Down-to-Earth Project

From a dock at Mobile last week a score of bellowing Guernsey, Jersey and Hoistein heifers were swung aboard a ship, Puerto Rico-bound. They were the first tangible results of the most down-to-earth postwar plan devised by a U.S. church. The church was the Brethren (Dunkers*), most of whose 185,000 members are farmers. The project: raising heifers to send to postwar Europe to replace depleted stock, help feed hungry Europeans.

The Brethren Service Committee, which supervises the program from its Elgin, Ill. headquarters, had been in touch with four European governments (Spain, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia) which want or will want heifer shipments. War exigencies have prevented any shipments to Europe so far, but the committee hopes that some may go to Spain and France by fall.

Meanwhile the Brethren are sending their cattle where they can. The committee chose Puerto Rico for the first shipment because there is a serious milk shortage on the island (40% of Puerto Ricans get no milk). The heifers, donated by farmer Brethren, are worth $200 to $300 apiece. The only cost to the Puerto Rican farmers who get them will be freight charges, totaling about $70.

Under an Almond Tree. The man behind the heifer project is 50-year-old, grey-haired Dan West, who owns a farm near Goshen, Ind., but who spends most of his time traveling around the country for the heifer program. Son of a Brethren preacher, he thought up the heifer plan under an almond tree in Murcia, Spain, where he was engaged in relief work during the Spanish Civil War. Spain's undernourished children, with less milk than a Hottentot, inspired him with the thought of importing U.S. cows to Spain.

When World War II began, West laid his idea before the Brethren and eventually the Church adopted the plan. Soon many Brethren had agreed to donate and raise a heifer for Europe. Now in the Brethren's barns (from Goshen to Westminster, Md.) are 1,000 cattle all earmarked for export to liberated countries.

The Committee has ruled that all heifers must be bred before shipping. Thus there may be two heifers or a heifer and a bull by the time the original heifer gets abroad. West says that, after the war, the Brethren will send heifers anywhere they can--to Japan and Germany, if possible. To West the project is not so much a matter of increasing depleted European dairy herds as it is a means of saving lives and helping the Brethren to practice what they preach.

Primitive Christians. The agony of the Thirty Years' War left religious Europeans in a state of mind much like that of religious people during World War II. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the established churches, widespread social unrest. Central Europe broke out into a rash of mystical, often non-sacramental sects whose members strove (usually under fierce persecution) to recover the spirit and the practices of the primitive Christian church. In the midst of arid orthodoxy, they sought catacombs of the spirit where direct communion with God might be achieved, usually with little or no intercession by clergy.

One of these sects was the Brethren, founded (1708) by Alexander Mack in Germany. Under Peter Becker, the Brethren migrated in mass to America in 1719. Most of them farm in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, Maryland. Few sects are more respected.

The Christ Within. The Brethren try to live strictly according to the New Testament. The five ideals of their Church: 1) brotherhood with all men ("Our relation to others must always be that of redemptive love"); 2) simplicity (Brethren eschew "vain appearances" of all kinds); 3 ) temperance and moderation in all things (Brethren do not smoke or drink); 4) peace with all men ("There is nothing about war that is Christlike"); 5) the Good Life ("The spirit of Christ in the soul").

Not as strict as their forebears, modern Brethren no longer wear plain dress (dark clothes, broad-brimmed hats). But like "the world's people," they now vote in elections, use automobiles, telephones, electric lights--which were once held to be inventions of the devil.

High point of the Brethren's religious life is still the Love Feast, which commemorates the Last Supper. Love Feasts used to be banquets held three or four times a year in an open grove or a farmer's barn. Now the Brethren gather for a simple meal in their churches. But the Love Feast is still followed by a ceremony in which the Brethren humbly wash one another's feet, in imitation of Jesus.

*From the German word dunken, to dip. Dunkers baptize by dipping candidates thrice.

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