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There the visitor will still find neither poverty nor wealth; there, far from the madding crowd, the angel of peace reigns supreme. We all know how Carlyle once visited Herrnhut, and how deeply impressed he was. At all the settlements and congregations the chief object of the Brethren is the cultivation of personal piety and Christian fellowship. We can see this from the number of services held.
The morning meal was enlivened by much more than the usual amount of talk. Leonhard was curious to know about Herrnhut, that old home of Moravianism, and the interest which he manifested in the history Loretz was so eager to communicate made him in turn an object of almost affectionate attention.
He had first issued a public notice that no refugee should settle at Herrnhut unless compelled by persecution; and secondly, he had called a meeting of the refugees themselves, and persuaded them to promise that in all their gatherings they would remain loyal to the Augsburg Confession. Meanwhile, in the village itself, he had pushed his scheme with vigour.
He had no idea to what this would lead. As the lad grew up in his father's home he had, of course, not the least suspicion that such a body as the Moravian Church existed. He had never heard of Zinzendorf or of Herrnhut. He was brought up a son of the Church of England; he loved her services and doctrine; and all that he desired to see was a revival within her borders of true spiritual life.
They stood for the villages of Fulneck, Gersdorf, Gestersdorf, Kunewalde, Klandorf, Stechwalde, Seitendorf and Zauchtenthal; and these are the places from which the first exiles came to renew the Brethren's Church at Herrnhut. Fifty years before his prayers were answered, Comenius lay silent in the grave . Yet never did bread cast upon the waters more richly return.
He believed that the Brethren there were called to a world-wide mission. He wanted Herrnhut to be a city set on a hill. "I have no sympathy," he said, "with those comfortable people who sit warming themselves before the fire of the future life." He did not sit long before the fire himself.
The effect on Zinzendorf was electric. His mind was full of missionary visions. The story of Antony fired his zeal. The door to the heathen world stood open. The golden day had dawned. He returned to the Brethren at Herrnhut, arrived at two o'clock in the morning, and found that the Single Brethren were still on their knees in prayer. Nothing could be more encouraging.
At New Herrnhut, in Greenland, he founded a settlement, as thoroughly organised as Herrnhut in Saxony. He built a church, adorned with pictures depicting the sufferings of Christ. He taught the people to play the violin. He divided the congregation into "choirs." He showed them how to cultivate a garden of cabbages, leeks, lettuces, radishes and turnips.
Much in the same way as in the Germany of the fourteenth century the lawless Brethren of the Free Spirit had justified their excesses in language which they borrowed from men of such noble and holy life as Eckhart and Tauler, and Nicolas of Basle, so the flagitious conduct, at Bedford and elsewhere, of some who called themselves Moravians threw scandal and odium on the tenets of the pure and simple-minded community of Herrnhut.
He knew but little, if anything at all, of the old Church of the Brethren; he had never been a member of that Church himself; he had no special interest in her welfare; and the emigrants whom he had brought to Herrnhut were mostly evangelical folk who had been awakened by the preaching of the Pietist pastor, Steinmetz, of Teschen.
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