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Updated: June 17, 2025
He would reconcile the Lutherans and Pietists. He consulted with leading professors on both sides; he convinced them of the need for peace; and the rival teachers actually agreed to accept this student of nineteen summers as the agent of the longed-for truce. But here Count Zinzendorf's mother intervened.
They were a body of Christians called to the task, in Zinzendorf's own words, "to proclaim the Saviour to the world"; and the Count's noble motto was: "The earth is the Lord's; all souls are His; I am debtor to all." There was a dash of romance in that Pilgrim Band, and more than a dash of heroism. They lived in a wild and eerie district. They slept on straw.
Each of the claimants to the hand of Theodora expressed his desire to retire in favour of the other; and, not being able to settle the dispute, the two young men set out for Castell to see what Theodora herself would say. Young Zinzendorf's mode of reasoning was certainly original.
As they joined the other Single Brethren, and marched in solemn procession past Zinzendorf's house, they heard the Count remark to a friend, "Sir, among these young men there are missionaries to St. Thomas, Greenland, Lapland, and many other countries." The words were inspiring. Forthwith the young fellows wrote to the Count and offered to serve in St. Thomas.
But Zinzendorf's "Church within the Church" idea is no Moravian "essential." It was never one of the ideals of the Bohemian Brethren; it sprang, not from the Moravian Church, but from German Pietism; and, therefore, if the American Brethren reject it they cannot justly be accused of disloyalty to original Moravian principles. For those principles they are as zealous as any other Moravians.
As these wanderers from a foreign land had not been able to bring in their pockets certificates of orthodoxy, and might, after all, be dangerous heretics, it occurred to Zinzendorf's canny steward, Heitz, that on the whole it would be more fitting if they settled, not in the village itself, but at a safe and convenient distance.
He recognized the facts of the case, abolished the "Congregation of the Spirit," and laid the constitutional foundations of the Brethren's Church in North America . Thus Zinzendorf's scheme of union collapsed, and the first American experiment was a failure. Meanwhile, Bishop Spangenberg had been busy with the second.
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