"It is impossible," he said, "for anyone to be a true Christian outside the Moravian Church."

As the man was outside that Church himself, and remained outside it all his life, his statement is rather bewildering.114

John Wesley was disgusted. He regarded Molther as a teacher of dangerous errors. The two men were poles asunder. The one was a quietist evangelical; the other a staunch High Churchman. According to Molther the correct order was, through Christ to the ordinances of the Church; according to Wesley, through the ordinances to Christ. According to Molther, a man ought to be a believer in Christ before he reads the Bible, or attends Communion, or even does good works; according to Wesley, a man should read his Bible, go to Communion, and do good works in order to become a believer. According to Molther the Sacrament was a privilege, meant for believers only; according to Wesley it was a duty, and a means of grace for all men. According to Molther, the only means of grace was Christ; according to Wesley, there were many means of grace, all leading the soul to Christ. According to Molther there were no degrees in faith; according to Wesley there were. No longer was the Fetter Lane Society a calm abode of peace. Instead of trying to help each other the members would sometimes sit for an hour without speaking a word; and sometimes they only reported themselves without having a proper meeting at all. John Wesley spoke his mind. He declared that Satan was beginning to rule in the Society. He heard that Molther was taken ill, and regarded the illness as a judgment from heaven. At last the wranglings came to an open rupture. At an evening meeting in Fetter Lane {July 16th, 1740.}, John Wesley, resolved to clear the air, read out from a book supposed to be prized by the Brethren the following astounding doctrine: "The Scriptures are good; prayer is good; communicating is good; relieving our neighbour is good; but to one who is not born of God, none of these is good, but all very evil. For him to read the Scriptures, or to pray, or to communicate, or to do any outward work is deadly poison. First, let him be born of God. Till then, let him not do any of these things. For if he does, he destroys himself."

He read the passage aloud two or three times. "My brethren," he asked, "is this right, or is this wrong?"

"It is right," said Richard Bell, the watchcase maker, "it is all right. It is the truth. To this we must all come, or we never can come to Christ."

"I believe," broke in Bray, the brazier, "our brother Bell did not hear what you read, or did not rightly understand."

"Yes! I heard every word," said Bell, "and I understand it well. I say it is the truth; it is the very truth; it is the inward truth."

"I used the ordinances twenty years," said George Bowers, the Dissenter, of George Yard, Little Britain, "yet I found not Christ. But I left them off for only a few weeks and I found Him then. And I am now as close united to Him as my arm is to my body."

The dispute was coming to a crisis. The discussion lasted till eleven o'clock. Some said that Wesley might preach in Fetter Lane.

"No," said others, "this place is taken for the Germans."

Some argued that Wesley had often put an end to confusions in the Society.

"Confusion!" snapped others, "What do you mean? We never were in any confusion at all."

Next Sunday evening Wesley appeared again {July 20th, 1740.}. He was resolved what to do.

"I find you," he said, "more and more confirmed in the error of your ways. Nothing now remains but that I should give you up to God. You that are of the same opinion follow me."

As some wicked joker had hidden his hat, he was not able to leave the room with the dignity befitting the occasion; but eighteen supporters answered to his call; and the face of John Wesley was seen in the Fetter Lane Society no more. The breach was final; the wound remained open; and Moravians and Methodists went their several ways. For some years the dispute continued to rage with unabated fury. The causes were various. The damage done by Molther was immense. The more Wesley studied the writings of the Brethren the more convinced he became that in many ways they were dangerous teachers. They thought, he said, too highly of their own Church. They would never acknowledge themselves to be in the wrong. They submitted too much to the authority of Zinzendorf, and actually addressed him as Rabbi. They were dark and secret in their behaviour, and practised guile and dissimulation. They taught the doctrine of universal salvation. Above all, however, John Wesley held that the Brethren, like Molther, laid a one-sided stress on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. They were, he contended, Antinomians; they followed too closely the teaching of Luther; they despised the law, the commandments, good works, and all forms of self-denial.

"You have lost your first joy," said one, "therefore you pray: that is the devil. You read the Bible: that is the devil. You communicate: that is the devil."

In vain Count Zinzendorf, longing for peace, endeavoured to pour oil on the raging waters. The two leaders met in Gray's Inn Gardens and made an attempt to come to a common understanding {Sept. 3rd, 1741.}. The attempt was useless. The more keenly they argued the question out the further they drifted from each other. For Zinzendorf Wesley had never much respect, and he certainly never managed to understand him. If a poet and a botanist talk about roses they are hardly likely to understand each other; and that was just how the matter stood between Zinzendorf and Wesley. The Count was a poet, and used poetic, language. John Wesley was a level-headed Briton, with a mind as exact as a calculating machine.

"Why have you left the Church of England?"115 began the Count.

"I was not aware that I had left the Church of England," replied Wesley.

And then the two men began to discuss theology.

"I acknowledge no inherent perfection in this life," said the Count. "This is the error of errors. I pursue it through the world with fire and sword. I trample it under foot. I exterminate it. Christ is our only perfection. Whoever follows after inherent perfection denies Christ."

"But I believe," replied Wesley, "that the Spirit of Christ works perfection in true Christians."

"Not at all," replied Zinzendorf, "All our perfection is in Christ. The whole of Christian perfection is imputed, not inherent. We are perfect in Christ—in ourselves, never."

"What," asked Wesley, in blank amazement, after Zinzendorf had hammered out his point. "Does not a believer, while he increases in love, increase equally in holiness?"

"By no means," said the Count; "the moment he is justified he is sanctified wholly. From that time, even unto death, he is neither more nor less holy. A babe in Christ is as pure in heart as a father in Christ. There is no difference."

At the close of the discussion the Count spoke a sentence which seemed to Wesley as bad as the teaching of Molther.

"We spurn all self-denial," he said, "we trample it under foot. Being believers, we do whatever we will and nothing more. We ridicule all mortification. No purification precedes perfect love."

And thus the Count, by extravagant language, drove Wesley further away from the Brethren than ever.

Meanwhile, at Fetter Lane events were moving fast. As soon as Wesley was out of the way, James Hutton came to the front; a good many Moravians—Bishop Nitschmann, Anna Nitschmann, John Toeltschig, Gussenbauer, and others—began to arrive on the scene; and step by step the Society became more Moravian in character. For this Hutton himself was chiefly responsible. He maintained a correspondence with Zinzendorf, and was the first to introduce Moravian literature to English readers. He published a collection of Moravian hymns, a Moravian Manual of Doctrine, and a volume in English of Zinzendorf's Berlin discourses. He was fond of the Moravian type of teaching, and asked for Moravian teachers. His wish was speedily gratified. The foolish Molther departed. The sober Spangenberg arrived. The whole movement now was raised to a higher level. As soon as Spangenberg had hold of the reins the members, instead of quarrelling with each other, began to apply themselves to the spread of the Gospel; and to this end they now established the "Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel." Its object was the support of foreign missions {1741.}. At its head was a committee of four, of whom James Hutton was one. For many years the "Society" supported the foreign work of the Brethren in English colonies; and in later years it supplied the funds for the work in Labrador. The next step was to license the Chapel in Fetter Lane. The need was pressing. As long as the members met without a licence they might be accused, at any time, of breaking the Conventicle Act. They wished now to have the law on their side. Already the windows had been broken by a mob. The services now were open to the public. The chapel was becoming an evangelistic hall. The licence was taken (Sept.). The members took upon themselves the name "Moravian Brethren, formerly of the Anglican Communion." But the members at Fetter Lane were not yet satisfied. For all their loyalty to the Church of England, they longed for closer communion with the Church of the Brethren; and William Holland openly asked the question, "Can a man join the Moravian Church and yet remain a member of the Anglican Church?"

"Yes," was the answer, "for they are sister Churches."

For this reason, therefore, and without any desire to become Dissenters, a number of the members of the Fetter Lane Society applied to Spangenberg to establish a congregation of the Moravian Church in England. The cautious Spangenberg paused. For the fourth time a momentous question was put to the decision of the Lot. The Lot sanctioned the move. The London congregation was established (November 10th, 1742). It consisted of seventy-two members of the Fetter Lane Society. Of those members the greater number were Anglicans, and considered themselves Anglicans still. And yet they were Brethren in the fullest sense and at least half of them took office. The congregation was organized on the Herrnhut model. It was divided into "Choirs." At the head of each choir was an Elder; and further there were two Congregation Elders, two Wardens, two Admonitors, two Censors, five Servants, and eight Sick-Waiters. Thus was the first Moravian congregation established in England. For many years this Church in Fetter Lane was the headquarters of Moravian work in Great Britain. Already a new campaign had been started in Yorkshire; and a few years later Boehler declared that this one congregation alone had sent out two hundred preachers of the Gospel.116



CHAPTER X.

YORKSHIRE AND THE SETTLEMENT SYSTEM.

As we follow the strange and eventful story of the renewal of the Brethren's Church, we can hardly fail to be struck by the fact that wherever new congregations were planted the way was first prepared by a man who did not originally belong to that Church himself. At Herrnhut the leader was the Lutheran, Christian David; at Fetter Lane, James Hutton, the Anglican clergyman's son; and in Yorkshire, the clergyman, Benjamin Ingham, who never joined the Moravian Church at all. He had, like the Wesleys and Whitefield, taken part in the Evangelical Revival. He was one of the Oxford Methodists, and had belonged to the Holy Club. He had sailed with John Wesley on his voyage to America, had met the Brethren on board the Simmonds, and had learned to know them more thoroughly in Georgia. He had been with John Wesley to Marienborn, had been admitted to the Communion there, had then travelled on to Herrnhut, and had been "exceedingly strengthened and comforted by the Christian conversation of the Brethren." He had often been at James Hutton's house, had attended services in Fetter Lane, was present at the famous Watch-Night Love-feast, and had thus learned to know the Brethren as thoroughly as Wesley himself. From first to last he held them in high esteem. "They are," he wrote, "more like the Primitive Christians than any other Church now in the world, for they retain both the faith, practice and discipline delivered by the Apostles. They live together in perfect love and peace. They are more ready to serve their neighbours than themselves. In their business they are diligent and industrious, in all their dealings strictly just and conscientious. In everything they behave themselves with great meekness, sweetness and simplicity."

His good opinion stood the test of time. He contradicted Wesley's evidence flatly. "I cannot but observe," he wrote to his friend Jacob Rogers, curate at St. Paul's, Bedford, "what a slur you cast upon the Moravians about stillness. Do you think, my brother, that they don't pray? I wish you prayed as much, and as well. They do not neglect prayers, either in public or in private; but they do not perform them merely as things that must be done; they are inwardly moved to pray by the Spirit. What they have said about stillness has either been strangely misunderstood or strangely misrepresented. They mean by it that we should endeavour to keep our minds calm, composed and collected, free from hurry and dissipation. And is not this right? They are neither despisers nor neglecters of ordinances."

The position of Ingham was peculiar. He was a clergyman without a charge; he resided at Aberford, in Yorkshire; he appears to have been a man of considerable means; and now he devoted all his powers to the moral and spiritual upliftment of the working-classes in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His sphere was the district between Leeds and Halifax. For ignorance and brutality these Yorkshire people were then supposed to be unmatched in England. The parish churches were few and far between. The people were sunk in heathen darkness. Young Ingham began pure missionary work. He visited the people in their homes; he formed societies for Bible Reading and Prayer; he preached the doctrine of saving faith in Christ; and before long he was able to say that he had fifty societies under his care, two thousand hearers, three hundred inquirers, and a hundred genuine converts. For numbers, however, Ingham cared but little. His object was to bring men into personal touch with Christ. "I had rather," he said, "see ten souls truly converted than ten thousand only stirred up to follow." His work was opposed both by clergy and by laymen. At Colne, in Lancashire, he was attacked by a raging mob. At the head of the mob was the Vicar of Colne himself. The Vicar took Ingham into a house and asked him to sign a paper promising not to preach again. Ingham tore the paper in pieces.

"Bring him out and we'll make him," yelled the mob.

The Vicar went out; the mob pressed in; and clubs were flourished in the air "as thick as a man's leg."

Some wanted to kill him on the spot; others wished to throw him into the river.

"Nay, nay," said others, "we will heave him into the bog, then he will be glad to go into the river and wash and sweeten himself."

A stone "as big as a man's fist," hit him in the hollow of the neck. His coat-tails were bespattered with mud.

"See," said a wit, "he has got wings." At last the Vicar relented, took him into the Vicarage, and thus saved him from an early death.

But Ingham had soon more irons in the fire than he could conveniently manage. If these Yorkshire folk whom he had formed into societies were to make true progress in the spiritual life they must, he held, be placed under the care of evangelical teachers. He could not look after them himself; he was beginning new work further north, in the neighbourhood of Settle; and the best men he knew for his purpose were the Moravians whom he had learned to admire in Georgia, London and Herrnhut. For one Brother, John Toeltschig, Ingham had a special affection, and while he was on his visit to Herrnhut he begged that Toeltschig might be allowed to come with him to England. "B. Ingham," he wrote, "sends greeting, and bids grace and peace to the most Reverend Bishops, Lord Count Zinzendorf and David Nitschmann, and to the other esteemed Brethren in Christ. I shall be greatly pleased if, with your consent, my beloved brother, John Toeltschig, be permitted to stay with me in England as long as our Lord and Saviour shall so approve. I am heartily united with you all in the bonds of love. Farewell. Herrnhut, Sept. 29, 1738."117 For our purpose this letter is surely of the deepest interest. It proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the Moravians started their evangelistic campaign in England, not from sectarian motives, but because they were invited by English Churchmen who valued the Gospel message they had to deliver. As Hutton had begged for Boehler, so Ingham begged for Toeltschig; and Toeltschig paid a brief visit to Yorkshire (November, 1739), helped Ingham in his work, and so delighted the simple people that they begged that he might come to them again. For a while the request was refused. At last Ingham took resolute action himself, called a mass meeting of Society members, and put to them the critical question: "Will you have the Moravians to work among you?" Loud shouts of approval rang out from every part of the building. As Spangenberg was now in London the request was forwarded to him; he laid it before the Fetter Lane Society; the members organized the "Yorkshire Congregation"; and the "Yorkshire Congregation" set out to commence evangelistic work in earnest {May 26th, 1742.}. At the head of the band was Spangenberg himself. As soon as he arrived in Yorkshire he had a business interview with Ingham. For Spangenberg shouts of approval were not enough. He wanted everything down in black and white. A document was prepared; the Societies were summoned again; the document was laid before them; and twelve hundred Yorkshire Britons signed their names to a request that the Brethren should work among them. From that moment Moravian work in Yorkshire began. At one stroke—by a written agreement—the Societies founded by Benjamin Ingham were handed over to the care of the Moravian Church. The Brethren entered upon the task with zeal. For some months, with Spangenberg as general manager, they made their head-quarters at Smith House, a farm building near Halifax {July, 1742.}; and there, on Saturday afternoons, they met for united prayer, and had their meals together in one large room. At first they had a mixed reception. On the one hand a mob smashed the windows of Smith House; on the other, the serious Society members "flocked to Smith House like hungry bees." The whole neighbourhood was soon mapped out, and the workers stationed at their posts. At Pudsey were Gussenbauer and his wife; at Great Horton, near Bradford, Toeltschig and Piesch; at Holbeck, near Leeds, the Browns; and other workers were busy soon at Lightcliffe, Wyke, Halifax, Mirfield, Hightown, Dewsbury, Wakefield, Leeds, Wortley, Farnley, Cleckheaton, Great Gomersal, and Baildon. The Moravian system of discipline was introduced. At the head of the men were John Toeltschig and Richard Viney; at the head of the women Mrs. Pietch and Mrs. Gussenbauer; and Monitors, Servants, and Sick Waiters were appointed just as in Herrnhut. Here was a glorious field of labour; here was a chance of Church extension; and the interesting question was, what use the Brethren would make of it.

At this point Count Zinzendorf arrived in Yorkshire {Feb., 1743.}, went to see Ingham at Aberford, and soon organized the work in a way of his own which effectually prevented it from spreading. His method was centralization. At that time he held firmly to his pet idea that the Brethren, instead of forming new congregations, should rather be content with "diaspora" work, and at the same time, whenever possible, build a settlement on the Herrnhut or Herrnhaag model, for the cultivation of social religious life. At this time it so happened that the Gussenbauers, stationed at Pudsey, were in trouble; their child was seriously ill; the Count rode over to see them; and while there he noticed the splendid site on which Fulneck stands to-day. If the visitor goes to Fulneck now he can hardly fail to be struck by its beauty. He is sure to admire its long gravel terrace, its neat parterres, its orchards and gardens, and, above all, its long line of plain stately buildings facing the southern sun. But then the slope was wild and unkempt, covered over with briars and brambles. Along the crown were a few small cottages. At one end, called Bankhouse, resided the Gussenbauers. >From there the view across the valley was splendid. The estate was known as Falneck. The idea of a settlement rose before Zinzendorf's mind. The spirit of prophecy came upon him, and he named the place "Lamb's Hill." For the next few days the Count and his friends enjoyed the hospitality of Ingham at Aberford; and a few months later Ingham heard that the land and houses at Falneck were on the market. He showed himself a true friend of the Brethren. He bought the estate, gave them part of it for building, let out the cottages to them as tenants, and thus paved the way for the introduction of the Moravian settlement system into England.

For good or for evil that settlement system was soon the leading feature of the English work. The building of Fulneck began. First the Brethren called the place Lamb's Hill, then Gracehall, and then Fulneck, in memory of Fulneck in Moravia. From friends in Germany they received gifts in money, from friends in Norway a load of timber. The Single Brethren were all aglow with zeal; and on one occasion they spent the whole night in saying prayers and singing hymns upon the chosen sites. First rose the Chapel (1746), then the Minister's House and the rooms beneath and just to the east of the Chapel (1748), then the Brethren's and Sisters' Houses (1752), then the Widows' House (1763), then the Shop and Inn (1771), then the Cupola (1779), and then the Boys' Boarding School (1784-5). Thus, step by step, the long line of buildings arose, a sight unlike any other in the United Kingdom.

As the Brethren settled down in that rough Yorkshire country, they had a noble purpose, which was a rebuke to the godless and cynical spirit of the age. "Is a Christian republic possible?" asked the French philosopher, Bayle. According to the world it was not; according to the Brethren it was; and here at Fulneck they bravely resolved to put the matter to the proof. As long as that settlement existed, said they, there would be a kingdom where the law of Christ would reign supreme, where Single Brethren, Single Sisters, and Widows, would be screened from the temptations of the wicked world, where candidates would be trained for the service of the Church and her Master, where missionaries, on their way to British Colonies, could rest awhile, and learn the English language, where children, in an age when schools were scarce, could be brought up in the fear of God, and where trade would be conducted, not for private profit, but for the benefit of all. At Fulneck, in a word, the principles of Christ would be applied to the whole round of Moravian life. There dishonesty would be unknown; cruel oppression would be impossible; doubtful amusements would be forbidden; and thus, like their German Brethren in Herrnhut, these keen and hardy Yorkshire folk were to learn by practical experience that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and more delightful to work for a common cause than for a private balance at the bank.

For this purpose the Brethren established what were then known as diaconies; and a diacony was simply an ordinary business conducted, not by a private individual for his own personal profit, but by some official of the congregation for the benefit of the congregation as a whole. For example, James Charlesworth, a Single Brother, was appointed manager of a cloth-weaving factory, which for some years did a splendid trade with Portugal and Russia, kept the Single Brethren in regular employment, and supplied funds for general Church objects. As the years rolled on, the Brethren established a whole series of congregation-diaconies: a congregation general dealer's shop, a congregation farm, a congregation bakery, a congregation glove factory, and, finally, a congregation boarding-house or inn. At each diacony the manager and his assistants received a fixed salary, and the profits of the business helped to swell the congregation funds. The ideal was as noble as possible. At Fulneck daily labour was sanctified, and men toiled in the sweat of their brows, not because they wanted to line their pockets, but because they wanted to help the cause of Christ. For the sake of the Church the baker kneaded, the weaver plied his shuttle, the Single Sisters did needlework of marvellous beauty and manufactured their famous marble-paper. For many years, too, these Brethren at Fulneck employed a congregation doctor; and the object of this gentleman's existence was not to build up a flourishing practice, but to preserve the good health of his beloved Brethren and Sisters.

We must not, however, regard the Brethren as communists. James Hutton was questioned on this by the Earl of Shelburne.

"Does everything which is earned among you," said the Earl, "belong to the community?"

"No," replied Hutton, "but people contribute occasionally out of 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, Gnadenhtten, 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."