History of the Moravian Church by J. E. Hutton (page 6)

what they earn.”

And yet this system, so beautiful to look at, was beset by serious dangers. It required more skill than the Brethren possessed, and more supervision than was humanly possible. As long as a business flourished and paid the congregation reaped the benefit; but if, on the other hand, the business failed, the congregation suffered, not only in money, but in reputation. At one time James Charlesworth, in an excess of zeal, mortgaged the manufacturing business, speculated with the money, and lost it; and thus caused others to accuse the Brethren of wholesale robbery and fraud. Again, the system was opposed in a measure to the English spirit of self-help and independence. As long as a man was engaged in a diacony, he was in the service of the Church; he did not receive a sufficient salary to enable him to provide for old age; he looked to the Church to provide his pension and to take care of him when he was ill; and thus he lost that self-reliance which is said to be the backbone of English character. But the most disastrous effect of these diaconies was on the settlement as a whole. They interfered with voluntary giving; they came to be regarded as Church endowments; and the people, instead of opening their purses, relied on the diaconies to supply a large proportion of the funds for the current expenses of congregation life. And here we cannot help but notice the difference between the Moravian diacony system and the well-known system of free-will offerings enforced by John Wesley in his Methodist societies. At first sight, the Moravian system might look more Christian; at bottom, Wesley’s system proved the sounder; and thus, while Methodism spread, the Moravian river was choked at the fountain head.

Another feature of settlement life was its tendency to encourage isolation. For many years the rule was enforced at Fulneck that none but Moravians should be allowed to live in that sacred spot; and the laws were so strict that the wonder is that Britons submitted at all. For example, there was actually a rule that no member should spend a night outside the settlement without the consent of the Elders’ Conference. If this rule had been confined to young men and maidens, there would not have been very much to say against it; but when it was enforced on business men, who might often want to travel at a moment’s notice, it became an absurdity, and occasioned some vehement kicking against the pricks. The Choir-houses, too, were homes of the strictest discipline. At the west end stood the Single Brethren’s House, where the young men lived together. They all slept in one large dormitory; they all rose at the same hour, and met for prayers before breakfast; they were all expected to attend certain services, designed for their special benefit; and they had all to turn in at a comparatively early hour. At the east end–two hundred yards away–stood the Single Sisters’ House; and there similar rules were in full force. For all Sisters there were dress regulations, which many must have felt as a grievous burden. At Fulneck there was nothing in the ladies’ dress to show who was rich and who was poor. They all wore the same kind of material; they had all to submit to black, grey, or brown; they all wore the same kind of three-cornered white shawl; and the only dress distinction was the ribbon in the cap, which showed to which estate in life the wearer belonged. For married women the colour was blue; for widows, white; for young women, pink; and for girls under eighteen, red. At the services in church the audience sat in Choirs, the women and girls on one side, the men and boys on the other. The relations between the sexes were strictly guarded. If a young man desired to marry, he was not even allowed to speak to his choice without the consent of the Elders’ Conference; the Conference generally submitted the question to the Lot; and if the Lot gave a stern refusal, he was told that his choice was disapproved by God, and enjoined to fix his affections on someone else. The system had a twofold effect. It led, on the one hand, to purity and peace; on the other, to spiritual pride.

Another feature of this settlement life was the presence of officials. At Fulneck the number of Church officials was enormous. The place of honour was held by the Elders’ Conference. It consisted of all the ministers of the Yorkshire District, the Fulneck Single Brethren’s Labourer, the Single Sisters’ Labouress, and the Widows’ Labouress. It met at Fulneck once a month, had the general oversight of the Yorkshire work, and was supposed to watch the personal conduct of every individual member. Next came the Choir Elders’ Conference. It consisted of a number of lay assistants, called Choir Helpers, had no independent powers of action, and acted as advisory board to the Elders’ Conference. Next came the Congregation Committee. It was elected by the voting members of the congregation, had charge of the premises and finances, and acted as a board of arbitration in cases of legal dispute. Next came the Large Helpers’ Conference. It consisted of the Committee, the Elders’ Conference, and certain others elected by the congregation. Next came the Congregation Council, a still larger body elected by the Congregation. At first sight these institutions look democratic enough. In reality, they were not democratic at all. The mode of election was peculiar. As soon as the votes had been collected the names of those at the top of the poll were submitted to the Lot; and only those confirmed by the Lot were held to be duly elected. The real power lay in the hands of the Elders’ Conference. They were the supreme court of appeal; they were members, by virtue of their office, of the Committee; and they alone had the final decision as to who should be received as members and who should not. The whole system was German rather than English in conception. It was the system, not of popular control, but of ecclesiastical official authority.

But the most striking feature of the settlement system is still to be mentioned. It was the road, not to Church extension, but to Church extinction. If the chief object which the Brethren set before them was to keep that Church as small as possible, they could hardly have adopted a more successful method. We may express that method in the one word “centralization.” For years the centre of the Yorkshire work was Fulneck. At Fulneck met the Elders’ Conference. At Fulneck all Choir Festivals were held; at these Festivals the members from the other congregations were expected to be present; and when John de Watteville arrived upon the scene (1754) he laid down the regulation that although in future there were to be “as many congregations as chapels in Yorkshire,” yet all were still to be one body, and all members must appear at Fulneck at least once a quarter! At Fulneck alone–in these earlier years–did the Brethren lay out a cemetery; and in that cemetery all funerals were to be conducted. The result was inevitable. As long as the other congregations were tied to the apron strings of Fulneck they could never attain to independent growth. I give one instance to show how the system worked. At Mirfield a young Moravian couple lost a child by death. As the season was winter, and the snow lay two feet deep, they could not possibly convey the coffin to Fulneck; and therefore they had the funeral conducted by the Vicar at Mirfield. For this sin they were both expelled from the Moravian Church. At heart, in fact, these early Brethren had no desire for Moravian Church extension whatever. They never asked anyone to attend their meetings, and never asked anyone to join their ranks. If any person expressed a desire to become a member of the Moravian Church, he was generally told in the first instance “to abide in the Church of England”; and only when he persisted and begged was his application even considered. And even then they threw obstacles in his way. They first submitted his application to the Lot. If the Lot said “No,” he was rejected, and informed that the Lord did not wish him to join the Brethren’s Church. If the Lot said “Yes,” he had still a deep river to cross. The “Yes” did not mean that he was admitted; it only meant that his case would be considered. He was now presented with a document called a “testimonial,” informing him that his application was receiving attention. He had then to wait two years; his name was submitted to the Elders’ Conference; the Conference inquired into all his motives, and put him through a searching examination; and at the end of the two years he was as likely to be rejected as accepted. For these rules the Brethren had one powerful reason of their own. They had no desire to steal sheep from the Church of England. At the very outset of their campaign they did their best to make their position clear. “We wish for nothing more,” they declared, in a public notice in the Daily Advertiser, August 2nd, 1745, “than that some time or other there might be some bishop or parish minister found of the English Church, to whom, with convenience and to the good liking of all sides, we could deliver the care of those persons of the English Church who have given themselves to our care.”

Thus did the Brethren, with Fulneck as a centre, commence their work in Yorkshire. At three other villages–Wyke, Gomersal, and Mirfield–they established so-called “country congregations” with chapel and minister’s house. The work caused a great sensation. At one time a mob came out from Leeds threatening to burn Fulneck to the ground. At another time a neighbouring landlord sent his men to destroy all the linen hung out to dry. At the first Easter Morning Service in Fulneck four thousand spectators assembled to witness the solemn service. And the result of the Brethren’s labours was that while their own numbers were always small they contributed richly to the revival of evangelical piety in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

In the Midlands the system had just the same results. At the village of Ockbrook, five miles from Derby, the Brethren built another beautiful settlement. For some years, with Ockbrook as a centre, they had a clear field for work in the surrounding district; they had preaching places at Eaton, Belper, Codnor, Matlock, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Dale, and other towns and villages; and yet not a single one of these places ever developed into a congregation.

In Bedfordshire the result was equally fatal. At first the Brethren had a golden chance in Bedford. There, in 1738, there was a terrible epidemic of small-pox; in one week sixty or seventy persons died; nearly all the clergy had fled from the town in terror; and then Jacob Rogers, the curate of St. Paul’s, sent for Ingham and Delamotte to come to the rescue. The two clergymen came; some Moravians followed; a Moravian congregation at Bedford was organized; and before long the Brethren had twenty societies round Bunyan’s charming home. And yet not one of these societies became a new congregation. As Fulneck was the centre for Yorkshire, so Bedford was the centre for Bedfordshire; and the system that checked expansion in the North strangled it at its birth in the South.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LABOURS OF JOHN CENNICK, 1739-1755.

Once more an Anglican paved the way for the Brethren. At the terrible period of the Day of Blood one Brother, named Cennick, fled from Bohemia to England; and now, about a hundred years later, his descendant, John Cennick, was to play a great part in the revival of the Brethren’s Church. For all that, John Cennick, in the days of his youth, does not appear to have known very much about his ecclesiastical descent. He was born (1718) and brought up at Reading, and was nursed from first to last in the Anglican fold. He was baptized at St. Lawrence Church; attended service twice a day with his mother; was confirmed and took the Communion; and, finally, at a service in the Church, while the psalms were being read, he passed through that critical experience in life to which we commonly give the name “conversion.” For us, therefore, the point to notice is that John Cennick was truly converted to God, and was fully assured of his own salvation before he had met either Moravians or Methodists, and before he even knew, in all probability, that such people as the Moravians existed. We must not ascribe his conversion to Moravian influence. If we seek for human influence at all let us give the honour to his mother; but the real truth appears to be that what John Wesley learned from Boehler, John Cennick learned by direct communion with God. His spiritual experience was as deep and true as Wesley’s. He had been, like Wesley, in the castle of Giant Despair, and had sought, like Wesley, to attain salvation by attending the ordinances of the Church. He had knelt in prayer nine times a day; he had watched; he had fasted; he had given money to the poor; he had almost gone mad in his terror of death and of the judgment day; and, finally, without any human aid, in his pew at St. Lawrence Church, he heard, he tells us, the voice of Jesus saying, “I am thy salvation,” and there and then his heart danced for joy and his dying soul revived.

At that time, as far as I can discover, he had not even heard of the Oxford Methodists; but a few months later he heard strange news of Wesley’s Oxford comrade, Charles Kinchin. The occasion was a private card party at Reading. John Cennick was asked to take a hand, and refused. For this he was regarded as a prig, and a young fellow in the company remarked, “There is just such a stupid religious fellow at Oxford, one Kinchin.” Forthwith, at the earliest opportunity, John Cennick set off on foot for Oxford, to seek out the “stupid religious fellow”; found him sallying out of his room to breakfast; was introduced by Kinchin to the Wesleys; ran up to London, called at James Hutton’s, and there met George Whitefield; fell on the great preacher’s neck and kissed him; and was thus drawn into the stream of the Evangelical Revival at the very period in English history when Wesley and Whitefield first began preaching in the open air. He was soon a Methodist preacher himself {1739.}. At Kingswood, near Bristol, John Wesley opened a charity school for the children of colliers; and now he gave Cennick the post of head master, and authorized him also to visit the sick and to expound the Scriptures in public. The preacher’s mantle soon fell on Cennick’s shoulders. At a service held under a sycamore tree, the appointed preacher, Sammy Wather, was late; the crowd asked Cennick to take his place; and Cennick, after consulting the Lot, preached his first sermon in the open air. For the next eighteen months he now acted, like Maxfield and Humphreys, as one of Wesley’s first lay assistant preachers; and as long as he was under Wesley’s influence he preached in Wesley’s sensational style, with strange sensational results. At the services the people conducted themselves like maniacs. Some foamed at the mouth and tore themselves in hellish agonies. Some suffered from swollen tongues and swollen necks. Some sweated enormously, and broke out in blasphemous language. At one service, held in the Kingswood schoolroom, the place became a pandemonium; and Cennick himself confessed with horror that the room was like the habitation of lost spirits. Outside a thunderstorm was raging; inside a storm of yells and roars. One woman declared that her name was Satan; another was Beelzebub; and a third was Legion. And certainly they were all behaving now like folk possessed with demons. From end to end of the room they raced, bawling and roaring at the top of their voices.

“The devil will have me,” shrieked one. “I am his servant. I am damned.”

“My sins can never be pardoned,” said another. “I am gone, gone for ever.”

“That fearful thunder,” moaned a third, “is raised by the devil; in this storm he will bear me to hell.”

A young man, named Sommers, roared like a dragon, and seven strong men could hardly hold him down.

“Ten thousand devils,” he roared, “millions, millions of devils are about me.”

“Bring Mr. Cennick! Bring Mr. Cennick!” was heard on every side; and when Mr. Cennick was brought they wanted to tear him in pieces.

At this early stage in the great Revival exhibitions of this frantic nature were fairly common in England; and John Wesley, so far from being shocked, regarded the kicks and groans of the people as signs that the Holy Spirit was convicting sinners of their sin. At first Cennick himself had the same opinion; but before very long his common sense came to his rescue. He differed with Wesley on the point; he differed with him also on the doctrine of predestination; he differed with him, thirdly, on the doctrine of Christian perfection; and the upshot of the quarrel that Wesley dismissed John Cennick from his service.

As soon, however, as Cennick was free, he joined forces, first with Howell Harris, and then with Whitefield; and entered on that evangelistic campaign which was soon to bring him into close touch with the Brethren. For five years he was now engaged in preaching in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire {1740-5.}; and wherever he went he addressed great crowds and was attacked by furious mobs. At Upton-Cheyny the villagers armed themselves with a horn, a drum, and a few brass pans, made the echoes ring with their horrible din, and knocked the preachers on the head with the pans; a genius put a cat in a cage, and brought some dogs to bark at it; and others hit Cennick on the nose and hurled dead dogs at his head. At Swindon–where Cennick and Harris preached in a place called the Grove–some rascals fired muskets over their heads, held the muzzles close up to their faces, and made them as black as tinkers; and others brought the local fire-engine and drenched them with dirty water from the ditches. At Exeter a huge mob stormed the building, stripped some of the women of their clothing, stamped upon them in the open street, and rolled them naked in the gutters.118 At Stratton, a village not far from Swindon, the mob–an army two miles in length–hacked at the horses’ legs, trampled the Cennickers under their feet, and battered Cennick till his shoulders were black and blue. At Langley the farmers ducked him in the village pond. At Foxham, Farmer Lee opposed him; and immediately, so the story ran, a mad dog bit all the farmer’s pigs. At Broadstock Abbey an ingenious shepherd dressed up his dog as a preacher, called it Cennick, and speedily sickened and died; and the Squire of Broadstock, who had sworn in his wrath to cut off the legs of all Cennickers who walked through his fields of green peas, fell down and broke his neck. If these vulgar incidents did not teach a lesson they would hardly be worth recording; but the real lesson they teach us is that in those days the people of Wiltshire were in a benighted condition, and that Cennick was the man who led the revival there. As he rode on his mission from village to village, and from town to town, he was acting, not as a wild free-lance, but as the assistant of George Whitefield; and if it is fair to judge of his style by the sermons that have been preserved, he never said a word in those sermons that would not pass muster in most evangelical pulpits to-day. He never attacked the doctrines of the Church of England; he spoke of the Church as “our Church”; and he constantly backed up his arguments by appeals to passages in the Book of Common Prayer. In spite of his lack of University training he was no illiterate ignoramus. The more he knew of the Wiltshire villagers the more convinced he became that what they required was religious education. For their benefit, therefore, he now prepared some simple manuals of instruction: a “Treatise on the Holy Ghost,” an “Exhortation to Steadfastness,” a “Short Catechism for the Instruction of Youth,” a volume of hymns entitled “A New Hymnbook,” a second entitled “Sacred Hymns for the Children of God in the Day of their Pilgrimage,” and a third entitled “Sacred Hymns for the Use of Religious Societies.” What sort of manuals, it may be asked, did Cennick provide? I have read them carefully; and have come to the conclusion that though Cennick was neither a learned theologian nor an original religious thinker, he was fairly well up in his subject. For example, in his “Short Catechism” he shows a ready knowledge of the Bible and a clear understanding of the evangelical position; and in his “Treatise on the Holy Ghost” he quotes at length, not only from the Scriptures and the Prayer-book, but also from Augustine, Athanasius, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Calvin, Luther, Ridley, Hooper, and other Church Fathers and Protestant Divines. He was more than a popular preacher. He was a thorough and competent teacher. He made his head-quarters at the village of Tytherton, near Chippenham (Oct. 25, 1742); there, along with Whitefield, Howell Harris and others, he met his exhorters and stewards in conference; and meanwhile he established also religious societies at Bath, Brinkworth, Foxham, Malmesbury, and many other villages.

At last, exactly like Ingham in Yorkshire, he found that he had too many irons in the fire, and determined to hand his societies over to the care of the Moravian Church. He had met James Hutton, Zinzendorf, Spangenberg, Boehler, and other Moravians in London, and the more he knew of these men the more profoundly convinced he became that the picture of the Brethren painted by John Wesley in his Journal was no better than a malicious falsehood. At every point in his evidence, which lies before me in his private diary and letters, John Cennick, to put the matter bluntly, gives John Wesley the lie. He denied that the Brethren practised guile; he found them uncommonly open and sincere. He denied that they were Antinomians, who despised good works; he found them excellent characters. He denied that they were narrow-minded bigots, who would never acknowledge themselves to be in the wrong; he found them remarkably tolerant and broad-minded. At this period, in fact, he had so high an opinion of the Brethren that he thought they alone were fitted to reconcile Wesley and Whitefield; and on one occasion he persuaded some Moravians, Wesleyans and Calvinists to join in a united love-feast at Whitefield’s Tabernacle, and sing a common confession of faith {Nov. 4th, 1744.}.119 John Cennick was a man of the Moravian type. The very qualities in the Brethren that offended Wesley won the love of Cennick. He loved the way they spoke of Christ; he loved their “Blood and Wounds Theology”; and when he read the “Litany of the Wounds of Jesus,” he actually, instead of being disgusted, shed tears of joy. For these reasons, therefore, Cennick went to London, consulted the Brethren in Fetter Lane, and besought them to undertake the care of his Wiltshire societies. The result was the same as in Yorkshire. As long as the request came from Cennick alone the Brethren turned a deaf ear. But the need in Wiltshire was increasing. The spirit of disorder was growing rampant. At Bath and Bristol his converts were quarrelling; at Swindon a young woman went into fits and described them as signs of the New Birth; and a young man named Jonathan Wildboar, who had been burned in the hand for stealing linen, paraded the country showing his wound as a proof of his devotion to Christ. For these follies Cennick knew only one cure; and that cure was the “apostolic discipline” of the Brethren. He called his stewards together to a conference at Tytherton; the stewards drew up a petition; the Brethren yielded; some workers came down {Dec. 18th, 1745.}; and thus, at the request of the people themselves, the Moravians began their work in the West of England.

If the Brethren had now been desirous of Church extension, they would, of course, have turned Cennick’s societies into Moravian congregations. But the policy they now pursued in the West was a repetition of their suicidal policy in Yorkshire. Instead of forming a number of independent congregations, they centralized the work at Tytherton, and compelled the other societies to wait in patience. At Bristol, then the second town in the kingdom, the good people had to wait ten years (1755); at Kingswood, twelve years (1757); at Bath, twenty years (1765); at Malmesbury, twenty-five years (1770); at Devonport, twenty-six years (1771); and the other societies had to wait so long that finally they lost their patience, and died of exhaustion and neglect.

As soon as Cennick, however, had left his societies in the care of the Brethren {1746.}, he set off on a tour to Germany, spent three months at Herrnhaag, was received as a member, returned a Moravian, and then entered on his great campaign in Ireland. He began in Dublin, and took the city by storm. For a year or so some pious people, led by Benjamin La Trobe, a Baptist student, had been in the habit of meeting for singing and prayer; and now, with these as a nucleus, Cennick began preaching in a Baptist Hall at Skinner’s Alley. It was John Cennick, and not John Wesley, who began the Evangelical Revival in Ireland. He was working in Dublin for more than a year before Wesley arrived on the scene. The city was the hunting ground for many sects; the Bradilonians and Muggletonians were in full force; the Unitarians exerted a widespread influence; and the bold way in which Cennick exalted the Divinity of Christ was welcomed like a pulse of fresh air. The first Sunday the people were turned away in hundreds. The hall in Skinner’s Alley was crowded out. The majority of his hearers were Catholics. The windows of the hall had to be removed, and the people were in their places day after day three hours before the time. On Sundays the roofs of the surrounding houses were black with the waiting throng; every window and wall became a sitting; and Cennick himself had to climb through a window and crawl on the heads of the people to the pulpit. “If you make any stay in this town,” wrote a Carmelite priest, in his Irish zeal, “you will make as many conversions as St. Francis Xavier among the wild Pagans. God preserve you!” At Christmas Cennick forgot his manners, attacked the Church of Rome in offensive language, and aroused the just indignation of the Catholic priests.

“I curse and blaspheme,” he said, “all the gods in heaven, but the Babe that lay in Mary’s lap, the Babe that lay in swaddling clothes.”

The quick-witted Irish jumped with joy at the phrase. From that moment Cennick was known as “Swaddling John”;120 and his name was introduced into comic songs at the music-halls. As he walked through the streets he had now to be guarded by an escort of friendly soldiers; and the mob, ten or fifteen thousand in number, pelted him with dirt, stones and bricks. At one service, says the local diary, “near 2,000 stones were thrown against Brothers Cennick and La Trobe, of which, however, not one did hit them.” Father Duggan denounced him in a pamphlet entitled “The Lady’s Letter to Mr. Cennick”; Father Lyons assured his flock that Cennick was the devil in human form; and others passed from hand to hand a pamphlet, written by Gilbert Tennent, denouncing the Moravians as dangerous and immoral teachers.

At this interesting point, when Cennick’s name was on every lip, John Wesley paid his first visit to Dublin {August, 1747.}. For Cennick Wesley entertained a thorough contempt. He called him in his Journal “that weak man, John Cennick”; he accused him of having ruined the society at Kingswood; he was disgusted when he heard that he had become a Moravian; and now he turned him out of Skinner’s Alley by the simple process of negotiating privately with the owner of the property, and buying the building over Cennick’s head. At one stroke the cause in Skinner’s Alley passed over into Methodist hands; and the pulpit in which Cennick had preached to thousands was now occupied by John Wesley and his assistants. From that blow the Brethren’s cause in Dublin never fully recovered. For a long time they were unable to find another building, and had to content themselves with meetings in private houses; but at last they hired a smaller building in Big Booter Lane,121 near St. Patrick’s Cathedral; two German Brethren, John Toeltschig and Bryzelius, came over to organize the work; Peter Boehler, two years later, “settled” the congregation; and thus was established, in a modest way, that small community of Moravians whose descendants worship there to the present day.

Meanwhile John Cennick was ploughing another field. For some years he was busily engaged–first as an authorized lay evangelist and then as an ordained Moravian minister–in preaching and founding religious societies in Cos. Antrim, Down, Derry, Armagh, Tyrone, Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal {1748-55.}; and his influence in Ulster was just as great as the influence of Whitefield in England. He opened his Ulster campaign at Ballymena. At first he was fiercely opposed. As the rebellion of the young Pretender had been only recently quashed, the people were rather suspicious of new comers. The Pretender himself was supposed to be still at large, and the orthodox Presbyterians denounced Cennick as a Covenanter, a rebel, a spy, a rogue, a Jesuit, a plotter, a supporter of the Pretender, and a paid agent of the Pope. Again and again he was accused of Popery; and one Doffin, “a vagabond and wicked fellow,” swore before the Ballymena magistrates that, seven years before, he had seen Cennick in the Isle of Man, and that there the preacher had fled from the arm of the law. As Cennick was pronouncing the benediction at the close of a service in the market-place at Ballymena, he was publicly assaulted by Captain Adair, the Lord of the Manor; and the Captain, whose blood was inflamed with whisky, struck the preacher with his whip, attempted to run him through with his sword, and then instructed his footman to knock him down. At another service, in a field near Ballymena, two captains of militia had provided a band of drummers, and the drummers drummed as only Irishmen can. The young preacher was summoned to take the oath of allegiance and abjuration. But Cennick, like many Moravians, objected to taking an oath. The scene was the bar-parlour of a Ballymena hotel. There sat the justices, Captain Adair and O’Neil of Shane’s Castle; and there sat Cennick, the meek Moravian, with a few friends to support him. The more punch the two gentlemen put away the more pious and patriotic they became. For the second time Adair lost his self-control. He called Cennick a rascal, a rogue, and a Jesuit; he drank damnation to all his principles; he asked him why he would not swear and then get absolution from the Pope; and both gentlemen informed our hero that if he refused to take the oath they would clap him in Carrickfergus Gaol that very night. As Cennick, however, still held to his point, they were compelled at last to let him out on bail; and Cennick soon after appealed for protection to Dr. Rider, Bishop of Down and Connor. The good Bishop was a broad-minded man.

“Mr. Cennick,” he said, “you shall have fair play in my diocese.”

In vain the clergy complained to the Bishop that Cennick was emptying their pulpits. The Bishop had a stinging answer ready.

“Preach what Cennick preaches,” he said, “preach Christ crucified, and then the people will not have to go to Cennick to hear the Gospel.”

The good Bishop’s words are instructive. At that time the Gospel which Cennick preached was still a strange thing in Ulster; and Cennick was welcomed as a true revival preacher. At Ballee and Ballynahone he addressed a crowd of ten thousand. At Moneymore the Presbyterians begged him to be their minister. At Ballynahone the Catholics promised that if he would only pitch his tent there they would never go to Mass again. At Lisnamara, the rector invited him to preach in the parish church. At New Mills the people rushed out from their cabins, barred his way, offered him milk, and besought him, saying, “If you cannot stop to preach, at least come into our houses to pray.” At Glenavy the road was lined with a cheering multitude for full two miles. At Castle Dawson, Mr. Justice Downey, the local clergyman, and some other gentry, kissed him in public in the barrack yard. As he galloped along the country roads, the farm labourers in the fields would call out after him, “There goes Swaddling Jack”; he was known all over Ulster as “the preacher”; his fame ran on before him like a herald; Count Zinzendorf called him “Paul Revived”; and his memory lingers down to the present day.

For Cennick, of course, was more than a popular orator. As he was now a minister of the Brethren’s Church, he considered it his duty, wherever possible, to build chapels, to organize congregations, and to introduce Moravian books and customs; and in this work he had the assistance of La Trobe, Symms, Caries, Cooke, Wade, Knight, Brampton, Pugh, Brown, Thorne, Hill, Watson, and a host of other Brethren whose names need not be mentioned. I have not mentioned the foregoing list for nothing. It shows that most of Cennick’s assistants were not Germans, but Englishmen or Irishmen; and the people could not raise the objection that the Brethren were suspicious foreigners. At this time, in fact, the strength of the Brethren was enormous. At the close of his work, John Cennick himself had built ten chapels, and established two hundred and twenty religious societies. Around Lough Neagh the Brethren lay like locusts; and the work here was divided into four districts. At the north-east corner they had four societies, with chapels at Ballymena, Gloonen, and Grogan, and a growing cause at Doagh; at the north-west corner, a society at Lisnamara, established later as a congregation at Gracefield; at the south-west corner, in Co. Armagh, three chapels were being built; and at the south-east corner, they had several societies, and had built, or were building, chapels at Ballinderry, Glenavy, and Kilwarlin.

At this distance of time the Brethren’s work in Ulster has about it a certain glamour of romance. But in reality the conditions were far from attractive. It is hard for us to realize now how poor those Irish people were. They lived in hovels made of loose sods, with no chimneys; they shared their wretched rooms with hens and pigs; and toiling all day in a damp atmosphere, they earned their bread by weaving and spinning. The Brethren themselves were little better off. At Gloonen, a small village near Gracehill, the Brethren of the first Lough Neagh district made their headquarters in a cottage consisting of two rooms and two small “closets”; and this modest abode of one story was known in the neighbourhood as “The Great House at Gloonen.” Again, at a Conference held in Gracehill, the Brethren, being pinched for money, solemnly passed a resolution never to drink tea more than once a day.

And yet there is little to show to-day for these heroic labours. If the visitor goes to Ulster now and endeavours to trace the footsteps of Cennick, he will find it almost impossible to realize how great the power of the Brethren was in those palmy days. At Gracehill, near Ballymena, he will find the remains of a settlement. At Ballymena itself, now a growing town, he will find to his surprise that the Brethren’s cause has ceased to exist. At Gracefield, Ballinderry, and Kilwarlin–where once Cennick preached to thousands–he will find but feeble, struggling congregations. At Gloonen the people will show him “Cennick’s Well”; at Kilwarlin he may stand under “Cennick’s Tree”; and at Portmore, near Lough Beg, he will see the ruins of the old church, where Jeremy Taylor wrote his “Holy Living and Holy Dying,” and where Cennick slept many a night. At Drumargan (Armagh), he will find a barn that was once a Moravian Chapel, and a small farmhouse that was once a Sisters’ House; and at Arva (Co. Cavan), he may stand on a hillock, still called “Mount Waugh,” in memory of Joseph Waugh, a Moravian minister. For the rest, however, the work has collapsed; and Cennick’s two hundred and twenty societies have left not a rack behind.

For this decline there were three causes. The first was financial. At the very time when the Brethren in Ulster had obtained a firm hold upon the affections of the people the Moravian Church was passing through a financial crisis; and thus, when money would have been most useful, money was not to be had. The second was the bad system of management. Again, as in Yorkshire and Wiltshire, the Brethren pursued the system of centralization; built a settlement at Gracehill, and made the other congregations dependent on Gracehill, just as the Yorkshire congregations were dependent on Fulneck. The third cause was the early death of Cennick himself. At the height of his powers he broke down in body and in mind; and, worn out with many labours, he became the victim of mental depression. For some time the conviction had been stealing upon him that his work in this world was over; and in a letter to John de Watteville, who had twice inspected the Irish work, he said, “I think I have finished with the North of Ireland. If I stay here much longer I fear I shall damage His work.” At length, as he rode from Holyhead to London, he was taken seriously ill; and arrived at Fetter Lane in a state of high fever and exhaustion. For a week he lay delirious and rambling, in the room which is now used as the Vestry of the Moravian Chapel; and there, at the early age of thirty-six, he died {July 4th, 1755.}. If the true success is to labour, Cennick was successful; but if success is measured by visible results, he ended his brief and brilliant career in tragedy, failure and gloom. Of all the great preachers of the eighteenth century, not one was superior to him in beauty of character. By the poor in Ireland he was almost worshipped. He was often attacked and unjustly accused; but he never attacked in return. We search his diary and letters in vain for one single trace of bitter feeling. He was inferior to John Wesley in organizing skill, and inferior to Whitefield in dramatic power; but in devotion, in simplicity, and in command over his audience he was equal to either. At the present time he is chiefly known in this country as the author of the well-known grace before meat, “Be present at our table, Lord”; and some of his hymns, such as “Children of the Heavenly King,” and “Ere I sleep, for every favour,” are now regarded as classics. His position in the Moravian Church was peculiar. Of all the English Brethren he did the most to extend the cause of the Moravian Church in the United Kingdom, and no fewer than fifteen congregations owed their existence, directly or indirectly, to his efforts; and yet, despite his shining gifts, he was never promoted to any position of special responsibility or honour. He was never placed in sole charge of a congregation; and he was not made superintendent of the work in Ireland. As a soldier in the ranks he began; as a soldier in the ranks he died. He had one blemish in his character. He was far too fond, like most of the Brethren, of overdrawn sentimental language. If a man could read Zinzendorf’s “Litany of the Wounds of Jesus,” and then shed tears of joy, as Cennick tells us he did himself, there must have been an unhealthy taint in his blood. He was present at Herrnhaag at the Sifting-Time, and does not appear to have been shocked. In time his sentimentalism made him morbid. As he had a wife and two children dependent on him, he had no right to long for an early death; and yet he wrote the words in his pocket-book:–

Now, Lord, at peace with Thee and all below, Let me depart, and to Thy Kingdom go.

For this blemish, however, he was more to be pitied than blamed. It was partly the result of ill-health and overwork; and, on the whole, it was merely a trifle when set beside that winsome grace, that unselfish zeal, that modest devotion, and that sunny piety, which charmed alike the Wiltshire peasants, the Papist boys of Dublin, and the humble weavers and spinners of the North of Ireland.122

CHAPTER XII.

THE APPEAL TO PARLIAMENT, 1742-1749.

Meanwhile, however, the Brethren in England had been bitterly opposed. For this there were several reasons. First, the leading Brethren in England were Germans; and that fact alone was quite enough to prejudice the multitude against them {1742-3.}. For Germans our fathers had then but little liking; they had a German King on the throne, and they did not love him; and the general feeling in the country was that if a man was a foreigner he was almost sure to be a conspirator or a traitor. Who were these mysterious foreigners? asked the patriotic Briton. Who were these “Moravians,” these “Herrnhuters,” these “Germans,” these “Quiet in the Land,” these “Antinomians”? The very names of the Brethren aroused the popular suspicion. If a man could prove that his name was John Smith, the presumption was that John Smith was a loyal citizen; but if he was known as Gussenbauer or Ockershausen, he was probably another Guy Fawkes, and was forming a plot to blow up the House of Commons. At the outset therefore the Brethren were accused of treachery. At Pudsey Gussenbauer was arrested, tried at Wakefield, and imprisoned in York Castle. At Broadoaks, in Essex, the Brethren had opened a school, and were soon accused of being agents of the Young Pretender. They had, it was said, stored up barrels of gunpowder; they had undermined the whole neighbourhood, and intended to set the town of Thaxted on fire. At three o’clock one afternoon a mob surrounded the building, and tried in vain to force their way in. Among them were a sergeant and a corporal. The warden, Metcalfe, admitted the officers, showed them round the house, and finally led them to a room where a Bible and Prayer-book were lying on the table. At this sight the officers collapsed in amazement.

“Aye,” said the corporal, “this is proof enough that you are no Papists; if you were, this book would not have lain here.”

Another cause of opposition was the Brethren’s quiet mode of work. In North America lived a certain Gilbert Tennent; he had met Zinzendorf at New Brunswick; he had read his Berlin discourses; and now, in order to show the public what a dangerous teacher Zinzendorf was, he published a book, entitled, “Some Account of the Principles of the Moravians.” {1743.} As this book was published at Boston, it did not at first do much harm to the English Brethren; but, after a time, a copy found its way to England; an English edition was published; and the English editor, in a preface, accused the Brethren of many marvellous crimes. They persistently refused, he declared, to reveal their real opinions. They crept into houses and led captive silly women. They claimed that all Moravians were perfect, and taught that the Moravian Church was infallible. They practised an adventurous use of the Lot, had a curious method of discovering and purging out the accursed thing, pledged each other in liquor at their love-feasts, and had an “artful regulation of their convents.” Above all, said this writer, the Moravians were tyrannical. As soon as any person joined the Moravian Church, he was compelled to place himself, his family, and his estates entirely at the Church’s disposal; he was bound to believe what the Church believed, and to do what the Church commanded; he handed his children over to the Church’s care; he could not enter into any civil contract without the Church’s consent; and his sons and daughters were given in marriage just as the Church decreed.123 Gilbert Tennent himself was equally severe. He began by criticizing Zinzendorf’s theology; and after remarking that Zinzendorf was a liar, he said that the Brethren kept their disgusting principles secret, that they despised good books, that they slighted learning and reason, that they spoke lightly of Confessions of Faith, that they insinuated themselves into people’s affections by smiles and soft discourses about the love of Christ, that they took special care to apply to young persons, females and ignorant people. From all this the conclusion was obvious. At heart the Brethren were Roman Catholics. “The Moravians,” said Gilbert, “by this method of proceeding, are propagating another damnable doctrine of the Church of Rome, namely, that Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.” We can imagine the effect of this in Protestant England. At one time Zinzendorf was openly accused in the columns of the Universal Spectator of kidnapping young women for Moravian convents; and the alarming rumour spread on all sides that the Brethren were Papists in disguise.

Another cause of trouble was the Moravian religious language. If the Brethren did not preach novel doctrines they certainly preached old doctrines in a novel way. They called Jesus the Man of Smart; talked a great deal about Blood and Wounds; spoke of themselves as Poor Sinners; and described their own condition as Sinnership and Sinnerlikeness. To the orthodox Churchman this language seemed absurd. He did not know what it meant; he did not find it in the Bible; and, therefore, he concluded that the Brethren’s doctrine was unscriptural and unsound.

Another cause of trouble was the Brethren’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. Of all the charges brought against them the most serious and the most persistent was the charge that they despised good works. They were denounced as Antinomians. Again and again, by the best of men, this insulting term was thrown at their heads. They taught, it was said, the immoral doctrine that Christ had done everything for the salvation of mankind; that the believer had only to believe; that he need not obey the commandments; and that such things as duties did not exist. At Windsor lived a gentleman named Sir John Thorold. He was one of the earliest friends of the Moravians; he had often attended meetings at Hutton’s house; he was an upright, conscientious, intelligent Christian; and yet he accused the Brethren of teaching “that there were no duties in the New Testament.” Gilbert Tennent brought the very same accusation. “The Moravian notion about the law,” he said, “is a mystery of detestable iniquity; and, indeed, this seems to be the mainspring of their unreasonable, anti-evangelical, and licentious religion.” But the severest critic of the Brethren was John Wesley. He attacked them in a “Letter to the Moravian Church,” and had that letter printed in his Journal. He attacked them again in his “Short View of the Difference between the Moravian Brethren, lately in England, and the Rev. Mr. John and Charles Wesley.” He attacked them again in his “A Dialogue between an Antinomian and his Friend”; and in each of these clever and biting productions his chief charge against them was that they taught Antinomian principles, despised good works, and taught that Christians had nothing to do but believe.

“Do you coolly affirm,” he asked, “that this is only imputed to a Believer, and that he has none at all of this holiness in him? Is temperance imputed only to him that is a drunkard still? or chastity to her that goes on in whoredom?”

He accused the Brethren of carrying out their principles; he attacked their personal character; and, boiling with righteous indignation, he denounced them as “licentious spirits and men of careless lives.”

As the Brethren, therefore, were now being fiercely attacked, the question arose, what measures, if any, they should take in self-defence. At first they contented themselves with gentle protests. As they had been accused of disloyalty to the throne, James Hutton, Benjamin Ingham, and William Bell, in the name of all the English societies connected with the Brethren’s Church, drew up an address to the King, went to see him in person, and assured him that they were loyal subjects and hated Popery and popish pretenders {April 27th, 1744.}. As they had been accused of attacking the Anglican Church, two Brethren called on Gibson, Bishop of London, and assured him that they had committed no such crime. For the rest, however, the Brethren held their tongues. At a Conference in London they consulted the Lot; and the Lot decided that they should not reply to Gilbert Tennent. For the same reason, probably, they also decided to give no reply to John Wesley.

Meanwhile, however, an event occurred which roused the Brethren to action. At Shekomeko, in Dutchess County, New York, they had established a flourishing Indian congregation; and now, the Assembly of New York, stirred up by some liquor sellers who were losing their business, passed an insulting Act, declaring that “all vagrant preachers, Moravians, and disguised Papists,” should not be allowed to preach to the Indians unless they first took the oaths of allegiance and abjuration {1744.}. James Hutton was boiling with fury. If this Act had applied to all preachers of the Gospel he would not have minded so much; but the other denominations–Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists and Quakers–were all specially exempted; and the loyal Moravians were bracketed together with vagrant preachers and Papists in disguise. He regarded the Act as an insult. He wrote to Zinzendorf on the subject. “This,” he said, “is the work of Presbyterian firebrands.” If an Act like this could be passed in America, who knew what might not happen soon in England? “We ought,” he continued, “to utilize this or some other favourable opportunity for bringing our cause publicly before Parliament.”

Now was the time, thought the fiery Hutton, to define the position of the Brethren’s Church in England. He went to Marienborn to see the Count; a Synod met {1745.}; his proposal was discussed; and the Synod appointed Abraham von Gersdorf, the official “Delegate to Kings,” to appeal to Lord Granville, and the Board of Trade and Plantations, for protection in the Colonies. Lord Granville was gracious. He informed the deputation that though the Act could not be repealed at once the Board of Trade would recommend the repeal as soon as legally possible; and the upshot of the matter was that the Act became a dead letter.

Next year Zinzendorf came to England, and began to do the best he could to destroy the separate Moravian Church in this country {1746.}. If the Count could only have had his way, he would now have made every Moravian in England return to the Anglican Church. He was full of his “Tropus” idea. He wished to work his idea out in England; he called the English Brethren to a Synod (Sept. 13-16), and persuaded them to pass a scheme whereby the English branch of the Brethren’s Church would be taken over entirely by the Church of England. It was one of the most curious schemes he ever devised. At their Sunday services the Brethren henceforward were to use the Book of Common Prayer; their ministers were to be ordained by Anglican and Moravian Bishops conjointly; he himself was to be the head of this Anglican-Moravian Church; and thus the English Moravians would be grafted on to the Church of England. For the second time, therefore, the Count was trying to destroy the Moravian Church. But here, to his surprise, he met an unexpected obstacle. He had forgotten that it takes two to make a marriage. He proposed the union in form to Archbishop Potter; he pleaded the case with all the skill at his command; and the Archbishop promptly rejected the proposal, and the marriage never came off.

As Zinzendorf, therefore, was baffled in this endeavour, he had now to come down from his pedestal and try a more practical plan {1747.}; and, acting on the sage advice of Thomas Penn, proprietor of Pennsylvania, and General Oglethorpe, Governor of Georgia, he resolved to appeal direct to Parliament for protection in the Colonies. As Oglethorpe himself was a member of the House of Commons, he was able to render the Brethren signal service. He had no objection to fighting himself, and even defended duelling,124 but he championed the cause of the Brethren. Already, by an Act in 1740, the Quakers had been freed from taking the oath in all our American Colonies; already, further, by another Act (1743), the privilege of affirming had been granted in Pennsylvania, not only to Quakers, but to all foreign Protestants; and now Oglethorpe moved in the House of Commons that the rule existing in Pennsylvania should henceforth apply to all American Colonies. If the Moravians, he argued, were only given a little more encouragement, instead of being worried about oaths and military service, they would settle in larger numbers in America and increase the prosperity of the colonies. He wrote to the Board of Trade and Plantations; his friend, Thomas Penn, endorsed his statements; and the result was that the new clause was passed, and all foreign Protestants in American Colonies–the Moravians being specially mentioned–were free to affirm instead of taking the oath.

But this Act was of no use to the English Brethren. The great question at issue was, what standing were the Brethren to hold in England? On the one hand, as members of a foreign Protestant Church they were entitled to religious liberty; and yet, on the other hand, they were practically treated as Dissenters, and had been compelled to have all their buildings licensed. As they were still accused of holding secret dangerous principles, they now drew up another “Declaration,” had it printed, sent it to the offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Master of the Rolls, and inserted it in the leading newspapers. At all costs, pleaded the Brethren, let us have a public inquiry. “If any man of undoubted sense and candour,” they said, “will take the pains upon himself to fix the accusations against us in their real point of view, hitherto unattainable by the Brethren and perhaps the public too, then we will answer to the expectations of the public, as free and directly as may be expected from honest subjects of the constitution of these realms.” The appeal led to nothing; the man of sense and candour never appeared; and still the suffering Brethren groaned under all sorts of vague accusation.

At last, however, Zinzendorf himself came to the rescue of his Brethren, rented Northampton House in Bloomsbury Square,125 and brought the whole matter to a head. For the second time he took the advice of Oglethorpe and Thomas Penn; and a deputation was now appointed to frame a petition to Parliament that the Brethren in America be exempted, not merely from the oath, but also from military service.

As General Oglethorpe was now in England, he gladly championed the Brethren’s cause, presented the petition in the House of Commons, and opened the campaign by giving an account of the past history of the Brethren {Feb. 20th, 1749.}. For practical purposes this information was important. If the House knew nothing else about the Brethren it knew that they were no sect of mushroom growth. And then Oglethorpe informed the House how the Brethren, already, in bygone days had been kindly treated by England; how Amos Comenius had appealed to the Anglican Church; how Archbishop Sancroft and Bishop Compton had published a pathetic account of their sufferings; and how George I., by the advice of Archbishop Wake, had issued letters patent for their relief. But the most effective part of his speech was the part in which he spoke from personal knowledge. “In the year 1735,” he said “they were disquieted in Germany, and about twenty families went over with me to Georgia. They were industrious, patient under the difficulties of a new settlement, laborious beyond what could have been expected. They gave much of their time to prayer, but that hindered not their industry. Prayer was to them a diversion after labour. I mention this because a vulgar notion has prevailed that they neglected labour for prayer.” They had spent, he said, £100,000 in various industries; they had withdrawn already in large numbers from Georgia because they were compelled to bear arms; and if that colony was to prosper again the Brethren should be granted the privilege they requested, and thus be encouraged to return. For what privilege, after all, did the Brethren ask? For the noble privilege of paying money instead of fighting in battle. The more these Brethren were encouraged, said he, the more the Colonies would prosper; he proposed that the petition be referred to a Committee, and Velters Cornwall, member for Herefordshire, seconded the motion.

As Zinzendorf listened to this speech, some curious feelings must have surged in his bosom. At the Synod of Hirschberg, only six years before, he had lectured the Brethren for making business bargains with Governments; and now he was consenting to such a bargain himself. The debate in the Commons was conducted on business lines; the whole question at issue was, not whether the Moravians were orthodox, but whether it would pay the Government to encourage them; and the British Government took exactly the same attitude towards the Brethren that Frederick the Great had done seven years before. The next speaker made this point clearer than ever. We are not quite sure who it was. It was probably Henry Pelham, the Prime Minister. At any rate, whoever it was, he objected to the petition on practical grounds. He declared that the Moravians were a very dangerous body; that they were really a new sect; that, like the Papists, they had a Pope, and submitted to their Pope in all things; that they made their Church supreme in temporal matters; and that thus they destroyed the power of the civil magistrate. He suspected that the Brethren were Papists in disguise.

“I am at a loss,” he said, “whether I shall style the petitioners Jesuits, Papists, or Moravians.”

He intended, he declared, to move an amendment that the Moravians be restrained from making converts, and that all who joined their ranks be punished. The fate of England was at stake. If the Moravians converted the whole nation to their superstition, and everyone objected to bearing arms, what then would become of our Army and Navy, and how could we resist invasion? The next speakers, however, soon toned down the alarm. If Pelham’s objections applied to the Moravians, they would apply, it was argued, equally to the Quakers; and yet it was a notorious fact that the Colonies where the Quakers settled were the most prosperous places in the Empire. “What place,” asked one, “is more flourishing than Pennsylvania?” And if the Moravians objected to bearing arms, what did that matter, so long as they were willing to pay?

For these practical reasons, therefore, the motion was easily carried; a Parliamentary Committee was formed; General Oglethorpe was elected chairman; and the whole history, doctrine and practice of the Brethren were submitted to a thorough investigation. For this purpose Zinzendorf had prepared a number of documents; the documents were laid before the Committee; and, on the evidence of those documents, the Committee based its report. From that evidence three conclusions followed.

In the first place, the Brethren were able to show, by documents of incontestable authenticity, that they really were the true descendants of the old Church of the Brethren. They could prove that Daniel Ernest Jablonsky had been consecrated a Bishop at the Synod of Lissa (March 10th, 1699), that Jablonsky in turn had consecrated Zinzendorf a Bishop, and that thus the Brethren had preserved the old Moravian episcopal succession. They could prove, further, and prove they did, that Archbishops Wake and Potter had both declared that the Moravian episcopacy was genuine; that Potter had described the Moravian Brethren as apostolical and episcopal; and that when Zinzendorf was made a Bishop, Potter himself had written him a letter of congratulation. With such evidence, therefore, as this before them, the Committee were convinced of the genuineness of the Moravian episcopal succession; and when they issued their report they gave due weight to the point.

In the second place, the Brethren were able to show that they had no sectarian motives, and that though they believed in their own episcopacy, they had no desire to compete with the Church of England. “There are,” they said, “no more than two episcopal Churches among Protestants: the one known through all the world under the name of Ecclesia Anglicana; the other characterised for at least three ages as the Unitas Fratrum, comprehending generally all other Protestants who choose episcopal constitution. The first is the only one which may justly claim the title of a national church, because she has at her head a Christian King of the same rite, which circumstance is absolutely required to constitute a national church. The other episcopal one, known by the name of Unitas Fratrum, is far from pretending to that title.” In that manifesto the Brethren assumed that their episcopal orders were on a par with those of the Church of England; and that assumption was accepted, without the slightest demur, not only by the Parliamentary Committee, but by the bench of Bishops.

In the third place–and this was the crucial point–the Brethren were able to show, by the written evidence of local residents, that wherever they went they made honest, industrious citizens. They had settled down in Pennsylvania; they had done good work at Bethlehem, Nazareth, Gnadenhütten, Frederick’s Town, German Town and Oley; they had won the warm approval of Thomas Penn; and, so far from being traitors, they had done their best to teach the Indians to be loyal to the British throne. They had doubled the value of an estate in Lusatia, and had built two flourishing settlements in Silesia; they had taught the negroes in the West Indies to be sober, industrious and law-abiding; they had tried to uplift the poor Hottentots in South Africa; they had begun a mission in Ceylon, had toiled in plague-stricken Algiers, and had built settlements for the Eskimos in Greenland. If these statements had been made by Moravians, the Committee might have doubted their truth, but in every instance the evidence came, not from Brethren themselves, but from governors, kings and trading officials. The proof was overwhelming. Wherever the Brethren went, they did good work. They promoted trade; they enriched the soul; they taught the people to be both good and loyal; and, therefore, the sooner they were encouraged in America, the better for the British Empire.

As the Committee, therefore, were compelled by the evidence to bring in a good report, the desired leave was granted to bring in a bill “for encouraging the people known by the name of the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren, to settle in His Majesty’s Colonies in America.” Its real purpose, however, was to recognize the Brethren’s Church as an ancient Protestant Episcopal Church, not only in the American Colonies, but also in the United Kingdom; and its provisions were to be in force wherever the British flag might fly. The provisions were generous. First, in the preamble, the Brethren were described as “an ancient Protestant Episcopal Church and a sober and quiet industrious people,” and, being such, were hereby encouraged to settle in the American Colonies. Next, in response to their own request, they were allowed to affirm instead of taking the oath. The form of affirmation was as follows: “I, A. B., do declare in the presence of Almighty God the witness of the truth of what I say.” Next, they were allowed to pay a fixed sum instead of rendering military service, and were also exempted from serving on juries in criminal cases. Next, all members of the Brethren’s Church were to prove their claims by producing a certificate, signed by a Moravian Bishop or pastor. Next, the advocate of the Brethren was to supply the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations with a complete list of Moravian bishops and pastors, together with their handwriting and seal; and, finally, anyone who falsely claimed to belong to the Brethren’s Church was to be punished as a wilful perjurer.

The first reading was on March 28th, and the passage through the House of Commons was smooth. At the second reading, on April 1st, General Oglethorpe was asked to explain why the privilege of affirming should be extended to Moravians in Great Britain and Ireland. Why not confine it to the American colonies? His answer was convincing. If the privilege, he said, were confined to America, it would be no privilege at all. At that time all cases tried in America could be referred to an English Court of Appeal. If the privilege, therefore, were confined to America, the Brethren would be constantly hampered by vexatious appeals to England; and an English Court might at any moment upset the decision of an American Court. The explanation was accepted; the third reading came on; and the Bill passed the House of Commons unaltered.

In the House of Lords there was a little more opposition. As the Brethren were described as an “Episcopal Church,” it was feared that the Bishops might raise an objection; but the Bishops met at Lambeth Palace, and resolved not to oppose. At first Dr. Sherlock, Bishop of London, objected; but even he gave way in the end, and when the Bill came before the Lords not a single Bishop raised his voice against it. The only Bishop who spoke was Maddox, of Worcester, and he spoke in the name of the rest.

“Our Moravian Brethren,” he said, “are an ancient Episcopal Church. Of all Protestants, they come the nearest to the Established Church in this kingdom in their doctrine and constitution. And though the enemy has persecuted them from several quarters, the soundness of their faith and the purity of their morals have defended them from any imputation of Popery and immorality.”

The one dangerous opponent was Lord Chancellor Hardwicke. He objected to the clause about the certificate. If a man wished to prove himself a Moravian, let him do so by bringing witnesses. What use was a Bishop’s certificate? It would not be accepted by any judge in the country.

On the other hand, Lord Granville, in a genial speech, spoke highly of the Brethren. As some members were still afraid that the whole country might become Moravians, and refuse to defend our land against her foes, he dismissed their fears by an anecdote about a Quaker. At one time, he said, in the days of his youth, the late famous admiral, Sir Charles Wager, had been mate on a ship commanded by a Quaker; and on one occasion the ship was attacked by a French privateer. What, then, did the Quaker captain do? Instead of fighting the privateer himself, he gave over the command to Wager, captured the privateer, and made his fortune. But the Brethren, he held, were even broader minded than the Quakers.

“I may compare them,” he said, “to a casting-net over all Christendom, to enclose all denominations of Christians. If you like episcopacy, they have it; if you choose the Presbytery of Luther or Calvin, they have that also; and if you are pleased with Quakerism, they have something of that.”

With this speech Zinzendorf was delighted. As the little difficulty about the certificate had not yet been cleared away, he suggested that the person bringing the certificate should bring witnesses as well; and with this trifling amendment the Bill at last–on May 12th, the Moravian Memorial Day–was carried without a division.

In one sense this Act was a triumph for the Brethren, and yet it scarcely affected their fortunes in England. Its interest is national rather than Moravian. It was a step in the history of religious toleration, and the great principle it embodied was that a religious body is entitled to freedom on the ground of its usefulness to the State. The principle is one of the deepest importance. It is the fundamental principle to-day of religious liberty in England. But the Brethren themselves reaped very little benefit. With the exception of their freedom from the oath and from military service, they still occupied the same position as before the Act was passed. We come here to one of those contradictions which are the glory of all legal systems. On the one hand, by Act of Parliament, they were declared an Episcopal Church, and could hardly, therefore, be regarded as Dissenters; on the other, they were treated as Dissenters still, and still had their churches licensed as “places of worship for the use of Protestant Dissenters.”126

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS, 1749-1755.

As soon as the Act of Parliament was passed, and the settlement at Herrnhaag had been broken up, the Count resolved that the headquarters of the Brethren’s Church should henceforward be in London; and to this intent he now leased a block of buildings at Chelsea, known as Lindsey House. The great house, in altered form, is standing still. It is at the corner of Cheyne Walk and Beaufort Street, and is close to the Thames Embankment. It had once belonged to Sir Thomas More, and also to the ducal family of Ancaster. The designs of Zinzendorf were ambitious. He leased the adjoining Beaufort grounds and gardens, spent £12,000 on the property, had the house remodelled in grandiose style, erected, close by, the “Clock” chapel and a minister’s house, laid out a cemetery, known to this day as “Sharon,” and thus made preliminary arrangements for the establishment in Chelsea of a Moravian settlement in full working order. In those days Chelsea was a charming London suburb. From the house to the river side lay a terrace, used as a grand parade; from the bank to the water there ran a short flight of steps; and from there the pleasure-boats, with banners flying, took trippers up and down the shining river. For five years this Paradise was the headquarters of the Brethren’s Church. There, in grand style, lived the Count himself, with the members of his Pilgrim Band; there the Brethren met in conference; there the archives of the Church were preserved; and there letters and reports were received from all parts of the rapidly extending mission field.

And now the Count led a new campaign in England. As debates in Parliament were not then published in full, it was always open for an enemy to say that the Brethren had obtained their privileges by means of some underhand trick; and in order to give this charge the lie, the Count now published a folio volume, entitled, “Acta Fratrum Unitatis in Anglia.” In this volume he took the bull by the horns. He issued it by the advice of Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man. It was a thorough and comprehensive treatise, and contained all about the Moravians that an honest and inquiring Briton would need to know. The first part consisted of the principal vouchers that had been examined by the Parliamentary Committee. The next was an article, “The Whole System of the Twenty-one Doctrinal Articles of the Confession of Augsburg”; and here the Brethren set forth their doctrinal beliefs in detail. The next article was “The Brethren’s Method of Preaching the Gospel, according to the Synod of Bern, 1532”; and here they explained why they preached so much about the Person and sufferings of Christ. The next article was a series of extracts from the minutes of German Synods; and here the Brethren showed what they meant by such phrases as “Sinnership” and “Blood and Wounds Theology.” But the cream of the volume was Zinzendorf’s treatise, “The Rationale of the Brethren’s Liturgies.” He explained why the Brethren spoke so freely on certain moral matters, and contended that while they had sometimes used language which prudish people might condemn as indecent, they had done so from the loftiest motives, and had always maintained among themselves a high standard of purity. At the close of the volume was the Brethren’s “Church Litany,” revised by Sherlock, Bishop of London, a glossary of their religious terms, and a pathetic request that if the reader was not satisfied yet he should ask for further information. The volume was a challenge to the public. It was an honest manifesto of the Brethren’s principles, a declaration that they had nothing to conceal, and a challenge to their enemies to do their worst.

The next task of Zinzendorf was to comfort the Brethren’s friends. At this period, while Zinzendorf was resident in London, the whole cause of the Brethren in England was growing at an amazing pace; and in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Bedfordshire, Cheshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Dublin, and the North of Ireland, the members of the numerous societies and preaching places were clamouring for full admission to the Moravian Church. They assumed a very natural attitude. On the one hand, they wanted to become Moravians; on the other, they objected to the system of discipline enforced so strictly in the settlements, and contended that though it might suit in Germany, it was not fit for independent Britons. But Zinzendorf gave a clear and crushing answer. For the benefit of all good Britons who wished to join the Moravian Church without accepting the Moravian discipline, he issued what he called a “Consolatory Letter”;127 and the consolation that he gave them was that he could not consider their arguments for a moment. He informed them that the Brethren’s rules were so strict that candidates could only be received with caution; that the Brethren had no desire to disturb those whose outward mode of religion was already fixed; that they lived in a mystical communion with Christ which others might not understand; and, finally, that they refused point-blank to rob the other Churches of their members, and preferred to act “as a seasonable assistant in an irreligious age, and as a most faithful servant to the other Protestant Churches.” Thus were the society members blackballed; and thus did Zinzendorf prove in England that, with all his faults, he was never a schismatic or a poacher on others’ preserves.

Meanwhile, the battle of the books had begun. The first blow was struck by John Wesley. For the last seven years–as his Journal shows–he had seen but little of the Brethren, and was, therefore, not in a position to pass a fair judgment on their conduct; but, on the other hand, he had seen no reason to alter his old opinion, and still regarded them as wicked Antinomians. The Act of Parliament aroused his anger. He obtained a copy of Zinzendorf’s Acta Fratrum, and published a pamphlet128 summarizing its contents, with characteristic comments of his own {1750.}. He signed himself “A Lover of the Light.” His pamphlet was a fierce attack upon the Brethren. The very evidence that had convinced the Parliamentary Committee was a proof to Wesley that the Brethren were heretics and deceivers. He accused them of having deceived the Government and of having obtained their privileges by false pretences. He asserted that they had brought forward documents which gave an erroneous view of their principles and conduct. He hinted that Zinzendorf, in one document, claimed for himself the power, which belonged by right to the King and Parliament only, to transport his Brethren beyond the seas, and that he had deceived the Committee by using the milder word “transfer.” He accused the Brethren of hypocritical pretence, threw doubts upon their assumed reluctance to steal sheep from other churches, and hinted that while they rejected the poor they welcomed the rich with open arms. At the close of his pamphlet he declared his conviction that the chief effect of the Brethren’s religion was to fill the mind with absurd ideas about the Side-Wound of Christ, and rivers and seas of blood; and, therefore, he earnestly besought all Methodists who had joined the Church of the Brethren to quit their diabolical delusions, to flee from the borders of Sodom, and to leave these Brethren, loved the darkness and rejected the Holy Scriptures.

The next attack was of a milder nature. At Melbourne, in Derbyshire, the Brethren had a small society; and George Baddeley, the local curate, being naturally shocked that so many of his parishioners had ceased to attend the Parish Church, appealed to them in a pamphlet entitled, “A Kind and Friendly Letter to the People called Moravians at Melbourne, in Derbyshire.” And kind and friendly the pamphlet certainly was. For the Brethren, as he knew them by personal contact, George Baddeley professed the highest respect; and all that he had to say against them was that they had helped to empty the Parish Church, and had ignorantly taught the people doctrines contrary to Holy Scripture. They made a sing-song, he complained, of the doctrine of the cleansing blood of Christ; they had driven the doctrine of imputation too far, and had spoken of Christ as a personal sinner; they had taught that Christians were as holy as God, and co-equal with Christ, that believers were not to pray, that there were no degrees in faith, and that all who had not full assurance of faith were children of the devil. The pamphlet is instructive. It was not an accurate account of the Brethren’s teaching; but it shows what impression their teaching made on the mind of an evangelical country curate.

Another writer, whose name is unknown, denounced the Brethren in his pamphlet “Some Observations.” He had read Zinzendorf’s Acta Fratrum, was convinced that the Brethren were Papists, and feared that now the Act was passed they would spread their Popish doctrines in the colonies. For this judgment the chief evidence he summoned was a passage in the volume expounding the Brethren’s doctrine of the Sacrament; and in his opinion their doctrine was so close to Transubstantiation that ordinary Protestants could not tell the difference between the two.

At Spondon, near Derby, lived Gregory Oldknow; and Gregory published a pamphlet entitled, “Serious Objections to the Pernicious Doctrines of the Moravians and Methodists.” {1751.} As he did not explain his point very clearly, it is hard to see what objection he had to the Brethren; but as he called them cannibals and German pickpockets, he cannot have had much respect for their personal character. At their love-feasts, he said, their chief object was to squeeze money from the poor. At some of their services they played the bass viol, and at others they did not, which plainly showed that they were unsteady in their minds. And, therefore, they were a danger to Church and State.

At Dublin, John Roche, a Churchman, published his treatise {1751.}, the “Moravian Heresy.” His book was published by private subscription, and among the subscribers were the Archbishop of Armagh, the Bishops of Meath, Raphoe, Waterford, Clogher, Kilmore, Kildare, Derry, and Down and Connor, and several deans, archdeacons and other Irish clergymen. He denounced the Brethren as Antinomians. It is worth while noting what he meant by this term. “The moral acts of a believer,” said the Brethren, “are not acts of duty that are necessary to give him a share in the merits of Christ, but acts of love which he is excited to pay the Lamb for the salvation already secured to him, if he will but unfeignedly believe it to be so. Thus every good act of a Moravian is not from a sense of duty, but from a sense of gratitude.” Thus Roche denounced as Antinomian the very doctrine now commonly regarded as evangelical. He said, further, that the Moravians suffered from hideous diseases inflicted on them by the devil; but the chief interest of his book is the proof it offers of the strength of the Brethren at that time. He wrote when both Cennick and Wesley had been in Dublin; but Cennick to him seemed the really dangerous man. At first he intended to expose both Moravians and Methodists. “But,” he added, “the Moravians being the more dangerous, subtle and powerful sect, and I fear will be the more obstinate, I shall treat of them first.”

For the next attack the Brethren were themselves to blame. As the Brethren had sunk some thousands of pounds at Herrnhaag, they should now have endeavoured to husband their resources; and yet, at a Synod held in London, 1749, they resolved to erect choir-houses in England. At Lindsey House they sunk £12,000; at Fulneck, in Yorkshire they sunk thousands more; at Bedford they sunk thousands more; and meanwhile they were spending thousands more in the purchase and lease of building land, and in the support of many preachers in the rapidly increasing country congregations. And here they made an amazing business blunder. Instead of cutting their coat according to their cloth, they relied on a fictitious capital supposed to exist on the Continent. At one time John Wesley paid a visit to Fulneck, saw the buildings in course of erection, asked how the cost would be met, and received, he says, the astounding answer that the money “would come from beyond the sea.”

At this point, to make matters worse, Mrs. Stonehouse, a wealthy Moravian, died; and one clause in her will was that, when her husband followed her to the grave, her property should then be devoted to the support of the Church Diaconies. Again the English Brethren made a business blunder. Instead of waiting till Mr. Stonehouse died, and the money was actually theirs, they relied upon it as prospective capital, and indulged in speculations beyond their means; and, to cut a long story short, the sad fact has to be recorded that, by the close of 1752, the Moravian Church in England was about £30,000 in debt. As soon as Zinzendorf heard the news, he rushed heroically to the rescue, gave security for £10,000, dismissed the managers of the Diaconies, and formed a new board of administration.

But the financial disease was too deep-seated to be so easily cured. The managers of the English Diaconies had been extremely foolish. They had invested £67,000 with one Gomez Serra, a Portuguese Jew. Gomez Serra suddenly stopped payment, the £67,000 was lost, and thus the Brethren’s liabilities were now nearly £100,000 {1752.}. Again Zinzendorf, in generous fashion, came to the rescue of his Brethren. He acted in England exactly as he had acted at Herrnhaag. He discovered before long, to his dismay, that many of the English Brethren had invested money in the Diaconies, and that now they ran the serious danger of being imprisoned for debt. He called a meeting of the creditors, pledged himself for the whole sum, and suggested a plan whereby the debt could be paid off in four years. We must not, of course, suppose that Zinzendorf himself proposed to pay the whole £100,000 out of his own estates. For the present he made himself responsible, but he confidently relied on the Brethren to repay their debt to him as soon as possible. At all events, the creditors accepted his offer; and all that the Brethren needed now was time to weather the storm.

At this point George Whitefield interfered, and nearly sent the Moravian ship to the bottom {1753.}. He appealed to the example of Moses and Paul. As Moses, he said, had rebuked the Israelites when they made the golden calf, and as Paul had resisted Peter and Barnabas when carried away with the dissimulation of the Jews, so he, as a champion of the Church of Christ, could hold his peace no longer. He attacked the Count in a fiery pamphlet, entitled, “An Expostulatory Letter to Count Zinzendorf.” The pamphlet ran to a second edition, and was circulated in Germany. He began by condemning Moravian customs as unscriptural. “Pray, my lord,” he said, “what instances have we of the first Christians walking round the graves of their deceased friends on Easter-Day, attended with haut-boys, trumpets, French horns, violins and other kinds of musical instruments? Or where have we the least mention made of pictures of particular persons being brought into the first Christian assemblies, and of candles being placed behind them, in order to give a transparent view of the figures? Where was it ever known that the picture of the apostle Paul, representing him handing a gentleman and lady up to the side of Jesus Christ, was ever introduced into the primitive love-feasts? Again, my lord, I beg leave to inquire whether we hear anything of eldresses or deaconesses of the apostolical churches seating themselves before a table covered with artificial flowers, against that a little altar surrounded with wax tapers, on which stood a cross, composed either of mock or real diamonds, or other glittering stones?” As the Brethren, therefore, practised customs which had no sanction in the New Testament, George Whitefield concluded that they were encouraging Popery. At this period the Brethren were certainly fond of symbols; and on one occasion, as the London Diary records, Peter Boehler entered Fetter Lane Chapel, arrayed in a white robe to symbolize purity, and a red sash tied at the waist to symbolize the cleansing blood of Christ. But the next point in Whitefield’s “letter” was cruel. At the very time when Zinzendorf was giving his money to save his English Brethren from a debtor’s prison, Whitefield accused him and his Brethren alike of robbery and fraud. He declared that Zinzendorf was £40,000 in debt; that there was little hope that he would ever pay; that his allies were not much better; and that the Brethren had deceived the Parliamentary Committee by representing themselves as men of means. At the very time, said Whitefield, when the Moravian leaders were boasting in Parliament of their great possessions, they were really binding down their English members for thousands more than they could pay. They drew bills on tradesmen without their consent; they compelled simple folk to sell their estates, seized the money, and then sent the penniless owners abroad; and they claimed authority to say to the rich, “Either give us all thou hast, or get thee gone.” For these falsehoods Whitefield claimed, no doubt quite honestly, to have good evidence; and to prove his point he quoted the case of a certain Thomas Rhodes. Poor Rhodes, said Whitefield, was one of the Brethren’s victims. They had first persuaded him to sell a valuable estate; they had then seized part of his money to pay their debts; and at last they drained his stores so dry that he had to sell them his watch, bureau, horse and saddle, to fly to France, and to leave his old mother to die of starvation in England. For a while this ridiculous story was believed; and the Brethren’s creditors, in a state of panic, pressed hard for their money. The little Church of the Brethren was now on the brink of ruin. At one moment Zinzendorf himself expected to be thrown into prison, and was only saved in the nick of time by the arrival of money from Germany. But the English Brethren now showed their manhood. The very men whom Zinzendorf was supposed to have robbed now rose in his defence. Instead of thanking Whitefield for defending them in their supposed distresses, they formed a committee, drew up a statement,129 dedicated that statement to the Archbishop of York, and declared that there was not a word of truth in Whitefield’s charges. They had not, they declared, been robbed by Zinzendorf and the Moravian leaders; on the contrary, they had received substantial benefits from them. Thomas Rhodes himself proved Whitefield in the wrong. He wrote a letter to his own lawyer; James Hutton published extracts from the letter, and in that letter Rhodes declared that he had sold his estate of his own free will, that the Brethren had paid a good price, and that he and his mother were living in perfect comfort. Thus was Whitefield’s fiction exploded, and the Brethren’s credit restored.

But the next attack was still more deadly. At the time when Whitefield wrote his pamphlet there had already appeared a book entitled “A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhuters”; and Whitefield himself had read the book and had allowed it to poison his mind {1753.}. The author was Henry Rimius.130 He had been Aulic Councillor to the King of Prussia, had met Moravians in Germany, and now lived in Oxenden Street, London. For two years this scribbler devoted his energies to an attempt to paint the Brethren in such revolting colours that the Government would expel them from the country. His method was unscrupulous and immoral. He admitted, as he had to admit, that such English Brethren as he knew were excellent people; and yet he gave the impression in his books that the whole Moravian Church was a sink of iniquity. He directed his main attack against Zinzendorf and the old fanatics at Herrnhaag; and thus he made the English Brethren suffer for the past sins of their German cousins. He accused the Brethren of deceiving the House of Commons. He would now show them up in their true colours. “No Government,” he said, “that harbours them can be secure whilst their leaders go on at the rate they have done hitherto.” He accused them of holding immoral principles dangerous to Church and State. They held, he said, that Christ could make the most villainous act to be virtue, and the most exalted virtue to be vice. They spoke with contempt of the Bible, and condemned Bible reading as dangerous. They denounced the orthodox theology as fit only for dogs and swine, and described the priests of other Churches as professors of the devil. They called themselves the only true Church, the Church of the Lamb, the Church of Blood and Wounds; and claimed that, on the Judgment Day, they would shine forth in all their splendour and be the angels coming in glory. At heart, however, they were not Protestants at all, but Atheists in disguise; and the real object of all their plotting was to set up a godless empire of their own. They claimed to be independent of government. They employed a secret gang of informers. They had their own magistrates, their own courts of justice, and their own secret laws. At their head was Zinzendorf, their Lord Advocate, with the authority of a Pope. As no one could join the Moravian Church without first promising to abandon the use of his reason, and submit in all things to his leaders, those leaders could guide them like little children into the most horrid enterprizes. At Herrnhaag the Brethren had established an independent state, and had robbed the Counts of Büdingen of vast sums of money; and, if they were allowed to do so, they would commit similar crimes in England. They had a fund called the Lamb’s Chest, to which all their members were bound to contribute. The power of their Elders was enormous. At any moment they could marry a couple against their will, divorce them when they thought fit, tear children from their parents, and dispatch them to distant corners of the earth. But the great object of the Moravians, said Rimius, was to secure liberty for themselves to practise their sensual abominations. He supported his case by quoting freely, not only from Zinzendorf’s sermons, but also from certain German hymn-books which had been published at Herrnhaag during the “Sifting Time”; and as he gave chapter and verse for his statements, he succeeded in covering the Brethren with ridicule. He accused them of blasphemy and indecency. They spoke of Christ as a Tyburn bird, as digging for roots, as vexed by an aunt, and as sitting in the beer-house among the scum of society. They sang hymns to the devil. They revelled in the most hideous and filthy expressions, chanted the praises of lust and sensuality, and practised a number of sensual abominations too loathsome to be described. At one service held in Fetter Lane, Count Zinzendorf, said Rimius, had declared that the seventh commandment was not binding on Christians, and had recommended immorality to his congregation.131 It is impossible to give the modern reader a true idea of the shocking picture of the Brethren painted by Rimius. For malice, spite, indecency and unfairness, his works would be hard to match even in the vilest literature of the eighteenth century. As his books came out in rapid succession, the picture he drew grew more and more disgusting. He wrote in a racy, sometimes jocular style; and, knowing the dirty taste of the age, he pleased his public by retailing anecdotes as coarse as any in the “Decameron.” His chief object was probably to line his own pockets. His first book, “The Candid Narrative,” sold well. But his attack was mean and unjust. It is true that he quoted quite correctly from the silly literature of the Sifting-Time; but he carefully omitted to state the fact that that literature had now been condemned by the Brethren themselves, and that only a few absurd stanzas had appeared in English. At the same time, in the approved fashion of all scandal-mongers, he constantly gave a false impression by tearing passages from their original connection. As an attack on the English Brethren, his work was dishonest. He had no solid evidence to bring against them. From first to last he wrote almost entirely of the fanatics at Herrnhaag, and fathered their sins upon the innocent Brethren in England.

Meanwhile, however, a genuine eye-witness was telling a terrible tale. He named his book {1753.}, “The True and Authentic Account of Andrew Frey.” For four years, he said, he lived among the Brethren in Germany, travelled about helping to form societies, and settled down at Marienborn, when the fanaticism there was in full bloom. He was known among the Brethren as Andrew the Great. As he wore a long beard, he was considered rather eccentric. At Marienborn he saw strange sights and heard strange doctrine. At their feasts the Brethren ate like gluttons and drank till they were tipsy. “All godliness, all devotion, all piety,” said Rubusch, the general Elder of all the Single Brethren on the Continent, “are no more than so many snares of the devil. Things must be brought to this pass in the community, that nothing shall be spoken of but wounds, wounds, wounds. All other discourse, however Scriptural and pious, must be spued out and trampled under foot.” Another, Vieroth, a preacher in high repute among the Brethren, said, in a sermon at Marienborn castle church: “Nothing gives the devil greater joy than to decoy into good works, departing from evil, shalling and willing, trying, watching and examining those souls who have experienced anything of the Saviour’s Grace in their hearts.” Another, Calic, had defended self-indulgence. “Anyone,” he said, “having found lodging, bed and board in the Lamb’s wounds cannot but be merry and live according to nature; so that when such a one plays any pranks that the godly ones cry out against them as sins, the Saviour is so far from being displeased therewith that he rejoices the more.” In vain Frey endeavoured to correct these cross-air birds; they denounced him as a rogue. He appealed to Zinzendorf, and found to his dismay that the Count was as depraved as the rest. “Do not suffer yourselves to be molested in your merriment,” said that trumpet of Satan; and others declared that the Bible was dung, and only fit to be trampled under foot. At last Andrew, disgusted beyond all measure, could restrain his soul no longer; and telling the Brethren they were the wickedest sect that had appeared since the days of the Apostles, and profoundly thankful that their gilded poison had not killed his soul, he turned his back on them for ever.132

The next smiter of the Brethren was Lavington, Bishop of Exeter. He called his book “The Moravians Compared and Detected.” He had already denounced the Methodists in his “Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared” {1754.}; and now he described the Brethren as immoral characters, fitted to enter a herd of swine. In a pompous introduction he explained his purpose, and that purpose was the suppression of the “Brethren’s Church in England.” “With respect to the settlement of the Moravians in these kingdoms,” he said, “it seems to have been surreptitiously obtained, under the pretence of their being a peaceable and innocent sort of people. And peaceable probably they will remain while they are permitted, without control, to ruin families and riot in their debaucheries.” Of all the attacks upon the Brethren, this book by Lavington was the most offensive and scurrilous; and the Brethren themselves could hardly believe that it was written by a Bishop. It was unfit for a decent person to read. The good Bishop knew nothing of his subject. As he could not read the German language, he had to rely for his information on the English editions of the works of Rimius and Frey; and all he did was to collect in one volume the nastiest passages in their indictments, compare the Brethren with certain queer sects of the Middle Ages, and thus hold them up before the public as filthy dreamers and debauchees of the vilest order.

And now, to give a finishing touch to the picture, John Wesley arose once more {1755.}. He, too, had swallowed the poison of Rimius and Frey, and a good deal of other poison as well. At Bedford a scandal-monger informed him that the Brethren were the worst paymasters in the town; and at Holbeck another avowed that the Brethren whom he had met in Yorkshire were quite as bad as Rimius had stated. As Wesley printed these statements in his journal they were soon read in every county in England. But Wesley himself did not assert that these statements were true. He wished, he said, to be quite fair to the Brethren; he wished to give them a chance of clearing themselves; and, therefore, he now published his pamphlet entitled “Queries to Count Zinzendorf.” It contained the whole case in a nutshell. For the sum of sixpence the ordinary reader had now the case against the Brethren in a popular and handy form.

Thus the Brethren, attacked from so many sides, were bound to bestir themselves in self-defence. The burden of reply fell on Zinzendorf. His life and conversation were described as scandalous; his hymns were denounced as filthy abominations, and his discourses as pleas for immorality; and the Brethren for whose sake he had sacrificed his fortune were held up before the British public as political conspirators, atheists, robbers of the poor, kidnappers of children, ruiners of families, and lascivious lovers of pleasure. But the Count was a busy man. James Hutton says that he worked on the average eighteen hours a day. He was constantly preaching, writing, relieving the distressed, paying other people’s debts, and providing the necessaries of life for a hundred ministers of the Gospel. He had dealt with similar accusations in Germany, had published a volume containing a thousand answers to a thousand questions, and was loth to go over the whole ground again. For some time he clung to the hope that the verdict of Parliament and the common sense of Englishmen would be sufficient protection against abuse; and he gallantly defended the character of Rimius, and spoke with generous enthusiasm of Whitefield. The best friends of the Brethren, such as Lord Granville and the Bishops of London and Worcester, advised them to treat Rimius with contemptuous silence. But a reply became a necessity. As long as the Brethren remained silent, their enemies asserted that this very silence was a confession of guilt; and some mischievous scoundrel, in the name, but without the consent, of the Brethren, inserted a notice in the General Advertiser that they intended to reply to Rimius in detail. For these reasons, therefore, Zinzendorf, James Hutton, Frederick Neisser, and others who preferred to write anonymously, now issued a series of defensive pamphlets.133 The Count offered to lay before the public a full statement of his financial affairs; and James Hutton, in a notice in several newspapers, promised to answer any reasonable questions. It is needless to give the Brethren’s defence in detail. The plain facts of the case were beyond all dispute. In two ways the accusations of Rimius and Frey were out of court. First they accused the whole Church of the Brethren of sins which had only been committed by a few fanatics at Marienborn and Herrnhaag; and, secondly, that fanaticism had practically ceased before the Act of Parliament was passed. The Count here stood upon firm ground. He pointed out that the accusers of the Brethren had nearly always taken care to go to the Wetterau for their material; and he contended that it was a shame to blame innocent Englishmen for the past sins, long ago abandoned, of a few foreign fanatics. He appealed confidently to the public. “We are so well known to our neighbours,” he said, “that all our clearing ourselves of accusations appears to them quite needless.” In reply to the charge of using indecent language, he contended that his purpose was good, and justified by the results; and that, as soon as he found himself misunderstood, he had cut out all doubtful phrases from his discourses.

James Hutton explained their use of childish language. At this period the Brethren, in some of their hymns, used a number of endearing epithets which would strike the modern reader as absurd. For example, they spoke of the little Lamb, the little Jesus, the little Cross-air Bird. But even here they were not so childish as their critics imagined. The truth was, these phrases were Bohemian in origin. In the Bohemian language diminutives abound. In Bohemia a servant girl is addressed as “demercko”–i.e., little, little maid; and the literal translation of “mug mily Bozicko”–a phrase often used in public worship–is “my dear, little, little God.”

But the Brethren had a better defence than writing pamphlets. Instead of taking too much notice of their enemies, they began to set their English house in order. For the first time they now published an authorized collection of English Moravian hymns {1754.}; and in the preface they clearly declared their purpose. The purpose was twofold: first, the proclamation of the Gospel; second, the cultivation of personal holiness. If we judge this book by modern standards, we shall certainly find it faulty; but, on the other hand, it must be remembered that it rendered a very noble service to the Christianity of the eighteenth century. The chief burden of the hymns was Ecce Homo. If the Brethren had never done anything else, they had at least placed the sufferings of Christ in the forefront of their message. With rapturous enthusiasm the Brethren depicted every detail of the Passion History; and thus they reminded their hearers of events which ordinary Christians had almost forgotten. At times the language they used was gruesome; and, lost in mystic adoration, the Brethren, in imagination, trod the Via Dolorosa. They nestled in the nail-prints; they kissed the spear; they gazed with rapt and holy awe on the golden head, the raven locks, the pallid cheeks, the foaming lips, the melting eyes, the green wreath of thorns, the torn sinews, the great blue wounds, and the pierced palms, like rings of gold, beset with rubies red. In one stanza they abhorred themselves as worms; in the next they rejoiced as alabaster doves; and, glorying in the constant presence of the Well-Beloved, they feared not the King of Terrors, and calmly sang of death as “the last magnetic kiss, to consummate their bliss.” But, despite its crude and extravagant language, this hymn-book was of historic importance. At that time the number of hymn-books in England was small; the Anglicans had no hymn-book at all, and never sang anything but Psalms; and thus the Brethren were among the first to make the adoration of Christ in song an essential part of public worship. It was here that the Brethren excelled, and here that they helped to free English Christianity from the chilling influence of Deism. The whole point was quaintly expressed by Bishop John Gambold:–

The Doctrine of the Unitas
By Providence was meant,
In Christendom’s degenerate days, That cold lump to ferment,
From Scripture Pearls to wipe the dust, Give blood-bought grace its compass just, In praxis, truth from shew to part,
God’s Power from Ethic Art.

But the last line must not be misunderstood. It did not mean that the Brethren despised ethics. Of all the charges brought against them, the charge that they were Antinomians was the most malicious and absurd. At the very time when their enemies were accusing them of teaching that good works were of no importance, they inserted in their Litany for Sunday morning worship a number of petitions which were alone enough to give that charge the lie. The petitions were as follows:–

O! that we might never see a necessitous person go unrelieved! O! that we might see none suffer for want of clothing! O! that we might be eyes to the blind and feet to the lame! O! that we could refresh the heart of the Fatherless! O! that we could mitigate the burden of the labouring man, and be ourselves not ministered unto but minister! Feed its with that princely repast of solacing others! O! that the blessing of him who was ready to perish might come upon us!
Yea! may our hearts rejoice to see it go well with our enemies.

Again, therefore, as in their hymns, the Brethren laid stress on the humane element in Christianity.134

But their next retort to their enemies was the grandest of all. At a Synod held in Lindsey House, they resolved that a Book of Statutes was needed, and requested Zinzendorf to prepare one {1754.}. The Count was in a quandary. He could see that a Book of Statutes was required, but he could not decide what form it should take. If he framed the laws in his own language, his critics would accuse him of departing from the Scriptures; and if he used the language of Scripture, the same critics would accuse him of hedging and of having some private interpretation of the Bible. At length he decided to use the language of Scripture. He was so afraid of causing offence that, Greek scholar though he was, he felt bound to adhere to the Authorised Version. If Zinzendorf had used his own translation his enemies would have accused him of tampering with the Word of God. The book appeared. It was entitled, Statutes: or the General Principles of Practical Christianity, extracted out of the New Testament. It was designed for the use of all English Moravians, and was sanctioned and adopted by the Synod on May 12th, 1755. It was thorough and systematic. For fathers and mothers, for sons and daughters, for masters and servants, for governors and governed, for business men, for bishops and pastors, the appropriate commandments were selected from the New Testament. In a printed notice on the title page, the Brethren explained their own interpretation of those commandments. “Lest it should be thought,” they said, “that they seek, perhaps, some subterfuge in the pretended indeterminate nature of Scripture-style, they know very well that it becomes them to understand every precept and obligation in the same manner as the generality of serious Christians understand the same (and this is a thing, God be praised, pretty well fixed), or, if at all differently, then always stricter.” The purpose of the book was clear. It was a handy guide to daily conduct. It was meant to be learned by heart, and was issued in such size and form that it could be carried about in the pocket. It was “a faithful monitor to souls who, having been first washed through the blood of Jesus, do now live in the Spirit, to walk also in the Spirit.” To the Brethren this little Christian guide was a treasure. As long as they ordered their daily conduct by these “convenient rules for the house of their pilgrimage,” they could smile at the sneers of Rimius and his supporters. The Moravian influence in England was now at high tide. At the very time when their enemies were denouncing them as immoral Antinomians, they established their strongest congregations at Fulneck, Gomersal, Wyke, Mirfield, Dukinfield, Bristol, and Gracehill {1755.}; and in all their congregations the “Statutes” were enforced with an iron hand.

Thus did the Brethren repel the attacks of their assailants. From this chapter one certain conclusion follows. The very fact that the Brethren were so fiercely attacked is a proof how strong they were. As the reader wanders over England, he may see, if he knows where to look, memorials of their bygone labours. In Northampton is an auction room that was once a Moravian chapel. In Bullock Smithy is a row of cottages named “Chapel Houses,” where now the Brethren are forgotten. In a private house at Bolton, Lancashire, will be found a cupboard that was once a Moravian Pulpit. In Wiltshire stands the “two o’clock chapel,” where Cennick used to preach. We may learn much from such memorials as these. We may learn that the Brethren played a far greater part in the Evangelical Revival than most historians have recognised; that they worked more like the unseen leaven than like the spreading mustard tree; that they hankered not after earthly pomp, and despised what the world calls success; and that, reviled, insulted, and misrepresented, they pursued their quiet way, content with the reward which man cannot give.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS, 1734-1762.

In order to have a clear view of the events recorded in this chapter, we must bear in mind that the Brethren worked according to a definite Plan; they generally formed their “Plan” by means of the Lot; and this “Plan,” speaking broadly, was of a threefold nature. The Brethren had three ideals: First, they were not sectarians. Instead of trying to extend the Moravian Church at the expense of other denominations, they consistently endeavoured, wherever they went, to preach a broad and comprehensive Gospel, to avoid theological disputes, to make peace between the sects, and to unite Christians of all shades of belief in common devotion to a common Lord. Secondly, by establishing settlements, they endeavoured to unite the secular and the sacred. At these settlements they deliberately adopted, for purely religious purposes, a form of voluntary religious socialism. They were not, however, socialists or communists by conviction; they had no desire to alter the laws of property; and they established their communistic organization, not from any political motives, but because they felt that, for the time at least, it would be the most economical, would foster Christian fellowship, would sanctify daily labour, and would enable them, poor men though they were, to find ways and means for the spread of the Gospel. And thirdly, the Brethren would preach that Gospel to all men, civilized or savage, who had not heard it before. With these three ideals before us, we trace their footsteps in North America.

The first impulse sprang from the kindness of Zinzendorf’s heart. At Görlitz, a town a few miles from Herrnhut, there dwelt a small body of Schwenkfelders; and the King of Saxony issued an edict banishing them from his dominions {1733.}. As soon as Zinzendorf heard of their troubles he longed to find them a home. He opened negotiations with the trustees of the Colony of Georgia. The negotiations were successful. The Governor of Georgia, General Oglethorpe, was glad to welcome good workmen; a parcel of land was offered, and the poor Schwenkfelders, accompanied by Böhnisch, a Moravian Brother, set off for their American home. For some reason, however, they changed their minds on the way, and, instead of settling down in Georgia, went on to Pennsylvania. The land in Georgia was now crying out for settlers. At Herrnhut trouble was brewing. If the spirit of persecution continued raging, the Brethren themselves might soon be in need of a home. The Count took time by the forelock. As soon as the storm burst over Herrnhut, the Brethren might have to fly; and, therefore, he now sent Spangenberg to arrange terms with General Oglethorpe. Again the negotiations were successful; the General offered the Brethren a hundred acres; and a few weeks later, led by Spangenberg, the first batch of Moravian colonists arrived in Georgia {1734.}. The next batch was the famous company on the Simmonds. The new settlement was on the banks of the Savannah River. For some years, with Spangenberg as general manager, the Brethren tried to found a flourishing farm colony. The learned Spangenberg was a practical man. In spite of the fact that he had been a University lecturer, he now put his hand to the plough like a labourer to the manner born. He was the business agent; he was the cashier; he was the spiritual leader; he was the architect; and he was the medical adviser. As the climate of Georgia was utterly different from the climate of Saxony, he perceived at once that the Brethren would have to be careful in matters of diet, and rather astonished the Sisters by giving them detailed instructions about the cooking of rice and beef. The difference between him and Zinzendorf was enormous. At St. Croix, a couple of years before, a band of Moravian Missionaries had died of fever; and while Zinzendorf immortalized their exploits in a hymn, the practical Spangenberg calmly considered how such heroic tragedies could be prevented in the future. In political matters he was equally far-seeing. As the Brethren were now in an English colony, it was, he said, their plain duty to be naturalized as Englishmen as soon as possible; and, therefore, in a letter to Zinzendorf, he implored him to become a British subject himself, to secure for the Brethren the rights of English citizens, and, above all, if possible to obtain letters patent relieving the Brethren from the obligation to render military service. But on Zinzendorf all this wisdom was thrown away. Already the ruin of the colony was in sight. At the very time when the Brethren’s labours should have been crowned with success, Captain Jenkins, at the bar of the House of Commons, was telling how his ear had been cut off by Spaniards {1738.}. The great war between England and Spain broke out. The chief aim of Spain was to destroy our colonial supremacy in America. Spanish soldiers threatened Georgia. The Brethren were summoned to take to arms and help to defend the colony against the foe. But the Brethren objected to taking arms at all. The farm colony was abandoned; and the scene shifts to Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, the good Spangenberg had been busy in Pennsylvania, looking after the interests of the Schwenkfelders. He attended their meetings, wore their clothing–a green coat, without buttons or pockets–studied the works of Schwenkfeld, and organized them into what he called an “Economy.” In other words, he taught them to help each other by joining in common work on a communist basis. At the same time, he tried to teach them to be a little more broad-minded, and not to quarrel so much with other Christians. But the more he talked of brotherly love the more bigoted the poor Schwenkfelders became. At this time the colony had become a nest of fanatics. For some years, in response to the generous offers of Thomas Penn, all sorts of persecuted refugees had fled to Pennsylvania; and now the land was infested by a motley group of Episcopalians, Quakers, Baptists, Separatists, Sabbatarians, Unitarians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Memnonites, Presbyterians, Independents, Inspired Prophets, Hermits, Newborn Ones, Dunckers, and Protestant Monks and Nuns. Thus the land was filled with “religions” and almost empty of religion. Instead of attending to the spiritual needs of the people, each Church or sect was trying to prove itself in the right and all the others in the wrong; and the only principle on which they agreed was the principle of disagreeing with each other. The result was heathendom and babel. Most of the people attended neither church nor chapel; most of the parents were unbaptized, and brought up their children in ignorance; and, according to a popular proverb of the day, to say that a man professed the Pennsylvania religion was a polite way of calling him an infidel.

As soon, therefore, as Zinzendorf heard from Spangenberg of these disgraceful quarrels a glorious vision rose before his mind; and the conviction flashed upon him that Pennsylvania was the spot where the Brethren’s broad evangel was needed most. There, in the midst of the quarrelling sects he would plant the lily of peace; there, where the cause of unity seemed hopeless, he would realize the prayer of Christ, “that they all may be one.” For two reason, America seemed to him the true home of the ideal Church of the Brethren. First, there was no State Church; and, therefore, whatever line he took, he could not be accused of causing a schism. Secondly, there was religious liberty; and, therefore, he could work out his ideas without fear of being checked by edicts. For these reasons he first sent out another batch of colonists, led by Bishop Nitschmann; and then, in due time, he arrived on the scene himself. The first move had the promise of good. At the spot the Lehigh and the Monocany meet the Brethren had purchased a plot of ground {1741}; they all lived together in one log-house; they proposed to build a settlement like Herrnhut; and there, one immortal Christmas Eve, Count Zinzendorf conducted a consecration service. Above them shone the keen, cold stars, God’s messengers of peace; around them ranged the babel of strife; and the Count, remembering how the Prince of Peace had been born in a humble wayside lodging, named the future settlement Bethlehem. The name had a twofold meaning. It was a token of the Brethren’s mission of peace; and it reminded them that the future settlement was to be a “House of Bread” for their evangelists.

The Count was now in his element. For two years he did his best to teach the quarrelling sects in Pennsylvania to help and esteem each other; and the bond of union he set before them was a common experience of the redeeming grace of Christ. He had come to America, not as a Moravian Bishop, but as a Lutheran clergyman; and he was so afraid of being suspected of sectarian motives that, before he set out from London, he had purposely laid his episcopal office aside. For some months, therefore, he now acted as Lutheran clergyman to a Lutheran congregation in Philadelphia; and meanwhile he issued a circular, inviting German Christians of all denominations to meet in Conference. His purpose, to use his own phrase, was to establish a grand “Congregation of God in the Spirit.” At first the outlook was hopeful. From all sects deputies came, and a series of “Pennsylvanian Synods” was held. Again, however, the Count was misled by his own ignorance of history. At this time he held the erroneous view that the Union of Sendomir in Poland (1570) was a beautiful union of churches brought about by the efforts of the Brethren; he imagined also that the Bohemian Confession (1575) had been drawn up by the Brethren; and, therefore, he very naturally concluded that what the Brethren had accomplished in Poland and Bohemia they could accomplish again in Pennsylvania. But the stern facts of the case were all against him. At the very time when he was endeavouring to establish a “Congregation of God in the Spirit” in Pennsylvania, he heard that his own Brethren in Germany were departing from his ideals; and, therefore, he had to return to Germany, and hand on his American work to Spangenberg {1743.}.

For that task the broad-minded Spangenberg was admirably fitted, and now he held a number of titles supposed to define his mission. First, he was officially appointed “General Elder” in America; second, he was consecrated a Bishop, and was thus head of the American Moravian Church; and third, he was “Vicarius generalis episcoporum”; i.e., General Vicar of the Bishops. For the next four years the Pennsylvania Synods, with the broad-minded Spangenberg as President, continued to meet with more or less regularity. In 1744 they met twice; in 1745 three times; in 1746 four times; in 1747 three times; and in 1748 twice. But gradually the Synods altered in character. At first representatives attended from a dozen different bodies; then only Lutherans, Calvinists and Moravians; then only