HISTORICAL SKETCH.
We must distinguish between the old Bohemian and Moravian Brethren who belonged to the Slavonic race, and the new Moravians who are chiefly German or of German descent. The connecting link between the two was the celebrated educator, John Amos Comenius (1592-1671), the Jeremiah of the former, and the John the Baptist of the latter, who, hoping against hope for the resurrection of the Bohemian Unitas Fratrum, nearly crushed to death by persecution, left behind him their order of discipline, and made provision for the ordination of two bishops, that through them the succession might be preserved in a quiescent state, until, in 1735, it was transferred to the renewed Church.
The new Moravian Church [1667] took its origin from the remnant (the ' Hidden Seed') of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethern, to whom Count Zinzendorf (1700-1760), under the guidance of a special providence, gave an hospitable refuge on his estates at Berthelsdorf, in Upper Lusatia, Saxony. The asylum was called Herrnhut (the Lord's Protection), and became the mother church and the centre of the denomination.
The little colony of immigrants from Moravia soon increased, by the accession of German families of the pietistic school of Spener, to the number of three hundred souls. It was organized on the basis of the Ratio Disciplinæ of Comenius. David Nitschmann was consecrated the first bishop by Daniel Ernst Jablonsky (court chaplain in Berlin) and Christian Sitkov, the surviving bishops of the old succession (March 13, 1735). This consecration was performed secretly in the presence of only two members of the Bohemian congregation in Berlin, for the sole purpose of sending ordained ministers to the distant missions and colonies. It was not intended to establish an episcopal form of government, separate and distinct from the national Lutheran Church, but this separation was the natural consequence. The second bishop was Count Zinzendorf himself, who gave up his office at the Saxon court and his worldly prospects to devote himself entirely to the Church of his own planting. [1668] With all his eccentricities he was one of the purest and most remarkable men in the history of Christianity, a religious and poetic genius, and a true nobleman by nature and divine grace as well as by rank. He had but one all-absorbing passion--Christ and him crucified. [1669] From his childhood, when he used to write letters to his beloved Saviour, this sacred fire burned in him, and continued to burn till he was called to see him face to face. He early conceived the idea, by planting in the spirit of Spener a true Church in the nominal Church, to reform the Church at home, and to carry the gospel to the heathen. We may call him the German Wesley; he was an organizer like John Wesley, and a true hymnist like his brother Charles. The Oxford Methodists started with a legalistic type of piety, but they received a new inspiration from the childlike, cheerful, serene, and sublime trust in God which characterized the Moravians with whom they came in contact.
The patriarchs of Moravianism--Zinzendorf, Nitschmann, and Spangenberg--like the patriarchs of Methodism, labored in both hemispheres at a time when the stagnant State Churches of Germany and England cared little or nothing for their children in America. They founded Bethlehem (1741) and Nazareth in Pennsylvania, and other colonies which remain to this day. Zinzendorf endeavored to unite the other German denominations and sects in Pennsylvania into one Church, but in vain. [1670]
The Moravian brotherhood is par excellence a missionary society at home and abroad. It has but few regularly organized congregations scattered in Christian lands, but in an age of indifferentism and rationalism they were like cities of refuge and oases in the wilderness, with fresh fountains and green pastures for multitudes who flocked to them for refreshment. [1671] They are still holding up the model of living congregations of real Christians. Besides, they have mission stations, called Diaspora (1 Pet. i. 1), for those who wish to derive spiritual benefit from them without severing their connection with the established Churches. These half-members may be compared to the Jewish proselytes of the gate as distinguished from the proselytes of righteousness. The Moravians, however, are free from the spirit of proselytism, and endeavor to promote peace and union among the Christians at home. But they are aggressive abroad, and concentrate their energies on foreign missions. Their chief glory lies in the extraordinary zeal and self-denial with which, since 1732, they have labored for the conversion of the most ignorant and degraded heathen in Greenland, Labrador, among the American Indians, and the African negroes and Esquimaux, at a time when orthodox Protestant Christendom had not yet awoke to a sense of its long-neglected duty. To the small band of Moravians belongs the first place of honor in the work of foreign missions.