centuries of the Christian era it did much to preserve Christianity from being absorbed in an ocean of frothy and fruitless speculation. A threefold cord which could not be broken was formed by a defence of the Gospels, maintenance of the rule of faith, and loyalty to the bishops, who, as St. Hippolytus wrote, 'share in the same grace and high priesthood and teaching office' as the apostles.

So in America it was not by some blind chance that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity was preserved from being dissipated and denied. We realize the importance of the means as we understand the importance of the result, and in both we see the hand of God. For the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is no figment of the speculative imagination, but a true description of what we as Christians know concerning God. Like the doctrine of the Incarnation it became clothed in the language of Greek philosophy, but it nevertheless corresponds with the deepest elements in Christian experience. The truth that the Man of Sorrows is indeed the eternal Son and Word of God, as well as our elder brother, throws an entirely new light upon the Fatherhood of God and the destiny of man. And the life of a new sonship, a life granted to those who believe in Christ's Name, is perpetuated in us by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The first Christians were deeply conscious of a Power that came to dwell within them and guided mind and heart, who revealed their weakness and removed it, and they knew that this Giver of life must himself be Lord. We return to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. Each is divine, the End, the Way, the Power. That is the centre of our creed, and it should be the centre of our life. The more firmly we believe it, the more sincerely we shall maintain the dignity of our human nature, the more earnestly we shall struggle to keep the purity, the integrity, the largeness of this life of ours, which was taken by the Son of God, to be eternally His own, and to be included by us in every thought of Him.

VI

ASPECTS OF LUTHERANISM AND CALVINISM

SINCE 1700

Col. ii. 8: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

THERE is in Pennsylvania a borough named Bethlehem, and there is another place named Ephrata. Those two names are memorials of two remarkable offshoots of the German Protestant Pietism which flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For though Bethlehem is now famous for its iron and its steel, and lies in a district that has long since been invaded by railroads and furnaces, it is there that in 1741 the Moravian bishop Nitschmann, with his niece and Count Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, kept their first Christmas in America in a stable which they called Bethlehem. They had come to begin missionary work among the Indians, and their work was one of great adventures and considerable success. Some notable Red Indian braves sleep at Bethlehem.1 And Ephrata was even before Zinzendorf's arrival the home of Protestant monks and nuns and hermits, whose austerity seems to us like a breath wafted from an Oriental desert. The Pietists had striven to form societies inside larger communities, and Zinzendorf had created such a society, more intensive and at the same time more oecumenical than the Pietist conventicles formed sporadically in German cities. The Pietists had also

1 Among them is Tschoop, a Mohican, said to be the father of Uncas. He reappeared in the novels of Fenimore Cooper as 'Chingachgook'. Also 'Brother Michael', a ferocious warrior of the Munsey tribe, who became an exemplary Christian. Every quarter of an inch from his underlip to the top of his forehead was adorned with a round dot to indicate the number of scalps which he had taken. He died in 1758.

encouraged individualism, and, in certain conditions hostile to pristine simplicity of life, religious individualism leads men to renounce all that is human in the effort to attain union with God. Thus the organized sect and the lonely hermit were both a protest against a Protestantism which was too stagnant and too secular.

Zinzendorf (1700-1760) himself must be put side by side with his younger contemporary John Wesley, though not upon so eminent a level. A godson of Spener he was reared in the strongest aroma of Pietism. He studied in Wittenberg, improved his studies in Holland and France, and in 1721 bought an estate at Berthelsdorf in Upper Lusatia, a district where the German language was encroaching upon that of the Slavonic Sorbs. There and in Dresden he tried to promote a 'religion of the heart' by means of private Church societies; but his religion took a new direction on the arrival of some German Moravian emigrants at Berthelsdorf, which with his help became the cradle of a neighbouring settlement which was called Herrnhut.1

These Moravians preserved some of the traditions of the Slavonic sect known as the Unitas Fratrum or Union of Brethren, a sect retaining an episcopal succession but vehemently opposed to the Papacy. In the fifteenth century it made numerous converts in Bohemia and Moravia, and spread into Poland in the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1620, after the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, these Czech Protestants were crushed: some fled to Germany, and the Polish branch of the Union was absorbed in the Reformed (Calvinist) Church, retaining the episcopal succession in the person of John Amos Comenius (15921672) who published their System of Discipline, and consecrated as bishop his son-in-law Peter Jablonsky who

1 Herrnhut lies 18 miles south-east of Bautzen on the Löbau-Zittau railway. Löbau was still Sorbish at the beginning of the twentieth century. For this interesting Slavonic region, see Franz Tetzner, Die Slawen in Deutschland (F. Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1902).

was court preacher in Memel. The latter, who was consecrated in 1662, handed on the episcopal succession in 1699 to his son David Ernest Jablonsky, who was court preacher in Berlin and consecrated Nitschmann as missionary bishop for the West Indies in 1735 and Zinzendorf himself in 1737.

Zinzendorf was a convinced Lutheran 1 of a strongly subjective temperament, delighting in the composition of somewhat sensuous hymns in which he allowed the worship of the Father to be obscured by the worship of Jesus, the Lamb of God and Brother of the Christian. He even spoke of the Holy Spirit as Mother in the life of the Trinity. When the Unitas Fratrum was fully reconstituted in 1747 it was a compromise. On the one hand it included Zinzendorf's sentimental German theology and his method of creating societies into which he tried to divert every stream of fervour which he could find in other sects. And on the other hand the careful rules of discipline and semiCatholic ministry recall the great skill in organization which the Czechs always manifest whether in politics or in religion. Zinzendorf was pursued by the hostility of the Lutheran pastors and the Government until the whole community adopted the Augsburg Confession as its form of faith. Its right to exist was then formally recognized in Saxony in 1749. But it was before that date, and when he was banished from Saxony, that Zinzendorf had started the missionary work in Greenland, in Surinam, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Santa Cruz, which became the real glory of the Moravian Church. He received John Wesley at Herrnhut, and though Wesley did not join the Moravians, he was deeply influenced by their example. The fervour of Zinzendorf in the service of Christ was as deep as Wesley's own. He had a true zeal

1 The distinctive creed of the Moravians is stated in their so-called ‘Easter Litany'. It was translated into English and slightly modified in 1749. See Ph. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. iii, 'The Creeds of the Evangelical Churches', p. 799 (Harper, New York, 1877).

for the salvation of souls and he was one of the first of Protestants to recognize that missionary work is not a mere matter of colonial policy but the duty of every Christian as a Christian.

And then there is Ephrata.1 Ephrata in the eighteenth century was a centre of the two different types of monasticism which we find in Egypt as early as the fourth century. There was the hermit life, and there was the 'common life' of monks, and also nuns, living under the direction of a superior. About 1674 one John Kelpius, a native of Transylvania and a Master of Arts of the University of Altorf, went to America, withdrew from the world with several companions, some of whom were also men of learning, and lived in a cave near the Wissahickon, awaiting the return of Christ, the heavenly Bridegroom. He died in 1708 and most of his followers went back to the world. But his advocacy of the virgin life, his asceticism, and his mysticism produced a great effect on one Conrad Beissel. Beissel, who was a native of Ehrbach, had been by trade a baker, and in the days of his apprenticeship was devoted to music and dancing until he came under the influence of some extreme revivalists and migrated to America in 1720. He was a Baptist, and he adopted the view that Christians ought to observe the seventh day as holy. He selected a spot on the river Cocalico previously occupied by another hermit, and he was gradually joined by a considerable number of converts. The first coenobitic building, called 'Kedar', was erected in 1735. In a few years' time it was necessary to add three others, not including the so-called 'Saal' or chapel. The ascetics called themselves 'The Order of the Solitary'. Their religion was in accord with that of the German mystics of the period. It was marked by a craving after direct union with God, a sinking of self,

1 For the monasticism at Ephrata, see The Century Illustrated Magazine, December 1881 (The Century Co., New York; F. Warne, London).