon in April 29, 1728 for protection against the Indians (Riffe, 26). Likewise with George and Conrad, Peter petitioned the Assembly in 1731 to be "permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of English subjects" (Riffe, 26). Brother Jacob did not sign any of these petitions because he took two trips to Holland etc. in those years. Three of Peter’s children were born in Rockland Township after his relocation, Jacob (1755), Henry (1756) and Daniel (1759) He started a school (c. 1750) and employed a teacher and was as well known to witness wills.

Conrad Reiff

Conrad (1696-c.1777) had two sons, Daniel and Philip, with the rank of Captain and Lieutenant respectively, who maybe fought in revolutionary battles of 1777. Conrad operated a large farm, some 970 acres by 1775, with its own sawmill and gristmill. Based on the 1767 tax assessment Pendleton says he was one of only three men "who did not have to work with their hands" (44). This tax assessment lists 20 acres of grain, a gristmill, sawmill and several tenant farms. He had taken on several indentured servants in 1745 and following. He sued the equally wealthy ironmaster Johannes Lesher in 1766.

He began the move to Oley, buying land there in 1730 and moving in 1733. His two sons Daniel (b.1736) and Philip (b.1739) are registered as being born in Philadelphia County, but at this time Philadelphia County demarked the region. He deeded 300 acres to Peter in 1742 and the two were associated after that date. When the taxes for the new township were assessed in 1759 Conrad paid more than anybody, for he had some 925 acres. There is a spiritual odyssey denoted in his beliefs. At the outset he was Reformed, lived in Skippack, signed the petition of 1728 (and 1731?) and no doubt was included in Boehm's (1730) passionate denunciation of "Jacob Reiff and his brothers" (Letters, 217).

How rich is rich?

Conrad's Organ connects the two protagonists. Reiff willed it to his son Daniel in 1777. At that time "the organ can be considered to have been somewhat of a rarity as a home instrument. Those individuals who did own an organ were often wealthy persons of the community" (Brunner, 10). Conrad Reiff may have inherited the organ from his father-in-law Philip Kuhlwein in 1737, he certainly inherited all of his land. The organ mentioned in the will of Matthias Zimmerman in Philadelphia is of 1734. Conrad Weiser had one prior to 1760 in Tulpehocken (10). A schoolmaster and organist of Old Goschenhoppen c.1779 was paid five pounds a year. A schoolmaster-organist at Trappe, 11 pounds in 1760. Compensation could include other items such as use of the schoolhouse as living quarters, free use of church land, donations of firewood, food and clothing. An average for the middle of the eighteenth century, including playing the organ, free rent, singing at funerals and conducting the singing school was approximately 20 to 25 pounds a year. (Ingenious Bus, 44). Mittleberger got 10 pounds in his last year (43).




The article of the Berks County Historical Review was perhaps three times as long. I was able in the compass of two years (although I confess with the utmost difficulty) to remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species; especially the Europeans.

What a precarious position, truth. Swift among the Houyhnhnms continually seeks it. But what of Mittelberger and his propensity to “say the thing that was not?”

“I could heartily wish a law were enacted, that every traveler, before he were permitted to publish his voyages, should be obliged to make oath before the Lord High Chancellor that that he intended to print was absolutely true to the best of his knowledge; for then the world would no longer bee deceived as it usually is, while some writers, to make their works pass the better upon the public, impose the grossest falsities on the unwary reader."

Was Mittelberger wrong by accident or intent? Shall we take his authority for what happened, as partisans do, or in context supply him in charity with an event he didn’t say happened but did?

Works Cited

Raymond J. Brunner. "That Ingenious Business" Pennsylvania German Organ Builders. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1990

Chronicon Ephratense. Ephrata, 1786. Tr. By J. Max Hark, Lancaster, 1889.

T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943.

Ernest, James E. Ephrata A history. Allentown: Schlechter's, 1963.

James Y. Heckler. History of Franconia Township. 1901. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

Glatfelter, Charles H. Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, l7l7-l793. 2 Vols. Breinigsville, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, l980.

Mittelberger, Gottlieb. Journey To Pennsylvania. Edited and Translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Motherwell, Robert, tr. The Dada Manifesto, in Dada Painters and Poets, NY: 1951.

Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. The Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Fortress, 1958. Reprinted by Picton Press, Camden, ME.

The Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm. Edited by the Rev. William J. Hinke. Philadelphia: Sunday School Board of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1916.

Pendleton, Philip E. Oley Valley Heritage, The Colonial Years: 1700-1775. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1994.

Pennypacker, Samuel Whitaker. The Settlement of Germantown Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: William J. Campbell, 1899. Reprinted 1997 by Higginson Book Company, Salem, MA.

The Perkiomen Region. Vols. 1-5. Adams Apple Press, Bedminster, PA, 1994.

Reiff, Harry E. Reiff Families in America. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1986.

Riffe, Fred J. Reiff to Riffe Family in America. 1995.

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708-1742. 2 Vols.
Philadelphia: 1899, AMS:1971.

Wallace, Paul. Conrad Weiser: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.

Weiser, C. Z. The Life of (John) Conrad Weiser. Reading, PA: Daniel Miller, 1899.

George Whitefield's Journals (1737-1741). Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969.

Preview of Conrad Reiff and the Journey to Pennsylvania

Thanks to Michelle Lynch, editor of Historical Review of Berks County, this piece will appear June 2009, in an article entitled Journey to Pennsylvania.

It is titled after a work by that name of Gottlieb Mittelberger, published in 1756, probably the most widely read piece about 18th century Pennsylvania. The reader is given the hand of Swift to shepherd through the Oley of Berks County and Salford. Very powerful and interesting personages lurk in the background with the fictional Gulliver and Least Heat Moon, Muhlenberg, Baumann, Whitfield, Boehm, the funeral customs and obsequies of the time, the wills, the metaphor of fact, charges and counter chargers, the organs, the adverbs, the exaggerations. Anybody who likes reading Tristram Shandy will like reading about 18th century Pennsylvania.

Journey to Pennsylvania was Pennsylvania's infamy in 1756, a comeuppance of foibles and religions especially, naming one Conrad Reiff as a serious malefactor. For more than two centuries the allegations that author Gottlieb Mittelberger makes in Journey have stood unchallenged (except recently with Pendleton and Brunner). Biographers such as Fred Riffe pass over these events in Conrad's life in silence. The situation is not improved by Conrad's younger brother Jacob, who got in as much trouble with the Reformed in 1727 as Conrad ever did in his odyssey with the Newborn. Reformed historians have had to take a course in selective memory and rewriting history to fit the facts they so disapproved of into the history of the founding of the Reformed church in Pennsylvania. Two brothers scandalizing two different religions at the same time is almost too much to be hoped for.

Hans George Reiff / John George Reiff (1659-1726)

Acknowledgments

Modern works on the names here stem from the genealogy, Reiff Families in America (1986) by Harry Reiff (HER), a Ph.D. organic chemist (Minnesota, 1955) who long contributed to genealogy forums and corresponded at length with interested parties about Jacob Reiff's descendants. Reiff to Riffe (1995) by Fred J. Riffe pays tribute to him as does Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners, Vol II (1997) by Richard Warren Davis. HER is the source for the first modern printed reference by Davis that Hans George Reiff “was in Pennsylvania by 14 Feb 1718 as he owned land next to Michael Ziegler at Bebber Twp. (later Salford twp.) according to the deed bearing that date.” Davis acknowledges this information in a footnote as a “letter from Harry E. Reiff of Ambler, Pennsylvania, September 1994."

Harry's influence extends beyond his printed work. He contributed much in the background and foreground of this effort. For example, in a letter about the Ziegler deed, he says "there is often confusion in the literature involving Mennonite Hans Reiff and German Reformed Church Hans George Reiff. Mennonite Hans Reiff's farm was about a mile or so from that of Hans George's home and even closer to Jacob Reiff's presumed home, now called the Jacob Reiff Home/Park." He has seen much if not all of the writing here in manuscript, and though none of the errors likely to be found are his, he has saved the narrative a number of times with his meticulous attention to detail and reasoned judgment. HER says his book is "not a family history, but just a genealogical record of Jacob's descendants." What follows further investigates those lives.

Was it Anna or Anna Maria Wrote in English?

A continuing theme in this era is the perpetuation of German in these communities even until the 20th century. Not many German immigrants spoke or wrote English in those beginning years. There are several indications that Hans George Reiff and his family did. The first is that "Anna Reiff wrote in English," repeated by Hershey (MHEP, October 1995), who calls it "an unusual document which she wrote in 1773," but she does not say what the document was. This was first mentioned by Heckler (The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township, 1888) who said "there has been some inquiry as to who his [Jacob Reiff's] wife was, but it is not known. She probably was a woman of some distinction because she wrote a neat hand in English, which German women could not do." Efforts to identify this writing having failed, HER suggested in the absence of other information that it was Anna Maria, wife of Hans George and not Anna (wife of Jacob the Elder) who so wrote and that the writing was of Hans George's will. In explaining how this is so he observes the possiblity that Anna Maria was the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed Church official:

"the only document in English that I know of that may have been written by Anna Reiff is the Hans George Reiff will, now in the files in Philadelphia City Hall. Since the will was probated in 1727, it is unlikely that it was written by Jacob's wife Anna, [he means because Jacob did not marry until 1733] but possibly by Jacob's mother Anna. No proof of who or when; and additionally, I've heard that the original will was in German, but no proof of that either. Some years ago I read one of Henry Dotterer's reports from his European travels in which he noted the possibility that Hans George Reiff married Anna Maria, the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed churchman. If indeed she wrote Hans George's will, she was surely educated. Now, the historian Henry Dotterer wrote several books in his historical journeys. Two of the published books are in the stacks of the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Philadelphia, but there is a third unpublished one which I saw about 10 years ago. They wouldn't let me make a copy of it, but as I recall, Dotterer recounted his visit to the Netherlands and the Dutch Reformed Church archives, where he found data that Hans George married an educated daughter of a church minion (HER, 20 November 2002)."

Confusion of the Annas arose when Jacob's wife was initially called Anna Maria (Fisher). Glenn Landis says,

"I have been in contact with Harry Reiff...and he states that he has investigated the Fisher connection and finds no evidence for it and now would omit the reference. The "Anna Maria" part may have come from confusion with Jacob's sister or mother who were both Anna Maria. James Y. Heckler...says that Jacob Reiff's wife was Anna. He repeats this in several different contexts. Harry Reiff now agrees with this and says he knows of no primary evidence that she was called Anna Maria. The graves of Jacob and his wife in the Skippack Mennonite Cemetery are marked Jacob Reiff and Anna Reiff" (Letter to Richard D. Davis, 18 Feb 1994).

Anna's "neat hand" is practically identical to Heckler's remark about what Samuel Pennypacker says of Hans George Reiff's witness of the Mennonite Trust Agreement: "Hans George Reiff, a member of the German Reformed Church, who wrote a neat signature" ("Beber's Township and the Dutch Patroons"). The neat hand, putative education of Anna Maria and signature of Hans George, coupled with the vocation of Jacob as deputy registrar of wills all suggest education and knowledge of English, if they were not virtually a family of scribes. Anna Maria as the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed church minion would explain the education of her children, especially Jacob, called by Heckler (108) one of the four most learned of the community. We revisit this in discussion of the Mennonite Trust agreement below.

Hans George/Jacob: Reformed or Mennonite?

Both the German language and religion were consuming issues. Hans George and son Jacob lived in such close sympathy with Mennonites they became one with them in about a generation. The investigations of Glenn Landis increase this possibility. Wills not previously available indicate that Jacob Reiff married Anna Landes, a Mennonite:

"a recently discovered estate settlement for the estate of Jacob Landes (1750) shows that he in fact had two daughters in addition to the son Jacob II. These daughters signed as Anna Reiff and Margreth Smith (mark)" (To Whom It May Concern). In any case Jacob's son George married Elizabeth Hendricks and if not before was Mennonite thereafter. HER's reasoning on this is that"Jacob had become disillusioned of the German Reformed congregations after he was accused of thievery of the proceeds from his trip to Holland and Germany with the minister Weiss and he may have changed religions in disgust" (1 March 2003).

German Reformed historians never got over the embarrassment of their politics in this alleged fraud, even if their own investigator (Schlatter) exhonorated Jacob. The turmoil lasted a decade and more and took its toll since no religious affiliation can hereafter bve shown to exist for Jacob for the rest of his life. Not that there are not many opportunities. He probated the will of Claus Jansen, first Mennonite minister at Skippack (Heckler, Lower Salford, 15 (insert in Adams Apple ed.). His neighbors, Hans George's putative cousins, Hans and Abraham Reiff were long standing members of the Salford Mennonites and of course "many of his grandchildren married Mennonites" (Davis, 347). HER says that Jacob's mother, Anna Maria, "died after her son Jacob (with whom she lived for the last years of her life) had changed from the German Reformed Church to the Skippack Mennonite meetinghouse, possible because Jacob may have married the daughter of Skippack Mennonite Jacob Landis," and that, "the Mennonite lines seem to me to be quite clear from George III down..." because of the Reiff/Hendricks marriage.

We may joke that the Mennonites of that time were so eclectic, but didn't they ask Hans George to be their witness and didn't they lend their sanctuary for a Lutheran pastor to perform the funeral of a Reformed widow (that is, Anna, Hans George's spouse) and then bury her in their churchyard? Jacob could have returned to support the Wentz Church, successor to the Reiff Church, as his prodigal brother Conrad did (The Perkiomen Region, I, 39-44), but there is no evidence he did. He could have worshiped at Muhlenberg's church, who respected him as one who "could discern good as well as evil in others" (Journals, I, 353), but there is no record of it although there is that his sister did. It would not be difficult to disappear into the Mennonite meetinghouse since they kept fewer records than the "churched." Jacob is not going to make it easy to decide, which we may take as a motive to understand the much longer account of his life and trials when it appears (in process here)!

1718, 1724, Or Before?

The arrival of Hans George Reiff in Pennsylvania and Skippack must be earlier than when his name occurs as a benchmark to Michael Ziegler’s first land purchase in Feb 1717/18, “beginning at a reputed Corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” (Strassberger, 419). If Ziegler came to Germantown in 1709 (Alderfer, Several Documents, 28) and settled in Skippack in 1718, Reiff, to have identified his land, must have been previously established. HER compares the year of the recording of that purchase in 1724 vs. the date of the survey, 1718, that this “reflects the recording not the date of purchase. The land was still in Philadelphia Co. and often years went by before the farmers went all that distance to Philadelphia (quite a trip in those days) to record the purchase/ownership.” It seems also probable that Hans George lived in such close intellectual and physical proximity to several Mennonites, including Ziegler, an early Mennonite minister, that he was never far from becoming one himself, which, as above, was the case with Jacob's family within a generation. Ziegler was designated a trustee of the first deed of the Skippack Mennonite congregation (Alderfer, 28) that conveyed the 100 acres in 1717/18 for the Mennonite school house and burial ground (Strassberger 415) and probably the cause of Hans George Reiff being asked to witness the further trust agreement in 1725.

In 1734 Ziegler applied to the Land Office for a resurvey of this tract of 100 acres. New lines of demarcation were then given, implying not only that Reiff was deceased, which he was, but also that he had originally been the only point of reference available for the deed, thus a very early landholder indeed. Instead of saying “beginning at a corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” the new survey says, “beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending…to a post thence North East by the land of Jacob Colph (421). The resurvey gives the original survey date as December, 1717. “In pursuance of a warrant …dated the tenth day of September in the year 1717…there was survey’d and set out unto Michael Ziegler…in December, 1717 a certain tract…beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending thence…to a post…by the land of Jacob Colph” (Strassburger, 423).

Different opinions hold that Hans George Reiff arrived “in the latter part of 1600” (Riffe, 18), or as Heckler says, there was a tradition in the Reiff family that he came before Penn. Maybe it was in 1709, or, as Davis suggests, with a large group of Mennonites who came in August of 1717 (347), but it is certain the land of Hans George Reiff and his wife Anna Maria (1662-1753) was already a benchmark in Salford.

It is worth observing that Hans George did not participate in the religious wars and narrow arguments that troubled his son Jacob. He maintained friendly relations with Mennonites, Lutherans and a wide range of people. Pennsylvania religious history and politics, original letters, journals and reports of Boehm, Weiss and Muhlenberg, a thousand tracts and books show diversity of thought in all directions, a free and often lawless environment. Hans George Reiff was an exception to the argumentative, contentious citizen, a wise man, who in his will asks that his five children take their parts in the estate under the supervision of "two indifferent men by the rule of their inventory that it may prevent discord" (Rife, 20).

Hans George or John George?

It only matters what you call him because it conditions the results of the search. Later biographers insist he is John, that Hans is a diminutive (Riffe, 1). The deed mentioning "Hans George Reiff's land" and his signature of the Mennonite agreement of 1725 as Hans George refute this, so rebaptizing him is also anglicizing, that most fearsome threat to all subsequent Pennsylvania Dutch culture. There is no contemporary reference to "John" Reiff except the will, but it is signed with a mark. HER calls it "rather a cockeyed mark," and suggests from the mark and mere initials JR on the will that he was illiterate, but since we know he “wrote a neat hand” it suggests he was infirm and incapable of other signing at the end. The will is dated 15 Dec 1726, right before he died. Hans’ son Jacob Reiff may have had ready to hand a seal denoting JR. HER says, (20 Nov 2002) “I’ve heard that the original will was in German, but no proof of that either,” except of course for the sudden appearance of “John” at the end of the will, indicating a translation. He adds, “the archives in Philadelphia City Hall are not at all always in German-far from it" (11 Dec 2001).

Evidence of anglicizing his name is more modern, but evidence that the current copy of the will is translated occurs in the correction of “Sulford” to Salford in the opening with the now Englished name, “John George Reiff of Salford Township.” That is, “Salford” is corrected from “Sulford,” which the Historical Society document calls it, suggesting “John” is corrected from “Hans.” John is more common thereafter. In the records of the Pennsylvania Historical Society he becomes “John George” Reiff so there is pressure to conform to this if only for clarity: ”Copy of the last will and testament of John George Reiff, of Sulford Township, Philadelphia County, Pa., dated 15 December 1726.”

He is called John George Reiff in an article in 1922, identifying one witness to the will as Johannes Scholl (The Perkiomen Region, Vol I, 105), whose German name is not parallel to his peer "John," further suggesting translation, but that of course is because his name was "John" in the will. Riffe gives his name as “John (Hans) George Reiff” (20) on a lease agreement of 1724 and release of deed May 15, 16. Confusing father and son he cites as his source James Heckler’s “History of Lower Salford Township & Reiff Family Sketch & Notes,” but Heckler there refers to Hans George’s son, “George, or John George” (24). Heckler in fact calls the father “Hans George.” Later in Heckler’s narrative, Henry S. Dotterer, whose work is inserted, calls him “John George Reiff” (30), but reverts to “Hans George” in referring to land Jacob Reiff purchased in 1727 “adjoining lands of Hans George Reiff” (31). This shows only that Hans George was a slightly more prevalent usage in 1886.

A Mennonite “Hans Reiff” also purchased 100 acres in 1718 that bordered those of Hans George. Old world census lists often denote the religion of the head of household next to the name. “An “M” appears behind each who was a Mennonite” (Davis, 1). Using this shorthand biographers have denoted Hans George Reiff by religion in order to separate him from his Mennonite neighbor Hans (c. 1688-1750), even though Hans Reiff is the age of Hans George’s children. By 1717 Hans George’s family was grown. George was 25, Peter 23, Conrad 21, Jacob 19 and Anna Maria 15. According to Heckler he had “purchased the entire southern corner of the township containing two hundred acres” (History of Harleysville, 24). The religious shorthand implies social distinctions between Reformed and Mennonite that did not seem to apply for Hans George who had extensive relations with many. He could have been called Hans George the blacksmith, Hans George of Salford, or Sulford, as in his will, instead of Hans George the Reformed.

English the Mennonite Trust Agreement?

It is significant who lives near who in these communities because they turn to neighbors in time of need. In the case of Hans George, it was Ziegler and Hans Reiff, both Mennonites, who bordered his land. Davis (347) thinks Hans Reiff and Hans George were relatives of some kind, both for their names and proximity of residence. Of his relations with these Mennonite neighbors it overreaches to say that Hans George Reiff "assisted in the preparation" of the Mennonite trust agreement that he witnessed because "in the time when many of the colonists were unable to read and write, John George Reiff was considered an educated man," or, that "he was more than helpful in assisting the poorer immigrants, particularly those of the Mennonite faith," and "helped organize and build the Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse" (Riffe, 19-20). Some such might apply later to his son Jacob when he was deputy for the probate of wills c. 1743-48, “the object in having a German-speaking deputy located here, was doubtless, to accommodate those German inhabitants, who lived a great distance from Philadelphia and were ignorant of the English language” (Heckler, 31), but if Anna Maria Reiff was writing English, was her husband Hans George?

Samuel Pennypacker argues that his ancestor, Heinrich Pannebecker, was the agent who set up this trust agreement, that the Mennonites must have been "acting under the guidance of some one more or less familiar with the forms of conveyancing" (Bebber’s Township and the Dutch Patroons of Pennsylvania, in The Creation, Founding and early Settlers of Bebber’s Township, by William N. Detweiler, 1992. 6). But Pannebecker’s written English is a Dutch pidgen as bad or worse than schoolmaster Christopher Dock's German-English, of whom Heckler remarks, his “education was in German and [he] did not know what constituted good English (History of Harleysville, Lower Salford, 52).

To compare the two, the German-English of the will of Christopher Dock says, "my order is dit, to chose Man, two upright Man can do it, let them bring it in two like part and worth as good she can, and so likewise if any fruit, every a thing shall come in two like part to Receive each of my Children one part" (The Perkiomen Region II, 25). But just as bad, if not worse, Pennebecker's letter of 13 February 1742 says : "M. Frend Ed Ward Shippen. My keind Respek too Juer too let Ju under Stan tha I haffe spoken with the totters of Abraham op den Graff an by ther words ar willing too singe Jur deeds as ther broders haffe don…"(Bebber’s Township, 31).

Speaking of the scant English excellence in Skippack, Heckler observes that Hans George’s neighbor Michael Ziegler “made his mark” MZ, and that “while his wife wrote her name in German Catharine Zieglerin…we will not comment on his fitness as a minister of the gospel when he could not so much as write his name” (History of Skippack and Vicinity, 13).

The modern Pennypacker says, “the witnesses were Hans George Reiff; a member of the German Reformed Church, who wrote a neat signature, and Antonius Heilman, a Lutheran living at the Trappe. Whether this selection of witnesses was the result of chance alone, or had some purpose, it is impossible to determine” (6). However if both his parents knew English it is no wonder the career of son Jacob was so set apart, for he spoke and wrote English and German fluently and probably Dutch, since he traveled for those years in Holland. That his education can be traced back to his parents suggests that he was groomed by birthright for his responsibilities such as probating the will of Claus Jansen, the first Mennonite minister at Skippack, a settler in Skippack as early as 1703, whose will "dated June 1, 1739...was proven before Jacob Reiff, of Lower Salford, deputy register, October 30, 1745" (Heckler, 15). To argue that he was educated because his father was, somebody had to translate the Mennonite trust agreement and from the above it was not Pennebacker so either Hans George or Jacob might do.

The trust agreement of 30 March 1725 designed that “the land should be held for the benefit of the poor of the Mennonites, and for the erection of a meeting house for the people of that sect, and, on the other hand to so restrict it, that only members in good standing in this meeting could act as trustees" (Pennypacker, 6). Pennypacker observes that the agreement was a visionary recognition of a duty to provide for the education of all of the children of a township and the burial of all of the dead, and that for all time, the setting apart of so large a domain as one hundred acres, for the purpose, and the expression of his affection for them, are not at all characteristic of a mere sale of lands…(4-5).

Ruth is less ecstatic about the generosity of Dutch patronage: "there was a transaction back in Bebber's Town. . .the Mennonites on the Skippack bought. . .a 100 acre plot, at a somewhat reduced rate" (96). Pennypacker differs that the "annual rental of one shilling and four pence" (4) were "not intended in any sense as the consideration for the conveyance or any part of it" (6) but merely as a sign, insisted upon by van Bebber that he was "a Patroon as well as a vendor" (6) in his dealings, "even in a gift to the Trustees of a charity" (7). Just to make it interesting, Riffe says they paid 15 pounds for it (19)! By way of comparison, in 1724 Pennepacker gave a lease on 200 acres to Hans George Reiff for 5 shillings, which Reiff however then purchased for 485 pounds, 13 shillings (Riffe, 20). So in terms of the lease rate the Mennonites got a reduced rate, but in terms of the value of the land an outright gift.

Richard Warren Davis traces Hans George's old world origins to the Swiss Wadenswil as a son of Ulrich Ryeff, (b.1626), and Cathri Zäshler (347). HER says the possibility “cannot be ignored” that he migrated to the Pfalz (Basel) and joined the German Reformed Church there. Nothing of Hans George’s wife Anna Maria is known that does not enhance her character and intelligence as witnessed in Muhlenberg's remembrance of her in his Journals (I, 352f) in 1753. In his will Hans George's neighbors “Isaac Duboy and Lorrents Schweitzer” are charged to see that the will is adequately performed. “Jno Scholl” and “Garret InDehaven” are witnesses with a “Robert Jones,” and the inventory of his estate is signed by “Lorentz Livnya Mornn (sic)” and “Johannes Lefebe” which identities might tell a little more about Hans George, at least by association.

History of Old Germantown: With a Description of Its Settlement and Some Account of Its Important Persons, Buildings and Places Connected with Its Development

By John Palmer Garber, C. Henry Kain, Naaman Henry Keyser, Horace Ferdinand McCann

Published by H. F. McCann, 1907.

Hendrick Pannebecker, Surveyor of Lands for the Penns, 1674-1754: Flomborn, Germantown and SkippachBy Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker. Published by Priv. print., 1894

Jacob Reiff the Elder (15 November 1698 – 16 February 1782)was the youngest son of Hans George Reiff (d. December, 1726) and Anna Maria (1662-1753), his executor and a man of wide reputation in Skippack and Lower Salford. Evidence now suggests that his wife was Anna Landis (1709 – 28 October 1788) who he married at Skippack in 1733.

Jacob the Elder had two sons, Jacob Jr. and George III. It is hard to conclusively prove whether he was a Mennonite later in life because of the records which Mennonites essentially did not believe in keeping, but a summary of some of the argument goes like this:

His oldest son, Jacob Reiff Jr., the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), who voted for the Pennsylvania convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, seems to have followed his father's Reformed tendencies since he participated in the founding of the Wentz Reformed Church. His brother George, as we have married a Mennonite.

Jacob Jr.'s children however got him into the Mennonites in a big way, especially his son John Reiff (5 December 1759 – 6 February 1826) who married a daughter of Bishop Christian Funk and became a minister with that prescient, if defrocked divine, who endorsed the American Revolution. This John Reiff signed the preface, with other ministers, of the English version of Funk’s Mirror for all Mankind (Norristown, Pa.,1814). In 1814 Jacob Reiff (Jr.) donated land for the first Funkite meetinghouse in Skippack (Wenger, 350), the same land that his son John later retitled to the Dunkards after the Funkite demise.

So much more can be said of Jacob the Elder’s activities in every way that they must be given a separate article unto themselves.

George Landis Reiff (4/7/1740 – 1/24/1808), George Reiff III. That is, George I was Hans George. George II was John George Reiff (c.1692-1759), oldest son of Hans George Reiff. Genealogists were unsure of the maiden name of Jacob Reiff wife so they took to differentiating in this way, but the mother of George Landis Reiff mother was Anna Landis. George III is of course the second son of Jacob the Elder. He married Elizabeth Hendricks on 2/15/1764. Along with his father and brother Jacob, he was recorded as a private in Captain Barnet Haines Company for Lower Skippack in the Revolution, but the same provisos for Mennonites at war may apply to him as to his son (below) in the War of 1812. He and his wife, Elizabeth Hendricks are buried at Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery. Hendricks of course is an illustrious name in Pennsylvania, forever dignified by the signing of the protest against slavery by Gerhard Hendricks in 1688.

Elizabeth Hendricks (4/9/1740 – 6/25/1817) was the daughter of Leonard
Hendricks (b. Krefeld, 1698-1776, buried Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery) and
Elizabeth Turner (born c. 1712 in Pennsylvania). Leonard had named his son-in-law coexecutor of his will, probated 3/8/1776.

If it had not begun sooner with Jacob's wifeAnna Landis, it is thought that the Mennonite affiliation began with George’s marriage to Elizabeth. The genealogist and historian Harry Reiff says: "Elizabeth Hendricks who married George Reiff III was a daughter of Leonard Hendricks, who in turn was a son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks. The Hendricks were part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled/established Germantown in 1683 and later. These people were called Dutch Quakers-induced by William Penn to come to Penn’s colony in America. Apparently there was a strong Mennonite population in the Krefeld/Munchen-Gladback area, and Quaker-Mennonite-Reformed families at times were mixed. At any rate, Leonard Hendricks owned land in the Towamencin area of present Montgomery Co., and was considered a Quaker.”

Leonard’s father, Lawrence Hendricks (b. ca. 1670 Kriegsheim Germany, d. 1749 at Towamencin, Montgomery Co.), a Quaker and then a Mennonite, arrived in PA with his father Willem Hendricks (1649-1691) on the "Francis and Dorothy" on 12 October 1685. Lawrence’s father, William, was a Holland Dutch Mennonite who had arrived with Pastorious in 1682 and brought his sons Lawrence and Henry with him.

Lawrence Hendricks signed the 1728 petition for the Susquehanna Road or Line" Of this list Alderfer says "the list of signatures attached to the 1728 petition contains about twelve Mennonite names. The first six signatures are of men from the Towamencin Mennonite community. The first four (Jacob Godshalk, Godshalk Godshalk, Henry Hendricks, and Lawrence Hendricks) were the original 1714 settlers in what would later become the Towamencin Mennonite community…the Hendricks brothers may have been brothers-in-law to Godshalk Godshalk, oldest son of Jacob Godshalk, the first Mennonite bishop in America, who settled first at Germantown.”
(Alderfer, 19-21).

George Hendricks Reiff (23 Dec 1768 - 28 Nov 1847) married Elizabeth Clemens (30 Jan 1773-13 Jun 1840) on 7 Feb1792, the daughter of Garret Clemens (1/2/1745 - 5/1/1820) of Lower Salford Township. Garret was the oldest surviving son of Jacob (d. 1782) and Barbara Clemens ( whose will of 1782 is extant) and the grandson of Gerhart Clemens (1680-c.1744-45, the Mennonite settler who arrived in 1709, married Anna H. (Anneli) Reiff in 1702 and who first makes mention of Jacob Reiff the Elder in his diary, "Anno 1723, July 2: “I settled with Jacob Reiff and remain in debt to him for the land yet L14 18s." This is the first chronological reference to Jacob Reiff the Elder. The marriage of Jacob Reiff’s grandson with Clemens’ great granddaughter marks another notable crossing of family trails.

Elizabeth Clemens herself is mentioned once, in a note in the famous diary which had belonged to her great grandfather, to which her grandfather Jacob made some later additional notes. Jacob states that “Elizabeth was married in 1763. She was then twenty years of age.” (Strassburger, 473) She had some nine sisters and five brothers. Jacob Clemens ended his years living with son John, but he had several sons. He called Gerhard the oldest but born before him were Michael, 1729, Jacob 1739, twins Gerhard and Christian 1741. There were at least some five other sons and nine daughters (471). Garret’s parents sold him two parcels of land in 1768 totaling 135 acres. Here he is called Garret Clements, Jr. after his grandfather.
George Landis Reiff, the father of George Hendricks Reiff.

George Clemens Reiff (1/14/1793 – 3/4/1860)

was the father of Abraham S. Reiff, although we must distinguish two contemporary cousins, both named George Clemens Reiff. That is, the two brothers, George and Jacob, married the two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah Clemens, daughters of Garret Clemens. Each of these named a son George. The George C. Reiff (6/13/1804 – 11/16/1886), who married Elizabeth Detweiler in 1830, was from our point of view the cousin, the son of Jacob Hendricks Reiff, a storekeeper in Skippackville, and Sarah Clemens. This George is younger than his brother by 11 years. He is mentioned by Heckler in his History of Lower Salford (87) and in the History of Franconia Township as living in Skippackville and as having married the oldest daughter of Abraham Detweiler (d. 12/10/1830). There is a letter of his in the Henry S. Dotterer collection at the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Riffe, 108).

The older George C. Reiff, father of Abraham S. Reiff, married Maria Magdalena Bauer Schwenk (7/19/1794 – 3/28/1875) on 30 April 1814. As his son Abraham had been in Worcester, this George Reiff was also a trustee for purchase of Mennonite land in Skippack where he lived. He was one of "three Mennonite trustees, Jacob F. Kulp, Daniel Landes, and George Reiff," who executed a trust for land donated by Issac Kulp to build the new meetinghouse erected by the Old Mennonites of Skippack in 1848” (Wenger, 99).

The New Meetinghouse

This new meetinghouse ties several Old Mennonite strands together and illustrates aspects of the division between Old and the New. The seceding "new" Mennonites took over the meetinghouse in Skippack which the undivided congregation had built in 1844 (Wenger, 97), where both Old and then Old and New met for a time. But the Old or original group refused to prosecute their expropriation of property from scruples of conscience against litigation. They built a new building in 1848, slightly smaller than the old, although the deed was not made until August 21, 1849 (Wenger, 99). This was the land of which George Reiff served as trustee.

According to John F. Funk (1878) the building of a new meetinghouse illustrates what true Mennonites were all about. It also gives us a concrete means to understand the division of 1847.

“During the difficulties which occurred in the church, in eastern Pennsylvania, in 1847-48 on account of the disobedience and innovations of John H. Oberholtzer, in Bucks County, and the Hunsicker faction in Skippack, Montgomery County, there still remained, in the Old Church, so much love to God and the teachings of the Savior as to enable them, by the grace of God, to fulfill the teachings of Christ in a most noble manner, and leave to the world one of the most glorious examples of self-denial and devotion to their religious principles, presented to us in modern times.”

“The new factions claimed the old meeting-house and were determined to have it at all events. The property was one of considerable value and justly belonged to the Old Church, and any impartial judge or jury would have, without any scruples, freely accorded it to them, had they presented their claims, but instead of doing so, they chose rather to obey the scriptural injunctions “not to resist evil, and of him that taketh away thy goods, not to ask them again,” and quietly, leaving the new factions in possession, they purchased other grounds and built themselves a new house.” (Funk,128)

This account highlights the unworldly Old Mennonite belief as well as some of the deep interrelations of the Mennonite Reiffs. In acting as trustee for the new building in Skippack, George C. Reiff, was doing there exactly what John B. Bechtel was doing in Hereford, when, at the 1847 division, he became the Old Mennonite pastor at the age of 41. Bechtel’s granddaughter, Anna Mack, was subsequently to marry George C. Reiff’s great grandson, Howard R. Reiff. Neither ancestor knew the other, but they acted in accord. Their children however, Anna and Howard, became new Mennonites in 1911.

The Old Mennonites of Skippack then became the "Upper Skippack" congregation, but while they surrendered the meetinghouse they kept the Skippack Alms Book, that record of alms money with annual audits conducted yearly from 1738, the oldest such record of its kind in Pennsylvania. This Alms Book gives “a list of all the ordained men of the Skippack circuit since 1738" (Wenger, 97) and records the signatures of the three Reiffs of succeeding generations, starting with George [C.] Reiff who kept the Alms Book from 1835 to 1842, signing it four times (Wenger, 103). His son Abraham S. Reiff of the Worcester congregation, part of the Skippack circuit, signed the Alms Book three times, from 1877-79. Abraham's son, George L. Reiff, as noted, signed 34 times. Thus the Alms Book and meetinghouse document these three generations. [Prior to the Oberholtzer division of 1847 the hierarchy of the Franconia conference had been comprised of districts overseen by a bishop, but " the Skippack bishop district retained the 'circuit system' which evidently obtained in all the districts at first" (Wenger, 98). That is, the ministers of this district would rotate among the three congregations, from Skippack, the seat, to Worcester and Providence.]

Executor

George C. Reiff also served as executor of his father-in-law’s will, Abraham Schwenk (5/25/1759 – 8/6/1843) and was named as guardian of the six children of Schwenk’s deceased son, also named Abraham. Here he is again simply called, George Reiff:

"Gaurdian[sic.] of the persons and Estates of the minor children of my late Deceased Son Abraham named as follows, to wit, Isaac, Abraham, David, William, Margaret & Sarah—from the first Day of April last past, until each of the said minor Children shall attain the age of 21 years.—The sum of $500 being due to each of them on the said first day of April, and in the hands of the said George Reiff; and of the further sum or sums that will be due to them immediately after my decease…" (Strassburger, 301) We know that George Reiff adequately fulfilled that trust, because in “1854 others of the heirs acknowledged the receipt of their full inheritance from George Reiff…"(Strassburger, 303).

Nonresistence

Paradoxically for a Mennonite, but before his marriage in 1814, George Reiff was listed as a private in the War of 1812. This might explain his intimacy with his father in law, who was a Sergeant Seventh Class in the Philadelphia County Militia during the Revolution and in the Montgomery County Militia in 1786. Abraham Schwenk was "a tanner in Germantown at the time of the [Revolutionary] war, nineteen years old, a tall, fine man, he was under age, but because of his size the officers did not know it. At the battle of Germantown he went upstairs in a house as he was wounded, where a woman said that British were coming. He replied, 'Let the devils come,' and he took a large stick from the fireplace and drove them back" (Strassburger, 296).

As a son of Mennonite parents it might seem important to explain how George Reiff was a Private in the War of 1812 (Captain John Wentz's Company, Sixth Class, Fifty-first Regiment), when, "apart from believers' baptism, the most distinctive doctrine of the Mennonites is their Biblical nonresistance" (Wenger, 57). That is, that "a Christian may not participate in, or support, war or violence in any form whatever" (Wenger, 57).

Mennonites were sometimes said to have served when they did not, but were included in the rolls anyway. Philip Geisinger, Henry Geisinger and John Geisinger had petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1778 for exemption from military service (Wenger, 60-2) and been penalized. Wenger reports that there are "about a dozen and half graves at the Saucon burying ground on which are Grand Army of the Republic, G. A. R. markers of the Revolutionary War, including …Johannes Geissinger (1739- 1811)…Henrich Geisinger (1737-1817)…Philip Geissinger (1732-1809) and Abraham Geissinger, (1749-1825). As John L. Ruth says, these are “the crowning irony which was to mark the memories of Jacob Yoder, John Geissinger, and their friends who sacrificed all they had to separate themselves from the Revolutionary War for conscience’ sake. For all their pains, their graves are yearly marked with American flags placed by modern patriotic organizations, who, having carelessly read the rosters of Colonel Siegfried’s militia, in their myth-making zeal designate these defenseless, dispossessed Christians as soldier heroes of the American Revolution.” (Ruth, 173) Of course there were also many Geissingers and Rosenbergers in the Saucon Valley not in the Mennonite Church. In fact however the opposite of the case is true. Some of those people were imprisoned for not serving.

If they did serve there were two ways around the prohibition. First, after the war to make a confession to the congregation and be reinstated. The second out was to not yet have been baptized, therefore not yet to be held accountable to Mennonite doctrine (Wenger, 64). Mennonites were baptized as adults. The minority of Mennonites who did serve in the American Revolution joined other denominations. The way back to the Old was not easy. To be reinstated in the offender would have had to publicly repent the war before the congregation and then submit to their vote.

Although much later, an example of this issue occurs in the nonresistant dilemma of the two sons of Henry Mack, step brothers of Anna Mack Reiff and nephews of Bishop Andrew Mack, that is, Harvey and Philip. Harvey went to France in 1918 as a conscientious objector and stayed to work for the Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee (Wenger, 75). Philip went to Officer's Candidate School at Fort Meade and became a 2nd Lieutenant with every intention of going to France as a combatant, but the war ended.

Mennonite spokesmen downplay such opposites. Wenger says that Philip G. Mack "accepted noncombatant service at Camp Meade; was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70). But he didn’t “accept” service, he sought it out and he wanted to fight. He was only noncombatant because he couldn’t get to France in time. Philip's mother, Sarah Ann Geisinger came of a long Old Mennonite tradition of noncombatants. She wouldn’t let Philip in the house with his uniform on. Also he went from the “new” Mennonites to the Presbyterians shortly after his marriage. His nephew, JH Reiff, who lived across the street, remembered that when Philip came home in his uniform his mother wouldn't let him in the house or let him stay there. As his niece Elizabeth Reiff put it, "Philip got thrown out of the communion for going to OCS instead of registering as a CO."

Wenger says Philip was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70), but it is more accurate to say that for his mother's sake Philip confessed and repented to the church and was received in that fellowship again, after which he lived at home until he married in 1925, but shortly followed the way of his sister Anna into the new Mennonites and from there, with wife Catherine became Presbyterian.

A similar situation exists perhaps with Gottshall Gottschalk, who signed the Skippack Alms Book twice in 1791 (Wenger, 102), although 6 others signed that year also. If it is the same person, Godshalk (Boorse) Godshalk (1762-1835) who is buried in Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery is on the Muster Roll of Towamencin Township under Captain Daniel Springer on 11/24/1780 (Perkiomen Region, 387-8)

Another striking example of Mennonite military service seems to exist in the life of Bishop Heinrich Kolb Hunsicker (3/7/1752-7/8/1836), who while being both a farmer, a minister of the Lower Skippack Mennonites and a Bishop, was also listed as a member of the 6th Class of Captain Dull's Company of Militia, 1st Battalion, Philadelphia Co. under the command of Col. Daniel Heister in 1778. He began signing the Skippack Alms book in 1781 even while being listed as a member of the Philadelphia Militia that same year. He signed the Alms Book 33 times, until 1832

There is a divergence of theory and practice. It is possible to suppose that the military connection was watered down, whether in the life of George C. Reiff or Philip Mack. George C. and Maria Reiff are buried in the Lower Skippack Mennonite cemetery. While Mennonites would bury strangers for the sake of charity or geography, for the most part they buried their own in their graveyards.

Most of George C.'s children are explicitly denominated as Mennonites in the immediate area.

Schwenks/Bauers

But more can be said of the Schwenk family of George C.’s wife. In 1779 Abraham Schwenk lived in Claytonville, the home of Henry Mack and Jacob L. Reiff a hundred years later. He subsequently bought a large farm in Frederick Township at Delphi, also called Zieglerville Station where he built a tannery and farmed till about 1808. Subsequent to that he owned 176 acres in Skippack Township along the Perkiomen Creek opposite Schwenksville. The Schwenks were members of Keeley's Lutheran Church to which Abraham Schwenk gave the ground on which the Lutheran Church was erected in Schwenksville. His estate was divided equally among nine children. In the will his daughter who married George Reiff is sometimes named Maria, sometimes Mary. Intermixing Mennonites and Lutherans as in Maria Schwenk’s family occurred also with Andrew and Henry Mack’s brother Peter, who was a Lutheran minister in Hummelstown in the 1880’s.

Maria Schwenk’s mother, Veronica Landis Bauer (4/10/1756 – 9/13/1840), was a Mennonite whose father, Michael Bauer (c. 1720-1784) married Veronica Landis about 1744-45. This Michael Bauer was just sitting down to a wedding banquet in 1776, celebrating his oldest daughter’s marriage to Christian Meyer, when soldiers of the Continental Army plundered the feast and carried off a wagonload of spoils to their camp (Ruth, ‘Twas Seeding Time, 91).

Michael Bauer was in turn the son of Hans Bauer (d. 1748), who owned land on the Perkiomen in 1734. In 1742 he bought 105 acres in Butter Valley in Colebrookdale and in 1743, 134 acres in Douglas Manor (also later the residence of Henry Mack). Both these properties were annexed into Hereford Township in 1753. (Strassburger, 316f). Strassburger says that Hans was "no doubt" buried in the Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, but the tombstone has been effaced so he does not appear in the Hereford Burial List compiled by Henry Mack in 1934. This Hans Bauer (d. 1748), a Mennonite, is said to have emigrated between 1708 and 1717 before settling in Colebrookdale (Strassburger, 315). Veronica Landis' mother was the daughter of another prominent Mennonite settler, Johannes Landis, of Bucks County (Strassburger, 320).

Butter Valley was a very fertile area containing Hereford and Colebrookdale, both Mennonite colonies. The first Hereford meetinghouse was built about 1743 and is the location of the oft-mentioned Hereford burial ground. In 1749 Michael Bauer inherited lands in Colebrookdale from his father. He signed the petition of 1753 to the Philadelphia Court to erect the new Hereford Township and was among the Hereford residents taxed in 1758. Michael and his wife Veronica Landis are probably also buried in the Hereford ground. Their son Samuel (1746-1822) is. There were only three children, Samuel, Fronica and Anna. Veronica married Abraham M. Schwenk in 1779.

Like Abraham S. Reiff and John B. Bechtel in the Oberholtzer Division, the Bauer and Landis trails cross very profoundly with another tributary of the Reiffs, the Bechtels and the Macks in the Mennonite church of Hereford.


Abraham Schwenk Reiff ( Jun 1817 - 30 Aug 1879) the last unchanged Old Mennonite, married Sarah (Sallie) Detweiler Landis (4 Oct 1820 – 18 Jan 1891) in 1840. Between 1843 and 1860 they reared nine children. Most notable was their first son George (1846-1932), known as Uncle George to succeeding generations, who maintained the farm in Worcester much visited by his youngest brother Jacob with his son, Howard, his wife Anna and family, (Howard, Elizabeth and Florence). He also maintained the Old Mennonite ways. One purpose for which his brother Jacob first bought a car was to stay in touch with this brother, the farm and his roots; somewhat contradictorily, because Old Mennonites did not much drive. He used that car in the 20’s to travel to Worcester to take communion with those he had grown up with. Among Mennonites the week prior to communion is an important service of repentance, it and the yearly communion not to be missed. Jacob, Abraham's youngest child, stood between the Old and the New and was still going to worship with Uncle George in Worcester in 1929 when he could. In one letter to his grandson Howard, Jacob refers to his father Abraham:

“My father was always willing to pay a bill which he did know was correct in all its items. I can recall my father sent me to Norristown for a load of feed with 3 horses and in making the turn at Jeffersonville, through my carelessness, I tore off another man’s wheel of his wagon. The man went to my father and told him what I done and demanded him to pay the damage and father was willing. As I grew older I came to realize that extreme carefulness has been one of the foundation stones of my father’s success” (Letter of 27 Jan 1929).

We surmise that Uncle George obtained his father’s land in Worcester (Methacton) after his father’s death in 1879. The Worcester Mennonite burial ground there, begun about 1744, is the final resting place of Abraham and Jacob L. and probably other Reiffs, along with many soldiers who died after the battle of Germantown. Christopher Sauer, the polemicist and printer of the German Bible is also buried there with other first settlers.

Actual details are scarce, but a signal one occurs with the name "Abraham Reiff" inscribed upon a beam in the attic of the third meetinghouse. Such actualities are always wonderful, like the ornate signature of John Bechtel below in The Wandering Soul or the signature of Jacob and Anna Reiff carved in the old mill in Skippack. Sometime prior to 1771, maybe as early as 1739, that first meetinghouse had been used as a school, then rebuilt about 1804 and again in 1873. Abraham Reiff was a member of the building committee of this third meetinghouse when he so inscribed his name (The Perkiomen Region [PR] I, 104).

Trustee

He was also one of three designated trustees for the receipt of land in 1860 when that congregation had added to the "Mennonist Society burying ground of Worcester" (Wenger, 107) and he served as trustee, August 9, 1873, for the purchase of the land where the third meetinghouse was built. So his Abraham Reiff's name is preserved in relation to the Mennonites three ways, trustee for the cemetery addition, trustee for land for the new building and member of the building committee. He was ordained in 1877 as a deacon at Worcester "as an old man" (Wenger, 99) and served until his death two years later. His son, George L. Reiff (12/8/1846 – 10/8/1932), the above “Uncle George,” continued his father's service to this church, Deacon from 1881 until his death in 1932.

All these generations knew one another. Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack, refers to George Reiff’s advice in his letter of 8 Oct 1874, “that is what George Reiff said we should do.”
Worcester is notable also as a Schwenkfelder settlement. Church, school and burial ground there hold antiquarian interest, but Abraham Reiff had originally came from Skippack and Salford where preceding Reiffs had lived.

Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929)

Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927)

Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994)

The roster is;

1. Hans George Reiff (c. 1659-1726) Buried Salford Mennonite Cemetery.
2. Jacob Reiff the Elder (1698-1782) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery
3. George Landis Reiff (1740-1808)
4. George Hendricks Reiff (1768-1847) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Church
5. George Clemens Reiff (1793-1860) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Meetinghouse
6. Abraham Schwenk Reiff (1817-1879) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
7. Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
8. Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927) Buried Northwood Cemetery, Top of Broad St.
9. Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994) Buried Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd.
10. Andrew Edwin (Yeo) Reiff (1941-

The Meaning Of Reiff

Reif

Three languages produce twenty variant spellings of reiff. The German reif means “ripe or complete," the borrowed Scandinavian reif "to plunder,” and the English, rife, “frequent occurrence.”

“Reiflich" in German means a deliberate judgment, a decision which gradually takes shape in the mind. A mature man is ein gereifter Mann. Wine matures with age, reift durch langes Lagern. Reif (raif) denotes ripeness and roundness in fruit and grain, maturity in wine and cheese. Reife prufung is meiosis, reif graupeln a meteor, Stirnreif a circlet, Armreif a bracelet, reifen heber, an automobile tire. Mit dem Reifen spielen means playing with a hoop.

All these involve the circular, thus the poet is also a ring maker. Es reift, means frost. Completion and maturity of the ring symbolize completion in the seasons of a year, whiteness of age, winter crowned with hoar frost on the ground, Reif a circle of life well lived, whitened to a grandfather's head at rest, effort satisfied, timely completion echoing in progeny and ancestry, thus also a ring, life eternal.

Reiff

Its Scandinavian cousin reif (reef) is an anachronism in English meaning plunder. Tolkiens’s glossary of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (Oxford, 1925, l. 2046) gives "ryue" or "rife" as “abundant,” translated as "great," but at line 1341, "to rip or cut open.” Reif is also spelled reaf, reiff, rieff, reife. In it we see Norse pirates plundering the coasts of Europe and Britain in the 8th to 10th centuries. Reif has linguistic affinities as diverse as from the Common West German reif to Old English reaf, Old Frisian raf and Old High German roub, or roup, which becomes the German raub.

The first appearance in English of the Scandinavian reif is the Lindisfarne Gospel’s (950 A.D.) translation of Luke 11.22, naturalized in Old English as, "alla woepeno his zenimeth. . .& reafo his todaelde" (OED). Reafo his todaelde means “plunder his entire house.”

In the context Jesus had been charged with casting out demons by the power of demons, viz. Beelzebub. Remnants of the story yet exist in public memory. He says that if Satan casts himself out his own kingdom will fall, “but if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you (v. 20). Thus reafo his todaelde implies a spiritual plundering, for when "a strong man armed keeps his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall overcome him, he takes from him all his armor wherein he trusted, and divides his spoils.” Reif despoils the strong man with a stronger.

Scandinavian plundering had wide usage: "the King gert be de partit then / All hail the reif among his men" (1375). "Through cowatice gud Alexander was lost; And Julius als, for all his reiff and bost" (1470). "Let richt, not reif, my pensioun bring againe" (1585).

In seventeenth century Scottish ballads "John Armstrong was executed, for he did great robberies and stealing in England, maintaining twenty four men in household every day upon reiff and oppression." So “Dick of Dryup is complained of, with others, for reif and burning." (The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Edited by James Child, Vol. III, (1618-1635) 365, 47). Dover, 1963. 365, 47)

So when we ask what is the outcome of all these "reiffs, spulzeis, oppressions, slaughters, allegit to have bene committit" (OED, 1546), as late as 1815 Sir Walter Scott persisted, "Saint Michael and his spear/ Keep the house from reiff and wear.” Conundrums of it would include: be reiff to prevent reiff so reiff shall be no more; and, there is a Reiff deliverance rife with peace.

Rife

The English rife in common use today is mostly confined to rumor and frequency.

Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “wars are rife” (“To Seem the Stranger”), that Andromeda “hears roar / A wilder beast from West than all were, more / Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd” (“Andromeda”).

The English rife begins to occur in southern England after 1120 A.D., "native in English, rather than an adoption from Scandinavian" (OED). Derived from the four related languages, Old Norse (rifr), late Old English (ryfe, rife), Middle Low German (rif, riv(u)e, ryue) and Low German (rife), ryfe, rif, riffe, rief (riefe) means frequent, widely known, often harmful rumors, "rife and catching" (1705).

So "King Pelleus…Helde a feste, as hit is ryfe" (1407) and "fools are so rife in this nation"(1732); "this great world is all too rife with calamity" (1787); "the reports which they circulate…grow more rife than ever “(1792). Suddenness is implied in its translation of Psalm 94.21, "they are rife to shed the guiltlesse blood" (1549), and "the highest tree in all the woode is rifest rent." (1552)

Should we want to explain the interrelations between the German, Scandinavian and English we would trace the first presumed instance of the word to riew or rife in Low German. This is a survival from the so-called Ingvaeonic, the oldest known form of English, Frisian and Old Saxon. The Ingvaeonic rife precedes the German and the other early forms of the word, but when it survives in Low German it branches into the English and Scandinavian forms.

Reifen in Low German means "hoop;" it coexists with the Middle High German reif and with the verb "rifen," to ripen ( R. Priebsch and W. E. Collinson. The German Language. London: Faber & Faber, 1968.193, 251). Low German forms also include reif, reifen, rifen, and rife, but the Ingvaeonic rife links the opposed meanings of the German and Scandinavian. Before "rife" and after "rife" we might say.

A sound change occurs when Old English breaks from Old Saxon and Old High German that helps explain these opposites of war and peace. The German reif, shortened into rife and reif, emigrated to England, but the earlier dipthong of the Anglo-Saxon stayed home in Germany.

That is, in sounds shortened from a dipthong toward a single syllable, the dual sound ai changed to single e (Priebsch 40-41), called a monophthongization,which emigrated. The German diphthong ei (which sounds like ai) kept its suggestion of completeness while the shortened English ie (e) that crossed the water took the suggestion of plunder.

English rife typically never occurs with e following r and the Scandinavian reif never occurs with i following r, but both forms occur in the German. The German reif and the English rife sound the same and share with the migrant Scandinavian reif their spelling. These spellings are so closely intertwined they may be indistinguishable in origin. But reif and reif, closest in form, often spelled identically, are pronounced differently and have virtually opposite meanings, yet all three are thought to have a common origin in the Ingvaeonic reif, complexities which more or less coexist together in the widest sense of the Germanic Languages East, North and West, Goth, Norse and Saxon.

Note: In regard to the Nordic origins see also Full text of "Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples"

THE ANGLO-SAXON RUNIC POEM

13. Bad (Salz. AS. rada, Goth, reda), as in other alphabets. It is most satisfactory on the whole to take rad as " riding," cf. rseiif, reiff of the Norwegian and Icelandic poems. "Biding seems an easy thing to every warrior while he is indoors, and a very courageous thing to him who traverses the high-roads on the back of a stout horse," though it is doubtful whether byf> can mean "seems," and neither hw&t nor any of its compounds are used of things. Professor Chadwick has, however, suggested to me that the proper name of this letter is rada of the Salzburg Codex, corresponding to the ON. reiffi, "tackle (of a ship)," " harness," hence "equipment" generally. Here it would be used in a double sense, in the first half as "furniture" (cf. ON. reiffustol, "easy-chair," AS. rsadesceamu), in the second as "harness."

Conrad Reiff of Oley (c. 1696-1777)

Can Conrad Reiff be saved? Well anybody can. Will he? Well that depends. The essential life now circulates under the title of Journey to Pennsylvania which will appear in the Historical Review of Berks County in Summer 2009. Also outtakes for this article are here.