It is also true, and I regret to say it, that many of our Brothers, and even the Sisters, who seem ever given to idolizing, fell to the other extreme and, as in the case of John the Baptist, wondered whether our leader might not be Christ. Even Brother Onesimus once tried to poison my mind against our superintendent by remarking that even he thought that, perhaps, our leader might be Christ, whereupon I rebuked our Brother Onesimus so soundly for his folly, I never again heard him repeat such nonsense. Thus it went back and forth so that it seemed the conflict between our leader and the printer were never to cease, the printer publishing it far and wide that our superintendent was born under a strange conjunction of the stars and that a number of planets manifested in him their characteristics: from Mars, our superintendent had his great severity; from Jupiter, his friendliness; from Venus, that the female sex ran after him; while Mercury had given him the arts of the comedian; and not content with this, our printer must even go so far as to say of our superintendent: "In many points he is very close to Gichtel and still closer to the little beast described in Revelation 13:11, which represents his peculiarity in spiritual things. His figure is such that if one beseeches him he has the horns of a lamb, but if one touches his temper a little he speaks like a dragon, and is, indeed, not to be regarded as the first great beast, whose number is 66. He is not so beast-like, but is also not clean Godly, but is humanly peculiar and no other than CVnraDVs BeIseLVs DcLVVVI--666." All of which goeth to show that when one man hateth another beyond all reason, the hater maketh a greater fool of himself than of him who is derided. CHAPTER XI BROTHER AGONIUS AND HIS PROPHECY No great genius was ever without some mixture of madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the voice of common mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul. --Aristotle. Brother Agonius, his real name being Michael Wohlforth, or Welfare, as he was known among the English settlers--what a shock, notwithstanding our boasted fortitude and resignation, his death was to us! He was born, as became his warlike soul, at the fortress of Memel, on the Baltic Sea. Coming to this New World in his early youth, he at once joined himself to the Pietists, the Hermits of the Wissahickon; but he remained not long there, for his fiery, intrepid zeal left him no other mind but that he must journey to and fro, near and far, even making a long and dangerous journey to the Germans of North Carolina, preaching to them as he did to every one, in season and out of season, wherever he went, to repent their godless lives and to submit themselves wholly to the Master's will.