his departure from the little colony. "How are you?" said Zinzendorff. "Not very well," the poor man replied, in a hollow voice; and when the Count proceeded to speak to him in his own kind way, he burst into tears; and this was the only answer he could return. The next day, however, he came to Zinzendorff, and told him the sad tale of his woe. He remained at Herrnhüt, and continued a faithful and consistent member of the Church to the end of his days. Zinzendorff's views regarding sickness were peculiar. He believed that the affliction was sent for some special purpose, and therefore considered it the duty of the person afflicted to seek out the cause of the visitation; and when the message it conveyed had been obeyed, then he held it was right to pray for and expect healing. Several extraordinary cases of recovery resulted, we are told, from faith and prayer. Some of the Brethren thought a great deal of these cures; but the Count himself thought them strictly in keeping with the Word of God, and expressed no surprise whatever at the result. It was evidently his conviction that sickness was sent to punish and correct sin.

He now wished to release himself entirely from connexion with the State, and, if possible, get himself ordained as a minister. Under the Elector of Saxony he found many difficulties in his way; so he resolved to transfer his services to Christian VI., then about to be crowned King of Denmark. With this object he went to Copenhagen, taking with him some of the Moravian Brethren. He there had a long interview with the future king, who offered him office under his government. This however the Count declined, and his project fell through; although the young prince treated him with marked kindness and distinction; inviting him to his coronation, and conferring upon him the order of the Danebrog, an honour he had no wish to accept, but which he felt he could not decline without slighting the king. Writing to the Countess he says:-"If there is any good to be done at Court, I shall not undertake to do it; for so much time is lost in the veriest trifles, that I should not like to go before God having to answer for such a bad use of my days. and hours."

While in Denmark, he met with a pious negro named Antoine, from the Danish island of St. Thomas in the West Indies. Zinzendorff was much affected by the accounts he heard from this man of the spiritual degradation of the slaves in that and the adjacent colonies, and determined, if possible, to send out Moravian missionaries to them. To further this object, he invited the negro to visit Herrnhüt, and lay before the Brethren an account of the wretched condition of slaves at St. Thomas. Antoine, with his master's consent, willingly

accepted the invitation. The result was, that several members of the community offered themselves as missionaries; and, in the course of a year or two, about thirty had sailed for St. Thomas, Santa Crux, and St. John, and other islands in the West Indies.

sure,

Owing to the emigration from Moravia and Bohemia, the popu lation of Herrnhüt continued rapidly to increase. The authorities of those countries viewed this state of things with displeaand demanded that Zinzendorff should send back their runaway subjects to their own countries. Zinzendorff replied that all the emigrants were perfectly at liberty to return to their own country whenever they chose to do so; but considering that upon their return they would immediately be imprisoned because they were not Roman Catholics, he refused to compel them to return either to Bohemia or Moravia; and no further steps seem to have been taken in the matter.

About the same time, a great number of Protestant Bohemians fled from their own country on account of the persecutions which were then being practised against them there, and sought refuge on an estate about a league from Herrnhüt, belonging to one of Zinzendorff's aunts. She gave them a cordial reception, and soon appointed them a Lutheran pastor. Numbers of their fellow-countrymen quickly followed in their steps. This caused a good deal of uneasiness at the Court of Vienna, and a commission of enquiry was consequently opened. Herrnhüt was inspected, and all that went on there carefully investigated. After a close examination, which lasted four days, the commissioners withdrew, "touched," says Zinzendorff, "and full of affection for Herrnhüt."

The object of the commission was to ascertain how the Count had acted in reference to emigrants; whether he had endeavoured to draw them from the States of the Emperor; and what doctrines were taught, and what was the state of morality at Herrnhüt. Thus the enquiry did the Count and the Moravians much good. But unfortunately Zinzendorff's aunt was of a tyrannical and overbearing nature. Consequently she and the new settlers on her estate from Moravia did not agree long; and one day they all left her in a body, and went over to Herrnhüt, wishing to settle. This Zinzendorff could not, of course, consent to; he gave them food and shelter for a time, and endeavoured to persuade them to return. This, however, they would not do. They wandered about the country in great want and destitution. The Government again became alarmed, attributing all this to Zinzendorff, although in point of fact he had had no hand whatever in the matter, beyond giving this numerous band of wanderers a few days' food and

shelter, and strongly advising them to go back to his aunt. Nevertheless he soon received a royal mandate to sell his estates; and at the same time was given to understand, that unless he forthwith quitted the country, he would be arrested and thrown into prison. It will be recollected that upon his marriage the Count had made over all his estates to his wife, which now proved fortunate for the new Moravian community; for the property, in spite of the mandate, still remained virtually Zinzendorff's, though legally his wife's. So far he was unhurt, but he was obliged to leave Herrnhüt. He went to Tübingen, and there laid before the professors of theology a statement as to the faith and constitution of the community at Herrnhüt, with the view of ascertaining from them whether it could retain its discipline, and yet continue in connexion with the Evangelical Church. In the opinion of these theologians, he found that it could. This was a great satisfaction to him. Probably the opinion was of more importance than at this distance of time we can perceive; but certain it is that Zinzendorff spent no small amount of time and labour in endeavouring to procure the public opinion of theologians as to the Lutheran and Protestant nature of the new Moravian Church. It seems to have been a weakness of the Count's to be continually striving (and often at great pains) to prove himself in the right, before any one had intimated that he was wrong. From Tübingen he went to Ebersdorf in Lusatia, the late Elector of Saxony having died about five weeks after he had banished Zinzendorff. The new Elector was much better disposed towards him, and towards the Moravians in general, than his predecessor had been. One of the first acts of his reign was to grant to Moravian emigrants the privilege of free settlement in his states; and a short time afterwards he sent Zinzendorff formal permission to return to Herrnhüt. Zinzendorff had not long been there before he received a letter from a pious merchant at Stralsund, named Richter, asking him to procure a tutor for his family. Zinzendorff replied that he would do so, and soon presented himself to Richter under the name of Louis von Freydeck. He saw two of the chief theologians; and having obtained from them a certificate of orthodoxy, which was no doubt the object of his journey to Stralsund, he soon got ordained. Richter returned with him to Herrnhüt, and before long went out to Algeria as a missionary to the slaves. there.

At Herrnhüt great inconvenience had long been experienced owing to the absence of a bishop; for without one, Moravian ministers could not be ordained, and the consequence was that none of the missionaries who had gone out from Herrnhüt had

been ordained, so that they could neither baptize nor administer the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. To remedy this, the Count wrote to Jablouski, the oldest bishop of the Moravian Church, requesting him to confer the episcopal office upon David Nitschman, a carpenter, one of the earliest and most devoted settlers at Herrnhüt. This Jablouski, after due consideration and inquiry, consented to do, and David Nitschman was duly ordained bishop. This was a great point gained, for now missionaries were ordained before they went abroad. The tidings from the mission at St. Thomas were most discouraging; for of the eighteen who had gone out, ten had died in a short time.

As to Zinzendorff, being now ordained, he travelled and preached more than ever; but King Christian the Sixth evidently disapproved of the step he had taken in entering the ministry, and abruptly ordered him to resign the Order of the Danebrog, which he himself had lately conferred upon him. While at Cassel, the Count learnt that the king of Saxony had issued a rescript forbidding him to return to his own country. At Berlin he had several interviews with the king of Prussia, Frederick William I., who on one occasion exclaimed-"The devil could not invent a more daring lie than what I have heard about this man! He is no heretic or disturber. His only crime is that he has resigned the honours of nobility for the service of the Gospel." Zinzendorff next visited our own shores; and here he made the acquaintance of John and Charles Wesley, and for some time they held united weekly religious meetings in London. He took an active part in an association, then forming, for the instruction of negroes in the British plantations. He made the acquaintance, too, of the archbishop of Canterbury, George Whitfield, and several other eminent men. His biographer, however, says that the Moravians were too conservative to please the Dissenters, while by the Clergy of the Church of England they were confounded with the Methodists. Be that as it may, the Wesleys soon separated from the Moravians; they regarded many of their views as antinomian, and some as mystical. Disputes soon arose between the Methodists and the Moravians. The result was, that John Wesley, and eighteen or nineteen others, soon withdrew from these meetings. The last we hear of Zinzendorff is, that he directed the publication of an advertisement declaring that he and his people had no connexion with John and Charles Wesley; and concluded with one of his harmless prophecies-viz., "that they would soon run their heads against a wall." Wesley simply observed, that he would not, if he could help it, and took no further notice of the

matter.

Whitfield, however, was not so forbearing. He wrote a pamphlet against Zinzendorff, of which the latter took no notice, although urgently pressed by his friends to write a reply. In one of his later works, the Count apologises for the judgment he had given of the Wesleys and their followers.

It was a strange coincidence, that about a year and a half before Zinzendorff came to England, John Wesley should have sailed to Georgia, as a missionary, in the same vessel that conveyed some of the Moravian brethren there from Herrnhüt. Thus he had become acquainted with David Nitschman, the new Moravian bishop; Spangenberg, a pastor, an intimate friend (and also the biographer) of Zinzendorff; and several other leading men of that community. In regard to the conduct of these Moravians, Wesley says:

"I had long before observed the great seriousness of their behaviour. Of their humility they had given continual proof. If they were pushed, struck, or thrown down, they rose again and went away; but no complaint was found in their mouth. There was now an opportunity of trying whether they were delivered from the spirit of fear, as well as from that of pride, anger, and revenge. In the midst of the psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible scream began among the English. The Germans calmly sang on. I asked one of them afterwards, 'Were you not afraid?' He answered, 'I thank God, no.' I asked, 'But were not your women and children afraid ?' He replied mildly, 'No; our women and children are not afraid to die.'

The Wesleys unhesitatingly ascribe their conversion to God to a German Moravian named Peter Böhler, whose acquaintance they made in England after their return from Georgia; as they themselves admit, when they went to America to try to convert the heathen, they were not really converted themselves.

Leaving England, the Count returned to Berlin, where, with the consent of the king, he was consecrated a bishop by Jablouski and David Nitschman. Soon afterwards he was condemned to perpetual banishment from Herrnhüt. So he remained at Berlin, preaching and organising fresh missionary labours. He purchased an estate at Marienborn, and called it Herrnhäag. There he left the Countess, and set sail for the Island of St. Thomas, with the view of encouraging and inspecting the Missions. On his arrival, he found, to his great surprise, that the Governor had thrown the Moravian Brethren into prison, under the charge, which was true, that they refused to take an oath. Zinzendorff at once procured their