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"If the Head had to suffer such torture, anguish, misery, and pain, how shall his servants, children, and members expect peace and freedom as to their flesh?"

"The error of the cursed sect of the Anabaptists … would doubtless be and remain extirpated, were it not that a former priest Menno Symons … has misled many simple and innocent people," complained a letter to the regent of the Netherlands in 1541. "To seize and apprehend this man we have offered a large sum of money, but until now with no success. Therefore we have entertained the thought of offering and promising pardon and mercy to a few who have been misled … if they would bring about the imprisonment of the said Menno Symons."

Holy Roman Emperor Charles V joined in the hunt, offering 100 gold guilders for Menno's arrest. One Dutch man was broken on the wheel and executed merely for allowing Menno to stay with him. But the former priest, a pacifist armed with ideas but no weapons, was never caught. Instead, he led the Anabaptists out of their radical, violent, millennialist fantasies into a moderate, devotional, pacifist movement. Neither the first nor the most original interpreter of the radical Reformation's Anabaptism, he was such an outstanding leader that the movement today is known by his name: Mennonites.

Little is known about Menno's early life until his ordination as a priest at age 28. Though educated in a monastic school and trained for ministry, he had never even touched the Scriptures. "I feared if I should read them they would mislead me," he later wrote. "Behold! Such a stupid preacher was I for nearly two years."

After those two years, he had a crisis of faith. The bread and wine he dispensed at each Mass did not seem to transubstantiate into Christ's body and blood as Roman Catholic doctrine taught. He figured such thoughts had been suggested by the Devil, and prayed for God to ward them off. "Yet, I could not be freed from this thought," he wrote. "Finally, I got the idea to examine the New Testament diligently. I had not gone very far when I discovered that we were deceived, and my conscience, troubled on account of the aforementioned bread, was quickly relieved."

Believing the Bible to be authoritative, Menno developed the reputation as an "evangelical" preacher. "Everyone sought and desired me," he recounted. "It was said that I preached the Word of God and was a good fellow." But to Menno, it was a lie; his life was still empty and full of "diversions" like gambling and drinking.

Three years later, an otherwise unknown Leeuwarden Anabaptist was beheaded, sending Menno into another spiritual crisis. "It sounded very strange to me to hear of a second baptism," he wrote. "I examined the Scriptures diligently and pondered them earnestly but could find no report of infant baptism." Again, he wrote, "I realized that we were deceived." But his life changed little: "I spoke much concerning the Word of the Lord, without spirituality or love, as all hypocrites do."

Eventually, he was hit with a final crisis. Three hundred violent Anabaptists, dreaming of the imminent end of the world and attempting to escape persecution, captured a nearby town—and were savagely killed by the authorities. Among the dead was Menno's brother, Peter.

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