A Book That Speaks (If You Know How to Listen)

I've just been given a book that was destined for the trash.  It's an old German book, Ausgewählte Schriften (Selected Writings), by Pieter Pietersz (or Peter Peters in German), a Dutch Anabaptist builder of windmills, preacher, and writer, who lived 1574 - 1651.  He was a popular preacher  and writer in his own time, but he didn't have the sustained influence of someone such Menno Simons.  As Mennonites shifted from reading Dutch to High German when they lived in West Prussia, the writings of many of the Dutch founders of the Anabaptist movement lost favor.  However, his popularity rose again among the Kleine Gemeinde in Russia as they revived many of the old Dutch Anabaptists by translating their works into the German that their members could read.

Here's the cover page of the book:

The book was published in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1865, and Harold Bender in his article on the Kleine Gemeinde at GAMEO suggests that the Kleine Gemeinde sponsored the publication of this book.  (BTW, the article is quite biased against the KG, so don't take the rest of it at face value.)

In the next post, I'll share why this book was so important to me.