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GERMAN RELIGIOUS LIFE
IN
COLONIAL TIMES

GERMAN
RELIGIOUS LIFE
IN
COLONIAL TIMES
BY LUCY
LUCY FORNEY
66
FORNEY
BITTINGER
AUTHOR OF THE GERMANS IN COLONIAL TIMES"
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
7. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1906
BF
025 096 523
563
362
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT CompANY
Published, January, 1907
Og app 0 9 E. $,
Reel
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192095
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A. M. F.
FOREWORD.
It is hoped that this caption, derived from the Ger-
man Vorwort, instead of the more usual "Preface,"
may not seem affected in a book treating of matters
Germanic.
The work deals with much the same subject as that
of my earlier book, "The Germans in Colonial Times."
But it is specifically confined to an account of the reli-
gious life of the same period and people. A better title
would have been "Church Life," were it not that the
restriction of the term "church" to the three tolerated
confessions-Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic-
makes this title seem to confine the subject of the
work to them, whereas the story of the sects forms a
large part of it, as well in importance as in bulk.
It has been my aim to make the history a con-
nected story, not following the thread of each separate
denomination's annals, but rather trying to look over
the whole field and narrate the general course of eccle-
siastical life among the Germans in America during the
Colonial era.
LUCY FORNEY BITTINGER.
SEWICKLEY, PENNSYLVANIA.
JULY 9, 1906.
CONTENTS
**
CHAPTER
I RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS IN GERMANY
II THE SEPARATISTS.
•
III THE CHURCH PEOPLE.
PAGE
ΙΙ
·
24
53
IV THE MORAVIANS
79
V THE METHODISTS
94
VI THE GERMAN CHURCHES DURING THE REVOLUTION
107
CONCLUSION.
134
GERMAN RELIGIOUS LIFE
IN COLONIAL TIMES
CHAPTER I
RELIGIOUS CONDITIONS IN GERMANY
THE history of religious life in this country, as it has
manifested itself among the English-speaking portion of
our people, has been abundantly studied. In particular,
of making various books about the Puritans of New Eng-
land and their spiritual descendants, there is no end. But
the same life as it has manifested itself among the Ger-
man Americans has been much neglected, save on the
part of denominational annalists who have often shed
more heat than light upon history. Some account of
German religious life, especially in the Colonial period
of our history, would seem to be worth attempting.
In order to understand German religious life we
must understand the Germany from which it took its
rise; not the heroic Germany of the Reformation era,
not the powerful Empire of our own time, but the very
different land of the eighteenth century. Between that
Germany and the other two lies the abyss of the Thirty
Years' War, and it was out of this pit of abasement and
suffering that the first German emigrants came to this
country.
II
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
When we, at the present day, speak of Germany and
the Germans, we unconsciously think of the great world
power which now bears that name, the land of Goethe
and Schiller, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Bismarck
and Moltke. But the Germany from which the Col-
onial Germans emigrated was one in which misgovern-
ment and a shameful yet shameless subserviency to
French influence were the chief characteristics of its
rulers. Its literary light was the feeble glimmer of Klop-
stock and Herder and Gellert, with Leibnitz and Les-
sing as the only great names. Music,-devoted largely
to sacred themes, under "the two glorious Saxons," Bach
and Handel-was the highest exemplification of art.
Painting in the land of Dürer was then represented by
Raphael Mengs, while architecture lingered among the
relics of Gothic grandeur which had chanced to escape
the destruction of the Thirty Years' War, manifesting
itself only in the tasteless exuberance of the Rococo
style, imitated from France. The magnificent courage
and freedom of the Reformers, those contemporaries of
Huss and Luther and Zwingli, had paled and fallen into
a dry scholasticism against which mysticism and, later,
Pietism, were effectual though sometimes extravagant
protests.
Yet it was in the religious field that the best and deep-
est German thinking was going on, an illustration of
which is the fact that of all the literary productions of
the eighteenth century, the best are the hymns. Gel-
lert, dull and full of mannerisms in his fables, becomes
inspired to the best strains of which he is capable in his
12
Religious Conditions in Germany
religious poetry; while Gerhardt, who wrote nothing but
religious poetry and that "under circumstances when
most men would weep rather than sing," produced
a great body of deep and exquisite verse. Profes-
sional theologians, such as Arnold, Thomasius and
Bengel, were men of deep erudition, though they cer-
tainly did not wear their learning lightly and imparted
it in the terrible diction of their time-dialectic German
interlarded with Latin or French words, constructed as
only a German Gelehrter can construct and as only his
countrymen can read.
A powerful influence to keep alive the flame of piety
in those degenerate times was the work of that orthodox
mystic Johann Arndt, author of the famous book "von
Wahren Christenthum" which was for a century and a
half the favorite reading of pious people all over Ger-
many. Born a generation after the Reformation took
its rise, dying in the early years of the Thirty Years'
War, his book strengthened and edified the people
through the period we treat of and in large degree
formed the type of religious character in that period
before Pietism took up the work. His chief thesis is
that a man's life is the main part of his creed. Repent-
ance means a change of heart and must show itself in
love to God and one's neighbor. Theological orthodoxy
is very well, but he taught-and was bitterly persecuted
and vilified for teaching it—the important thing is to
evidence faith by works. This is good Lutheran doc-
trine, that of the Augsburg Confession, as he himself
I Winkworth's "Christian Singers of Germany."
VerM
13
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
proved and reiterated,-but doctrine which many the-
ologians of his day treated as though it were the sum of
all iniquity. Nevertheless the common people heard
him gladly; his book, arranged for reading through the
church year and for catechetical instruction, was re-
garded as almost inspired, and modern editions still con-
tain the account of its "Fourteen Miraculous Preserva-
tions" during the Thirty Years' War. Bound with a
beautiful collection of prayers, or rather devout medita-
tions, called by the quaint title "Paradise Garden of the
Christian Soul" and illustrated with innumerable relig-
ious "emblems" of every conceivable kind, it is still
popular and beloved among pious Germans, especially
the Lutherans.
Jakob Boehme, the mystical shoemaker of Görlitz, had
somewhat of the same influence upon Separatists which
Arndt had upon the orthodox church people. His the-
osophy was a strange mixture of alchemy and the doc-
trine of signatures, with a certain anticipation of the
Swedenborgian doctrine of "correspondence ;" but he
wrote even after his miraculous "illuminations," in the
crabbed and obscure style of an uneducated man and his
"Aurora" never had the popularity, as it had also not a
tithe of the power, of Arndt's simple, beautiful, practical
book.
Another influence, though somewhat more limited
than either Arndt's or Boehme's, was the imaginative
production of Pastor Andreä, a Lutheran clergyman of
Würtemberg, a contemporary of Arndt. Andreä wrote
the account of a crusader, Christian Rosencrantz, who
14
Religious Conditions in Germany
was supposed to have been initiated into the religious
order of the Rosicrucians. His followers, afterhaving
existed for centuries in secret, now desired the world to
profit by their occult powers and would be glad to
communicate with like-minded people. It was, in fact, a
pious mystification designed to ridicule astrology and al-
chemy and call attention to various things which Andreä
thought might be amended or undertaken by such a soci-
ety as his fancied Rosicrucians; but the public was
attracted by the magic and mystery, and not at all by
the reformatory schemes; so the author never lifted the
veil from his society which had grown, like Frankenstein's
monster, too powerful for its creator. To Arndt, whose
attention was attracted by the account of the society,
and who wrote for further information, Andreä acknowl-
edged the imaginary nature of the Rosicrucian Brother-
hood.
Separatism in all of its many forms was especially rife
in the Rhine Country, from which most of our early >>
German emigration came. It varied all the way from
the pious opinions held or taught by some pastor or
writer, and perhaps his little circle of followers or
readers, to societies approaching monasticism in their
constitution, or the larger and more formally organized
movement, which was called by its enemies Anabaptist;
this had, apparently, no connection with the socialistic
and secular one known as the Peasants' War, but took its
rise during Zwingli's lifetime in Switzerland, and at first
placed little stress on the time or mode of baptism.
Persecution scattered it far and wide; the disorder of
15
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
Münster, although the only instance of fanaticism among
the German Anabaptists, gave it a bad repute. It was
afterwards reformed by Simon Menno, and from the
middle of the sixteenth century his followers were called
Mennonites, which designation supplanted the older
one of Anabaptists.
The most important factor in the religious life of Ger---
many, however, was the movement called Pietism; this
grew to be powerful over the whole nation, in all ranks,
among Catholics and Protestants. It took its name from
the treatise of "Pia Desideria," published in 1675 by
Spener, who is often called its founder. But Pietism
was too large a thing to be founded by any one man or
one book, and must have been existent long before it
thus became crystallized by Spener's impulse. The
mysticism of Boehme, Andreä and scores of others; the
practical piety taught in Arndt's "True Christianity;"
the insistence of the Anabaptists upon purity in life;
the severe puritanic discipline in the Reformed church of
Zwingli—all these were caught up into one great whole,
to color religious and secular life in Germany through
more than a century following the publication of the
"Pia Desideria.'
Philip Jacob Spener was an Alsatian-as he himse f
always proudly insisted, "a Strasburger." The fact th
he was connected by birth and education with the Luth-
eran Church of this land, so far from the original seat of
the Saxon Reformation, so near Calvinistic Switzer-
land, proved a powerful influence in his religious devel-
opment. Studying in many universities, learned in
ག་མ་
16
Religious Conditions in Germany
many subjects and with considerable experience of the
world, he ever remained the typical, shy, awkward
scholar. His meeting with Labadie while studying in
Geneva was probably the most important of all outward
influences upon his future beliefs and practices. Jean
de Labadie was a Frenchman of noble family, first a
Jesuit, then a Jansenist; so popular that crowds of
adherents followed him from one end of France to the
other. Not desiring to break with Catholicism, many of
whose characteristics he loved to the end of his life, he
entered, or was thrust by Roman persecution, in his
fortieth year, into the Reformed Church.
On his way
from the Principality of Orange, now besieged by Louis
XIV, to take refuge in London, he was called by the
authorities of Geneva to be their pastor. "Thus was
Labadie, the second Reformer of the French Reformed
Church after Calvin, involuntarily transplanted to the
city of Calvin, this most favored centre of influence for
the Christian life in France, Italy, Germany and Eng-
land.' Here Spener first met him, frequented his
preaching and learned in particular two things which
Labadie had introduced from the Jansenists of Port
Royal into the Protestant church-the value of meetings
for Bible study and the formation of little circles of
especially enlightened or pious people which should be
a centre of light to others on a lower plane of Christian
life. These became the cardinal principles of Spener's
Pietism. These he subsequently introduced into his
church in Frankfort and these he advised in his famous
1 Goebel, Vol. II, p. 199.
" 1
2
17
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
book "Pia Desideria," in the preparation of which he
made free use of the writings of Labadie.
Frankfort might be called the metropolis of the Ger-
man Rhineland,—“ The old Imperial city, the centre of
the German Empire, important for its commerce, the
seat of the book trade and of intellectual intercourse."1
It was also a metropolis for the district of the Wetterau,
afterwards so famous for its separatism. Here Spener
"became the centre of Christian life in the Protestant
church of Western Germany." He founded many little
circles for the study of Scripture; he introduced catechi-
zation for the instruction of young people in Christian
truth preparatory to their confirmation and-most
offensive of all-believed that in all churches, even the
Reformed, there might be found truth and wise exam-
ples of Christian living. He even went so far as to
desire a union between the warring Lutheran and Re-
formed churches. Hatred, vilification, persecution,
never destroyed in him the spirit of faith, love and work;
and Pietism became the saving salt, first of the Luther-
ans and afterwards to a large extent of all the German
churches and sects. After twenty years of grandly suc-
cessful religious work in Frankfort, Spener was called
to Dresden to be the spiritual father of the Elector
there; but he found his position at the Saxon court so
uncomfortable and the Elector so indignant at his
courageous reproofs, that he was glad to accept a call
to Berlin, where, after another period of twenty years as
laborious and fruitful as his Frankfort pastorate, he died.
¹ Goebel, Vol. II p. 557.
18
Religious Conditions in Germany
The attempt to found collegia pietatis in Leipzig
under the leadership of Francke and others brought
on persecution, insomuch that the brilliant professor
Thomasius, who had defended these leaders, was
obliged to seek safety from a heresy trial in flight. A
consequence of this flight was the founding of the
- University of Halle, which became the headquarters of
Pietists and Pietism. Spener had great influence here,
though he was far from approving of all that was done
and warned the heads of the University against certain
extravagances. But it was immensely popular from the
first, the concourse of students being second only to
that resulting from Luther's teaching at Wittenberg one
hundred and fifty years before. From Halle Pietism
spread to other universities and to the little courts. By
the opening of the eighteenth century it was preached
from village pulpits, the very strongholds of conserva-
tism. Francke, Spener's son-in-law, became in a manner
his successor in the leadership of the movement and it
was here at Halle, too, that Francke gave it its new
direction in the way of merciful works. The famous
Halle Orphanage and the Bible Institute, founded in.
fulfilment of a vow by Baron von Canstein, were located
in the Saxon city. Canstein's name illustrates the fact
that Pietism found many of its adherents among the so-
called upper classes-nobles, university graduates,
clergymen and writers. Separatism and particularly
the sects, on the contrary, found their adherents
among artisans, weavers (who had been heretics by
trade from pre-reformation times), shoemakers like
{
19
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Jakob Boehme, bakers like Beissel, saddlers like
Rock.
Many of the small principalities which were so abun-
dant in the Rhineland exercised the right which, under
the loosely constituted Empire, some of the smallest
jurisdictions possessed, of protecting sects which were
not tolerated elsewhere. Eminent among these pietistic:
courts were those of Isenburg-Büdingen and Wittgen-
stein.
Sometimes the rulers made a sort of religious pet
of some conspicuously "pious" person;-for example a
certain duke was wont to act as coachman, driving
pietistic artisans' wives in his ducal carriage. But such
incidents were mostly later excrescences of the cult.
In time Pietism grew narrower and sometimes de-✓
veloped an intolerance of its own. Its separatistic ten-
dency cannot be denied, although Spener was able per-
sonally to bring back to his Frankfort church nearly all
of those who in the excess of their early zeal felt the
great church" too coldly formal for them. But not all
of Spener's followers had the broad-mindedness, the
learning and the charity which distinguished their great
leader, and their frequent schisms can neither be denied
nor excused. The narrowness of Pietism, its sublime
selfishness of interest in personal salvation only, its self-
righteousness even in the midst of professions of ex-
travagant humility, its objections to innocent customs
and amusements, its liability to give rise to cant and
hypocrisy-all these faults may be admitted without
detracting from the great and real service which it did,
not only to the Lutheran but to the whole Protestant
20
}
Religious Conditions in Germany
church;-not only to the religious but to the national
life. The Pietists were the first to make Christian love
and pity for all men important, or sympathy with the
poor fashionable. They introduced schools and orphan-
ages and the care of the poor. Afterwards leading
philosophers like Leibnitz tried to improve the wordly
condition of the masses. Goethe in his "Hermann and
Dorothea," first proved to the Germans that the life of
the common people is fit material for poetry. The close
of the Thirty Years' War had, by a natural reaction,
produced a class of rude vicious roisterers among the *
upper classes such as disgraced the English Restora-
tion;-men who cared neither for God nor man, least of
all for their poor subjects or dependents. Pietism stood
for the rights of all as children of a common Father.
Woman, too often regarded as a toy or drudge, was
honored among the Pietists as were the prophetesses
whom Tacitus described among the Germans of his day.
The earliest truly national movements in which the
people without the initiative of princes took part, were
the benevolences of Halle; the orphan houses there were
the first objects for which a public subscription was taken
in Germany. All this tenderness of heart could easily
turn into the gushing sentimentality to which the Teu-
tonic soul is naturally prone. It inculcated a subser-
viency toward "all in authority" which was not needed
in an already servile people; it produced a peculiar dia-
lect that hardened into cant when religious matters were
mentioned and it fostered a tone of sentimentality
in secular things as well. Probably Freytag is right
21
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
when he says that "Werther is a descendant of
Pietism."
In purely literary matters this form of practical religion
made for a purer German style with less parade of
erudition in classical quotation.
Thomasius is perhaps
the best type of the literary man produced by this way
of thinking. 'Talented, easily moved, fond of a fight,
of applause; exciting everyone by his restless activity;
for Pietists against persecuting orthodoxy and equally
against fanatical superstition; he fought for toleration
and morality against every sort of superstition or fanat-
icism." The influence of Spener's later reformation
upon the hymnology of the period was not particularly
marked or distinguished; some good writers of hymns
and devotional works,-Rodigast, Laurenti, and Bo-
gatzky, the author of the "Golden Treasury,"-made
up the sum of their success in this line of work.
That Pietism prepared the way for Rationalism is a
favorite reproach of orthodox writers, and probably it is
true to the extent that the study of theology and Scrip-
ture would naturally lead to freedom of investigation
and consequent free thought. Thus Bengel, author of
the much studied commentary, the " Gnomon," and
Semler, the earliest of the higher critics, were both of
the pietistic school. But after all deductions are made,
all unfortunate tendencies, all extravagances of the move-
ment pointed out, the truth remains that it was neces-
sary, if the fruits of the Reformation were to be anything
but dead scholasticism and formalism, that the waters of
German religious life should be troubled by a strong
22
Religious Conditions in Germany
angel of the Lord. That messenger of God was Pietism.
>
NOTE: The authorities used in the preparation of the introductory chap-
ter on the condition of Germany are first and foremost Freytag :
"Bilder
aus der deutschen Vergangenheit" (Leipzig, 1898), Vols. III and IV,
and Goebel: "Geschichte des Christlichen Lebens in Westphal-Rheinischen
Pfalz' (Coblentz, 1852-62), particularly Vol. II. The works of E.
Belfort Bax : "The Peasants' War" (London 1899), and "Rise and
Fall of the Anabaptists" (London and New York, 1903), give a thorough
understanding of those earlier movements, though disfigured by personal
prejudice against church leaders. Kurtz: "Church History," translated by
McPherson (New York, 1894), is exhaustive, though dull. Vaughn's
"Hours with the Mystics" (third edition, 1879), has copious extracts
from mystical writings. A study of Arndt's "Wahres Christenthum," of
which there are many editions, is indispensable to an understanding of the
religious thought of the period. So is the secular literature; Klopstock's
"Messiah," the writings of Wieland and Herder and some of Goethe's
works (the "Confessions of a Fair Saint" in "Wilhelm Meister"),
Miss Winkworth's "Christian Singers of Germany" (Philadelphia, 1869),
with the hymns of the time, is valuable. Hedges' "Hours with the Ger-
man Classics" (Boston, 1892), and Kuno Francke's "Social Forces in
German Literature," give helpful sidelights. The "List of Works Con-
sulted" in the preparation of my earlier book, "The Germans in Colonial
Times" (Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1901), gives titles of many other books
and articles bearing more or less remotely on the subject of this work which
may be serviceable to anyone wishing to make a more detailed study of the
matter.
23
CHAPTER II
THE SEPARATISTS
THE first German emigration to America was of
Separatists and the earliest emigrants were nearly all
of this religious persuasion. The Separatists were of
two sorts: those who separated themselves from the
organized churches, the Lutheran and Reformed, and
those who did not come out from any church, but
formed groups or loosely cohering sects of their own.
The latter kind were most commonly thrust out by per-
secution; the former, the "churchly Separatists," as they
are called by Goebel in his "Geschichte des Christlichen
Lebens," often left the Babylon of some established
church from an exaggerated opinion of ecclesiastical
corruption and their own superior righteousness.
First of the Separatist emigration in point of time,
number and importance were the Mennonites. These
followers of Menno Simon had had surcease from severe
persecution for more than a century when Penn made
known among the Dutch Mennonites the plans for a
colony of religious freedom. The Princes of the House
of Orange, beginning with William the Silent, had found
the "Weaponless Christians"—their chosen name—so
peaceable, harmless and industrious that they had granted
the sect a toleration expressly denied Anabaptists by the
Peace of Westphalia. Thus Holland became the natural
24
The Separatists
refuge of the Mennonites, and the centre of their
church;—from that land went out help to the poor
brethren in Germany; there were printed their Bibles
and hymn books and Confession of Faith, and the
ponderous history of their martyrs.
In Germany they were settled in the Pfalz, invited
thither by the elector, Karl Ludwig, in 1671; also in
Elsass, reinforced by "the Switzers which were fled thither
from Zurich." 1 These Anabaptists of the Palatinate
were said to be industrious, supporting their own pastors
and sick members, but not in communion with other
Mennonists. "Most Protestants are very willing to
employ them, because they are sober, industrious and
understand all trades except such machines and instru-
ments as are made use of in war." 2
The chief seat of the German Mennonites, however,
was Crefeld, very near the Holland boundary; it became
in some sort a Mennonite capital. The prosperity of
the town comes from the industries brought thither by
Mennonite weavers. Crefeld was a centre for many and
divers Separatists;—there the Labadists were numerous;
the sweet-spirited mystic Hochman von Hochenau, the
French nobleman and hermit, de Marsay, the saintly
hymn-writer, Tersteegen, and many others came and
went, or lived in Crefeld, or wrote to religious friends
there. But the most important visitor to Crefeld-im-
portant for the purposes of this narrative-was the rich,
¹ Preface to the Mennonite Confession of Faith, reprinted by Andrew
Bradford in Philadelphia, 1727.
2 Ott, quoted in Picart, Religious Ceremonies, Vol. VII, London, 1737.
25
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
gifted young English Quaker who came there repeat-
edly, preached to large congregations of Mennonites and
so interested them that a small band decided to cross
the wide Atlantic to their powerful friend's new province,
and there seek worldly and spiritual prosperity.
On William Penn's second "religious visit" to Ger-
many, he became acquainted with a choice circle of
Pietists in Frankfort, a little collegia pietatis, which met
in the Saalhof, the mansion of one of its wealthier mem-
bers. Among its members were many noble, wealthy
and learned people, but the only one who concerns our
story was the young Franconian doctor of laws, Francis
Daniel Pastorius. He was fascinated by Penn, a most
attractive and charming gentleman; but Pastorius and
his friends of the Saalhof were especially delighted by
the prospect of forming a colony in the American wilder-
ness, far from the wickedness, strifes, and persecutions
which distressed the godly in Europe, and they eagerly
entered into the project of purchasing land. Twenty-
five thousand acres were bought in the American forest.
Pastorius was made the agent of the "Frankfort Com-
pany," and sailed for the New World on the ship
America, to prepare the way for the coming of the rest
of the Frankfort friends.
But alas, for the fallibility of human expectations!
Not one of the Saalhof circle ever joined their agent
Pastorius in Pennsylvania. Instead, there came in the
autumn of 1683 on the Concord, a little company of
energetic Mennonite weavers from Crefeld, to whom
Penn had also sold land in his province and who did not
26
The Separatists
intrust their affairs to any agent, but went themselves to
take possession.
There were thirty-three of these " Pennsylvania Pil-
grims," as Whittier has sung them; they were nearly
all connected by blood and marriage, and belonged to
the Mennonite sect. The Concord had, as an English
Quaker who was a fellow passenger tells us, “a very
comfortable passage." Shortly after arriving their land
was surveyed for them and, meeting in the cave where
Pastorius was lodged on the river bank, the Crefeld
friends drew lots for the ground they were to occupy and
Germantown was founded.
Pastorius says:
"It could
not be described, nor would it be believed by coming
generations in what want and need, and with what Chris-
tian contentment and persistent industry this German-
town-ship started.” “Want and need" soon gave way
before the persistent industry of the Mennonite colonists.
Yearly they received accessions from home; the immi-
grants were industrious, often men of substance or of
learning; and all cheerful, courageous and God-fearing.
A year after the beginning of the "Germantown-ship,"
a very different sort of colony landed in Lord Baltimore's
new province of Maryland-the Labadists of Bohemia
Manor. After leaving successively the Jesuit order and
the Catholic church, Labadie had separated himself from
the Reformed church as well and headed a little com-
munity of his own. For a time the Labadists enjoyed
the protection of the Princess Elizabeth, the Abbess of
Herford, but their enthusiastic excesses drove them from
this asylum. They then went to a nobleman's estate,
27
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Wiewaert, in Holland, where they soon found themselves
straitened to support so large a community, and they
looked about for a place to which to send a colony.
Two of their number, Sluyter and Dankers, went to spy
out the land in America. They made some friends and
converts, notably Pieter Beyaert, the ancestor of the
Bayard family, and Ephraim Hermann, son of Augus-
tine Hermann, the Lord of Bohemia Manor in Mary-
land.
The younger Hermann procured land for them
from his unwilling father, and a colony was founded
there in 1683, which never exceeded 100 men, women
and children in numbers, lapsed woefully from the high
plane of Labadie's teaching and perished utterly, in the
early years of the eighteenth century. The whole epi-
sode is scarcely worth mention, did it not show how
widespread was the drawing towards the new world of
religious freedom among the sectaries and Separatists of
the old world.
Meanwhile Pastorius and his Mennonite fellow towns-
men were so far prospered that they had means to
build a church,-at first probably a Quaker meeting
house; but presently they decided that "although they
did not agree, since at this time the most were still
Quakers, nevertheless they found it good to have exer-
cises together" and presently ordained William Rutting-
hausen as their preacher. Thus the little Mennonite
flock increased and multiplied, and as the land was
gradually taken up, daughter churches were established
in other settlements around.
In 1688 there went out from four of these Germantown
28
The Separatists
colonists to the Quaker "Monthly Meeting" the first
public protest made on this continent against the
holding of slaves. It was immediately stifled in the
meeting, for English Friends had not then the tender
conscience of German Christians; that protest was un-
known save to a few antiquarians for almost two cent-
uries; nevertheless it was the brave and unselfish begin-
ning of a great moral conflict, and "when hereafter men
trace analytically the causes which led to Gettysburg
and Appomattox they will begin with the tender con-
sciences of the linen weavers
the linen weavers and husbandmen of
Germantown.
!! 1
¹ Pennypacker's Settlement of Germantown, p. 145. Apparently this
tender conscience among the Mennonites lasted until John Woolman's
time, for he notes in his account of a religious journey in 1758: "A friend
gave me some account of a religious society among the Dutch, called Men-
nonists, and amongst other things related a passage in substance as follows:
One of the Mennonists having acquaintance with a man of another society at
a considerable distance, and being with his wagon on business near the
house of his said acquaintance, and night coming on, he had thoughts of
putting up with him, but passing by his fields and observing the distressed
appearance of his slaves, he kindled a fire in the woods hard by and lay
there that night. His said acquaintance hearing where he had lodged, and
afterwards meeting the Mennonist, told him of it, adding he should have
been heartily welcome at his house, and from their acquaintance in former
times wondered at his conduct in that case. The Mennonist replied, Ever
since I lodged by thy field I have wanted an opportunity to speak with
thee. I had intended to come to thy house for entertainment, but seeing
thy slaves at their work, and observing the manner of their dress, I had no
liking to come and partake with thee.' He then admonished him to use
them with more humanity, and added: As I lay by the fire that night, I
thought that as I was a man of substance thou wouldst have received me
freely; but if I had been as poor as one of thy slaves, and had no power to
help myself, I should have received from thy hand no kinder usage than
they.'" (Journal. Boston ed. 1872, p. 122.)
C
29
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Among the additions to the colony was one of
strange and pathetic interest. In 1694 there came to
Germantown a blind old man led by his aged wife. On
inquiry it appeared that he was a Mennonist and so a
collection was made for him by the preacher Rutting-
hausen, a lot was given him, a little house built and a
tree planted in front of it. How much of his story was
known at the time did not appear; but we now know
that just before Oliver Cromwell's death a Dutch Men-
nonite named Cornelis Plockhoy sent him two commu-
nications, in which were set forth the plans of a Chris-
tian commonwealth wherein church and state should be
wholly separate, where rich and poor should be on an
equality of labor, and where "no lordship or servile
slavery shall burden our company." The death of Crom-
well and the disorders of the Restoration put an end to
any hopes Plockhoy might have had of help from the
English rulers for realizing his dream. He returned to
his Dutch home, and thence in 1662, led out a colony
of twenty-five people, Mennonites like their leader, to
"the Valley of the Swans" in New Netherlands.
The site was not ill-chosen, although, indeed, a col-
ony led thither thirty years before had been exterminated
by the Indians, the bones of the massacred being still
scattered on the shore. Nor was Plockhoy's scheme a
visionary or fanatic one ;-the modern reader is struck
by his broadmindedness, his astonishing forecast of the
most advanced modern social conditions. His proj-
ect proves the intellectual ability of the Netherland
¹Now Lewes, Delaware.
30
The Separatists
Mennonites. But the fates were against him. When, as a
result of the war between the Dutch and English, New
Netherlands was lost to the former, the English governor
of New York sent a boat to the Valley of the Swans,
demolished the settlement and carried off "what be-
longed to the Quaking Society of Plockhoy to a very
naile." The fate of the settlers is still a mystery;
but the blind old man who found refuge at German-
town in 1694 after more than three decades of trackless
wanderings was Cornelis Plockhoy.
In this same year there came to Germantown another
band of settlers not in the least like this gifted and hap-
less prophet, nor like the staid and sensible burghers
who made constant addition to the number and effi-
ciency of the community. These were the students of
Jakob Boehme, the so-called Rosicrucians, the commu-
nity of the "Woman in the Wilderness," the Hermits of
the Wissahickon. By these several names are they
known to posterity; but little that is trustworthy is known
of them, their life or their opinions. The community
was first gathered by a pastor of Würtemberg, Zimmer-
man by name, of whose learning and piety Gerard
Croese, the Quaker historian, speaks warmly. Several
university men, clergymen, teachers and students, were
attracted by Zimmerman and desired to depart with him
from those Babilonish coasts, to these American Plan-
tations
wherein they might mind this one thing
to wit: to show with unanimous consent their Faith and
Love in the Spirit in converting of people, but at
the same time to sustain their bodies by their daily
31
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
labour." The Hermits of the Wissahickon were not very
successful in "showing Love," for after Zimmerman's
death-which occurred on the eve of the embarkation
from Rotterdam-the new head of the community,
Koster, on the voyage over, excommunicated, another
member, Falkner, then started a rival society which he
named “The House of Peace." This having disintegrated
he joined the secession from the Quakers led by George
Keith, but found himself not wanted there; finally he
sailed back to Europe, where he taught the numerous.
languages which he knew and "maintained stoutly that he
would never die and came pretty near keeping his word,
since he reached the age of ninety-eight years and
retained his health and vivacity until the last."
Kelpius, who was chosen head of the hermit society
instead of the erratic Koster, was a learned, devout and
lovely character, but died young, and then the society of
the Woman in the Wilderness fell to pieces. Several
scattered members of the community continued a her-
mit existence near Germantown for many years, teach-
ing a little school, practising alchemy, herb doctoring,
casting nativities; or following the more worldly craft of
book-binding, but above all, studying Jakob Boehme's
theosophical writings. The Falkner brothers, the most.
clear-headed of these mystics, soon left the community
and became useful ministers of the Lutheran church.
The Hermits of the Wissahickon, as a community, were
nearly without influence on the religious life of Pennsyl-
vania; but they deserve notice as straws which show
¹ Contemporary letter in possession of Governor Pennypacker.
32
The Separatists
what way the Separatistic wind blew in those times.
Their quaint, old-world rites and supposed Rosicrucian
opinions have given rise to much popular interest and
much imaginative, and inaccurate, writing.
Meantime the colonists of Germantown had founded
a town government, which died of inanition in a short
time, since the religious principles of Mennonites did
not permit them to take part in government. They
built themselves a church, and started a school, taught
by Pastorius, and for which he wrote and published a
primer, the first original school-book printed in Pennsyl-
vania. A colony of German Friends, Quaker converts
made by William Ames and visited by Penn, came over
-the only Quakers of Teutonic nationality—and placed
the name of their village, Kreigsheim (near Worms) in
the form of Cresheim in the nomenclature of German-
town. Later, German Mennonites of the Amish variety
came from the Palatinate, though they held no fellow-
ship with the Dutch followers of Menno, having excom-
municated the latter on the burning question of the
rightfulness of wearing buttons instead of hooks and
eyes. The "ban" of which Mennonites have always
made great use, considering that they are a peace sect,
was freely employed by many sects of the Mennonites.
against one another.
A notable number of books were written in the Ger-
mantown colony from its earliest years, which goes far
to contradict the impression of the first Teutonic settle-
ment in America being one of "German boors
quote Franklin's unhappy expression-or, as exclusively
-to
3
33
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
composed of simple weavers and farmers. Of those con-
nected with the colony as "promoters," to borrow a
modern word, or as actual settlers, sixteen "wrote books
and produced literary labors, some of them of magni-
tude and importance."¹ Here also was begun the weav-
ing of linen and of cloth and the making of paper. The
little town was the metropolis of German America, even
long after losing its Mennonite and Quaker coloring, or
Separatistic tendencies. Thither came the German set-
tlers direct after their landing; from it went out the set-
tlers who gradually spread over Montgomery, Lancaster
and Berks Counties.
2
Of one of the earliest settlers, said to be Kurtz, this
legend has been preserved: "In the year 1720 a thou-
sand acres were offered to an influential member of the
Amish faith by the proprietary agent, but he refused the
grant saying: 'It is beyond my desire as also beyond
my ability to clear; if clear, beyond my ability to culti-
vate; if cultivated, it would yield more than my family
can consume; and as the rules of our society forbid the
disposal of the surplus, I cannot accept of your liberal
offer, but you may divide it among my married chil-
dren who at present reside with me. If this was really
Kurtz, the first ironmaster of Pennsylvania—having
built a furnace on the Octoraro in 1726—he evidently
had not the usual objection of his sect to engaging in
other occupations than farming.
}
¹ See Pennypacker's Settlement of Germantown for a list of these authors,
p. 290, and reproductions of many title pages.
2 See Redmond Coningham's MS. "History of the Mennonists and Am-
ish," in possession of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.
34
The Separatists
It was in 1727 that the project, long before mooted at
Germantown, of republishing the Mennonite Confession.
of Faith was carried into effect. The elders signing it
were three from Germantown, five from "Shipack," five
from "Canastoge," two from Manatany and one from
Great Swamp;-these names indicating the places in
which the sect had organized churches. We know that
1
from 1711 to 1732 the committee "on foreign needs" of
Mennonites at Amsterdam were constantly giving help
to distressed brethren of the faith who desired to go to
Pennsylvania. At length the committee abandoned the
work in despair, as too great for them; but the emigrants
were not stopped thereby, nor did help from private
sources cease. We cannot estimate the numbers of
"defenceless Christians" who took refuge in Pennsyl-
vania, save by the fact that at the close of the eighteenth
century, the American Mennonites reported to their
brethren in Holland between two and three hundred
communities scattered over Pennsylvania and in the
Valley of Virginia.²
¹ Dr. de Hoop Scheffer of Amsterdam, translated in Pennypacker's His-
torical and Biographical Essays.
2 The earliest of these bands was the little knot of persecuted Menno-
nites ejected from Berne, parted from their wives and children at Mann-
heim on the Palatinate and liberated on reaching the Netherlands. The
Mennonites at Nymwegen were much touched by the sufferings and
patience of these exiles and willingly helped them, first to return to the
Palatinate to their families if possible, then to emigrate to Pennsylvania.
These were perhaps the Swiss Mennonites for whom de Graffenried sought
an asylum in North Carolina, and some of them came under the leadership
of Hans Herr and Martin Kündig to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania
and were the forerunners of the large Mennonite emigration there in later
years.
35
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Sometime before the publication of the Christian Con-
fession, as it is called, there arrived in Penn's province
the forerunners of another Separatist sect-the largest
organized body of them outside the Mennonites. These
were the people called Dunkards or Dunkers; Germans
of their time named them Schwarzenau Taüfer, or Tunk-
ers, from a familiar word meaning to dip;-this, of
course, referred to their practice of immersion in baptism.
The Dunkards were often confused with the Mennonites
in earlier times, but they were quite distinct in origin and
history, their similarity extending no further than that
both were organized Separatist bodies, had a "testimony'
against infant baptism and war, and that both were strong
in the region of Crefeld, the "Separatist capital."
))
In studying the origin of the Dunkers (to give them
their best-known and more accurate English name), we
are brought face to face with the lovely character of
Hochmann von Hochenau-a character and history so
representative of the best and noblest in churchly Sepa-
ratism that a short study of it may be edifying as well as
instructive.
Ernst Christopher Hochmann von Hochenau was born
in 1670 of a noble Saxon family. He was brought up a
Lutheran, went to the newly-founded University of Halle
to hear the lectures of the exiled Professor Thomasius,
was converted there through the instrumentality of the
elder Francke, and afterwards spent some time at the
other Pietistic university of Giessen, under the brilliant
and learned Separatist Gottfried Arnold. If these names
show the influence under which he was educated, those
36
The Separatists
}}
following indicate the writers whom he most prized.
First of all his "Herzensbruder " Arnold; then Jane
Leade and Dr. Pordage, the English "Philadelphians
and students of Boehme; Menno Simons and David Joris,
the Mennonite; Boehme himself; the French mystic,
Poiret; Molinos the Quietist, and Petersen, who was
prominent in the pietistic circle of Frankfort whence Pas-
torius went out to Germantown. In 1698 Hochmann
himself was in Frankfort laboring unsuccessfully for the
conversion of Jews; abandoning this, he spent the next
years of his life going up and down the land, through
all northern and western Germany. He was persecuted
in every imaginable way-flogged, exiled, tried before
courts civil and ecclesiastical, and imprisoned half-a-
dozen times in various parts of Germany, one imprison-
ment lasting a whole year. During this incarceration at
Nürnberg (where he had once been offered a high posi-
tion in the city government), he was required to furnish
a statement of his beliefs, from which statement we learn
that his heresies were on the subjects of the ordinances,
the millennium, the possible restoration of the wicked,
and the superiority of the celibate over the married life.
However indifferent these opinions seem to us, they were
by no means so regarded by the Church and State in
Hochmann's time, and he suffered everything for propa-
gating them. At length the Countess Hedwig Sophie
of Berleberg gave him a refuge in her dominions at
Schwarzenau and there Hochmann built himself a little
house of two rooms, which he called Friedensburg—
"the castle of peace,"-though it was not destined to be
37
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
such. On his religious journeys through Germany,
Hochmann was always accompanied by friends who
took care of him, a very necessary devotion on their
part, since the mystic did not notice outward occur-
rences, so that some one must go before him when he
traveled from place to place, whom he followed like a
lamb." One of these brethren was Alexander Mack, a
well-to-do miller of Schwarzenau, who in pursuance of
Hochmann's teachings had left the church in which he
had been brought up and become a Separatist. A little
circle which gathered around Hochmann for instruction
was left to the leadership of Mack in Hochmann's
absence. During Hochmann's long imprisonment in
Nürnberg the pious people of Schwarzenau, as a result
of their Bible study, came to a belief in adult baptism.
The little society-a score of simple, uneducated work-
ing-people, men and women-were much perplexed and
divided. Hochmann from his prison wrote them his
opinion that those baptized in infancy needed not to be
rebaptized, but the Schwarzenau people, under the lead-
ership of Alexander Mack, believed infant baptism by
sprinkling invalid, and insisted upon immersion in run-
ning water so as to imitate exactly Christ's baptism. On
this point the two friends-bound together by love and
reverence, by journeyings and labors and perils for the
common cause-were sundered; and so sharp was the
contention between them that when afterward, in Switz-
erland, Hochmann spoke a few words of exhortation at
meeting held by Mack, the latter abused him violently,
calling him a hypocrite and an "erring spirit," to which
38
The Separatists
"}
Hochmann made no retort; but after the meeting he
went to Mack, embraced and kissed him and said affec-
tionately, "When thou, dear brother, art in Heaven and
seest me also enter, thou wilt be glad and will say, 'Oh,
see! there cometh also our dear brother Hochmann !'
The difference between the two men seems to have
arisen upon the fact that Hochmann at that time was a
determined Separatist, and enjoined on all those whom
he "awakened" the duty of coming out of the church;
while Mack and his Schwarzenau friends, although led
by their study of the Scripture to think that baptism by
immersion was an ordinance necessary to salvation, held
it also indispensable that there should be an organiza-
tion, a church, to administer this and other ordinances.
The son of Alexander Mack has left a sketch of the
founding of the Brethren's church, in which he says:"
"These eight persons covenanted and united together as
brothers and sisters into a covenant of the cross of Jesus
Christ to form a church of Christian believers, and when
they found in authentic histories that the primitive Chris-
tians in the first and second centuries uniformly accord-
ing to the command of Christ were planted into the
death of Jesus Christ by three-fold immersion into the
water-bath of holy baptism
they were anx-
iously desirous to use the means appointed by Christ
himself
They therefore commanded of him
who led in preaching the Word (Mack?) to immerse
them
They concluded to unite in fasting and
prayer, in order to obtain of Christ himself, the founder
1 ¹ Abridged from translation in Brumbaugh's German Baptist Brethren.
39
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
matter
of all his ordinances, a direction and opening in this
They cast lots to determine which
of the four brethren should baptize (the leader). Being
thus prepared the eight went out together one morning.
in solitude to a stream called the Eder and the brother
upon whom the lot had fallen baptized first that brother
who had desired to be baptized by the church of Christ
and he baptized him by whom he was baptized and the
remaining three brothers and three sisters and when all
had come up out of the water they were made to rejoice
with great inward joyfulness
They were
enabled to testify publicly in their meeting to the truth
and the Lord granted them his special grace so that still
more became obedient to the truth and thus within
seven years' time there was not only a large church in
Schwarzenau, but here and there in the Palatinate there
were lovers of the truth and especially in Marienborn; for
the church in the Palatinate was persecuted and its mem-
bers then came to Marienborn; and when the church
here became large, it was also persecuted. Then they
collected in Crefeld where they found liberty."
That his spiritual brothers had thus decided upon the
necessity of ordinances and a visible church was a great
grief to Hochmann. His later years were lonely and
sad. After his death his cottage fell to pieces and his
grave remained unmarked until it was visited by Ters-
teegen, the mystic and poet, who had been converted
by a spiritual son of Hochmann and therefore felt a
filial interest in the gentle, loving mystic. He begged
the aged Countess Hedwig, Hochmann's patroness, to
40
The Separatists
put a stone to mark the grave and she did so on condi-
tion that Tersteegen write the inscription, which he did
as follows:
"Wie Hoch is nun der Mann, der hier ein Kindlein
gar,
Herzinning, voller Lieb, doch auch voll Glaubens
war,
Von Zions Königs Pracht er zeugte und drum litte ;
Sein Geist flog endlich hin und hier zerfiel die
>> 1
Hütte."
Years after Hochmann's death, Stephen Koch, leading a
hermit's life in the Pennsylvania wilderness, saw in a
vision a "beautiful man" who conducted the hermit to
the heavenly Jerusalem. This "lovely man
This "lovely man" was Hoch-
mann.
And when sixty years had passed since Hoch-
mann's earthly tabernacle fell to earth, Jung Stilling, the
friend of Goethe, made the mystic the hero of his novel
"Theobald."
The newly-founded church also introduced the rite of
foot-washing, and the love-feast, an ordinary meal eaten
before the communion which is observed in the even-
ing, thus in every way endeavoring to imitate exactly
the administration of these acts by Christ. The liberty
which the Crefeld congregation found was not of long
duration. Persecution soon arose; several young breth-
ren were arrested and imprisoned at Gulch for four years,
1 How high is now the man, who once was like a child,
Sincere and full of love yet also full of faith,
Of Zion's Kingdom's fame he spoke and suffered for it.
His spirit rose to it and here decays the hut.
41
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
and Christian Libe, one of the most zealous and elo-
quent of the new church's evangelists, was arrested while
preaching in Basel, imprisoned, and on his refusal to
renounce his faith, sent to the galleys, "and had to work
the galling oar among malefactors."' The church in
Schwarzenau was so bitterly persecuted that they fled,
under the leadership of Mack, to Friesland.
Unfortunately the brave and eloquent Libe, who suf-
fered for the church, was not as charitable as he was
zealous. One of the members of his Crefeld congrega-
tion married a Mennonite girl; Libe, against the advice
of the other elder, Peter Becker, excommunicated the
erring brother. Becker and the party of charity who
adhered to him decided to leave Germany, and so in
1719 the first Dunker congregation came to America
and founded the Germantown church, served by Becker.2
Ten years after this, Alexander Mack brought over his
refugee congregation from Friesland.
On Mack's arrival he found a sad state of affairs
among the Dunkers in America. A "root of bitterness"
had sprung up to trouble them and this root was
Conrad Beissel. Beissel was a baker by trade, the
orphan child of a poor, drunken baker in the Palatinate.
Knocked about from pillar to post in his youth, gay
and careless, fond of fiddling and dancing, he was sud-
denly converted-by the direct work of God without hu-
man instrumentality, he averred-and became a zealous
¹ Mack's Historical Sketch, before cited.
2 Libe afterwards married out of meeting himself, demitted the ministry
and his church died out.
42
The Separatists
Pietist. Rivals had him arrested in Heidelberg and
banished on a charge of non-conformity. He took refuge
in the Wittgenstein region where no religious opinion,
however extraordinary, was persecuted. Thence, with
two companions, he came to Pennsylvania, that “Pella
of the sects," as Pastorius called it, and went to the
wilds of Conestoga, then the frontier, where he was
found by Peter Becker and other Brethren while on a
missionary tour, and here with others he was baptized.
It seemed wise to Becker to leave this magnetic and
zealous young convert in charge of the infant congrega-
tion thus formed at Conestoga; in reality nothing could
have been more unwise. Beissel soon began to teach
new doctrine; first the obligation to keep the seventh
day as the Sabbath; then the superior sanctity of the
celibate state; next he came to regard his Dunker bap-
tism as invalid and he and his brother hermits re-baptized
themselves. He had gathered several converts to
his monastic views and among the first whom he baptized
were Israel Eckerlin and Christopher Saur. Two young
girls, Anna and Maria Eicher, desired to enter his semi-
monastic community and with these adherents, Beissel
having resigned his leadership of the Dunker congrega-
tion at Conestoga, the New World monastery and
convent of Ephrata was organized. Beissel's most noted
converts in the next few years were Conrad Weiser and
Peter Miller.
As soon as Mack landed, he came to the assistance
of Becker against this fanatical and schismatic move-
ment; but his efforts to stem the tide were of little avail
43
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
His own son, Alexander Mack, Jr., was for a time an
inmate of Ephrata under the name of Brother Sander;
and in 1738-9 a large number of Dunkers from the
Germantown congregation defected to Beissel. This
conflict no doubt shortened and saddened the life of
Alexander Mack; he could not know, as we now do,
that Beissel's community would be but a passing wonder
and would die with its founder, while the Church of the
Brethren would remain until the present time.
The character and fate of the various converts men-
tioned is instructive as showing the influence of Ephrata
upon all sorts and conditions of men. Saur's connect-
ion with the community was brief and unhappy. His
wife, under Beissel's instruction, left her husband and
became an inmate of the convent as Sister Marcella:
Saur then departed from Lancaster County and returned
to Germantown.
Conrad Weiser, also an early convert, was the son of
one of the "poor Palatines" sent over by Queen Anne to
her colony of New York. After much ill-treatment and
suffering there, they fled through the wilderness from
Schoharie to Tulpehocken in Pennsylvania. A few
years after this emigration, young Weiser, who had lived
among the Indians in New York and knew their lan-
guage well, came to Pennsylvania, fell under Beissel's
influence, was baptized and for a time proved a very
zealous missionary of the Ephrata faith. Two of his
children entered the society, the daughter, Madlina,
dying in the convent. But Weiser soon had opportunity
given him through one
of his old Indian friends to
44
The Separatists
become interpreter for the province of Pennsylvania, and
"allowed himself to be taken up in the world." He
became Indian interpreter "so that the country could
neither make peace nor wage war with the Indians with-
out him," and formally resigned from the Ephrata
community, sending a sharp letter of reproof to them
concerning the tyranny and spiritual pride which he
found in the community.
At the same period of Beissel's opening ministry
there was taken into his community the first representa-
tive of a family which was to do great things for Ephrata
and suffer hard things from the Beisselian party in it ;—
this was the Eckerlin family. They were Pietists, child-
ren of a well-to-do tradesman, a Rathsherr, of Strasburg,
who had taken refuge from church persecution in the
safe haven of Schwarzenau. After his death his widow
and four sons came to Germantown, whither presently the
rest of the family came. Israel first, then the other sons
and the mother went to Conestoga to be under Beissel's
spiritual care. All the sons finally entered the monastery.
They were active exhorters and missionaries and suffered
imprisonment for the doctrine they propagated. Finally
Israel, as Brother Onesimus, became prior of the monas-
tery. He was a fine business man and under him the
community grew rich. It maintained five different kinds
of mills, bought all the farms for two miles around, and,
in short, made Ephrata a proverb for industry. Beissel,
in a fit of pique, once resigned to Brother Onesimus the
headship of the community, but was both surprised and
disgusted when his resignation was accepted. With the
sn
45
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
aid of Brother Jaebez, the Eckerlin family were at last
driven out from Ephrata and went "four hundred miles
into the wilderness," to New River in the present West
Virginia. There Indians fell upon them, took the
Eckerlins prisoners and destroyed the nascent hermitage;
and the ultimate fate of the brothers is not certainly known
but it is thought they died in a convent in France.
The ally of Beissel in his reassertion of authority,
Peter Miller-"Brother Jaebez"-is an extraordinary
instance of Beissel's occult power over the hearts and
minds of men. Miller, the son of a Palatine clergyman,
a graduate of Heidelberg University, came to this coun-
try to be a missionary of the Reformed church in the
Pennsylvania forests. At his examination and ordina-
tion by the presbytery of Philadelphia they pronounced
him “an extraordinary person for sense and learning.”
Yet this devout and learned young clergyman, when sent
to the wilds of Conestoga, was so fascinated by the former
baker and present hermit that he entered the Cloister,
became Beissel's most devout adherent and finally suc-
ceeded after "Father Friedsam's" death, to the position
of "superintendent" of Ephrata. ¹
1
1 In its palmy days Ephrata had not only mills and farms, but schools in
which Latin was so well taught that its graduates were able to correspond
with their monastic teachers in that language. Brother Obed, who was the
teacher of the day school there, established a Sunday School in Ephrata,
forty years before Robert Raikes, in which Obed's daughter, Sister Petron-
ella, a beautiful and lovable girl, was the first woman Sunday-School
teacher on record. The arts of ornamental writing and illumination flour-
ished in the Cloister, and a unique music, described as being of an un-
earthly beauty, was invented and practised under Beissel's personal super-
vision.
The monks set up a press of their own, upon which, under the
46
The Separatists
B
But the Ephrata community, its leaders and its spirit,
have always attracted a disproportionate amount of atten-
tion in religious history; a far better representative of the
spirit of Dunker Separatism is the Saur family, father-
and son, and their work for German culture. When the
elder Saur, taking his only child with him, left the Con-
estoga home which had been broken up by "Sister
Marcella's" withdrawal to the convent, he began in
Germantown a small printing business. This, under
Saur's energetic and competent management, became
the largest business of the kind in Pennsylvania. Saur
himself was probably a member of the Dunker com-
munion. Being asked by brethren to found a press and
disseminate Dunker literature, he, after several false
starts, succeeded in getting type and a press which had
been discarded by the printers of the famous Separatist
edition of the Bible called, from its place of publication,
the "Berleburg Bible." The edition of the Scripture
distributed from the famous pietistic institutions founded
by Francke at Halle was the popular one with church
people and Saur was the American agent for both the
Berleburg and Halle Bibles; he also dealt in the famous
medicines supplied from Halle and in general carried
on a business as various as that which was conducted at
the same time by Benjamin Franklin. Saur's first inde-
scholarly Brother Jaebez, they printed many books, pamphlets and broad-
sides, consisting of Mennonite and Dunker religious books, Beissel's works,
the hymns of the Cloister, and last but not least, the immense and mag-
nificent Martyr Book of the Mennonites, a massive folio of fifteen hundred
pages, the largest book printed during Colonial times in Pennsylvania.
47
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
pendent publication was the hymn book of the Ephrata
cloister, the "Weyrauchs Hügel," or Hill of Incense.
The blasphemous adulation of Beissel in this work
offended Saur, who had of course private reasons for a
hatred of "the superintendent," and led to the setting
up of the Ephrata press to print their own literature.
The party at the convent which was opposed to Beissel
rallied around Saur, and several of the Ephrata Brothers,
who were experienced in such matters, assisted Saur
with his first attempts at printing. Conrad Weiser
helped him buy paper from Franklin, who had all the
printing paper in the province in his control. But Saur
did not long need help. He presently began the publi-
cation of a newspaper, an almanac, and in 1745 printed
the first Bible published in this country in a European
tongue-the great "Germantown Bible," a monument
of typography only excelled by the Ephrata edition of
the "
Blütige Schauplatz." No wonder that when the
last sheet was printed, Saur burst into the pious excla-
mation, "Dank Gott, es ist vollbracht!" ("Thank God,
it is finished!")
1 ܳܙ
Beside the Scriptures, more than two hundred other
works proceeded from his press; and he is justly entitled
to the commendation of being "easily the foremost
sower of good seed in colonial America." He lived
up to the motto of his press, which was posted in a con-
spicuous place in the printing house: "Zur Ehre Gottes
und des Nächstens Bestes." Most of his work, and
1
?
)) 2
Brumbaugh's "Brethren," p. 374.
2 To the Glory of God and the Good of our Neighbor.
48
The Separatists
in particular the publication of the Bible, was done amid
the opposition and vilification of those, both clergymen
and laymen, who disliked Saur's separatistic opinions.
For "the good of his neighbor" the old printer, three
years before his death, addressed to Governor Denny
two long epistles' pleading for the deliverance of the
poor German immigrants from the plundering and
oppression of the shipmasters who brought them over
and in whose vessels the horrors of the slave-traders'
middle passage were rivaled, but it is not known that
the appeal produced any result.
But
When the elder Saur died, in 1751, his son of the
same name took upon himself the burden of the press.
Christopher Saur, Jr., had been deprived of a mother's
care in his youth;-it was not until 1744, after twelve.
years' residence in the Ephrata cloister, that Sister Mar-
cella yielded, probably to her son's entreaties, and
returned to her husband's home in Germantown.
Christopher had the advantage of a most excellent
teacher, the pious Mennonite school-master, Christopher
Dock, whose beautiful character is still, after more than
one hundred and fifty years, redolent of the odor of
sanctity. So grateful was young Saur for this teaching,
that he induced his old instructor to write a little
account of his method of teaching school, and after
overcoming the Mennonite's pious scruples about secur-
ing praise of men, won from him the little tract which
has preserved for future generations a description of one
¹ See Brumbaugh, p. 376 et seq. for the letters.
2
2 Reprinted in Pennypacker's Historical and Biographical Essays.
4
49
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
of the best colonial schools and school-masters.
was the first book on education printed in America.
This
As to the younger Saur's religious affiliations, there is
not the uncertainty which affects those of his father;—
Christopher Saur was not only a member, but an elder,
of the Dunker church. He is said to have been a
preacher of great power, a good pastor, and so benevo-
lent that the poor of Germantown called him the
"bread father." The business which he inherited he
enlarged beyond any similar enterprise in colonial
America; and the spirit with which he took it up and
conducted it may be judged from the editorial, as we
should now call it, with which he announced his father's
death and his own assumption of the headship of the
business: "I had rather indeed have earned my bread
by continuing in the book binding business, and so have
avoided the burden and responsibilities of a printer
but I find it laid upon me for God and
my neighbor's sake
Although I am not, nor
do I hope to be, so richly gifted as my father, I will
nevertheless use what is given me
•
and will
not allow this or that to turn me from what I believe to
be right and good." "
Nobly Christopher Saur fulfilled these promises. He
published the second and third editions of the German-
town Bible and the profits from the third edition being
more than he expected, he printed the "Geistliches
Magazin," which he distributed free to those who might
be benefited by it. The contents were from his own
¹ Brumbaugh, p. 397.
50
The Separatists
1
pen or that of Alexander Mack, Jr., or were translations
of devotional works such as the English non-juror
Law's "
Serious Call." This was the earliest religious
magazine in Pennsylvania. He followed his father's
example in writing timely articles on moral and religious
questions of the day;-thus, he opposed the partaking
of the Germans in the slave-trade. "This godless
traffic could find," he says, "up to the present no safe
footing in Pennsylvania owing to the abhorrence the
Germans still have for it "; and he warns them against
declining from the position held from the time of
Pastorius' protest. When the Germans founded the
Academy in Germantown, the younger Saur was one of
the trustees, giving a subscription of £20 for himself
and £50 as a memorial of his father. This form of
memorial shows that the opposition of the elder Saur
to the German Charity Schools project was not to edu-
cation in itself, but to the ecclesiastical and political
plans back of that apparently praiseworthy and inno-
cent project.
Christopher Saur's later years and the close of his
life amid exile, poverty and obloquy, belong to the
story of German religious life in the Revolutionary
period.
It is with mingled feelings of regret and relief that
one sees the end of the Separatist period;-regret
for the picturesque, the mystical, the pious folk who
are no longer the chief objects of our study; relief
that we may leave these scores of warring sects, of
¹ Berichte, February 15th, 1761, quoted by Brumbaugh.
51
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
ignorant and narrow-minded disputants, of pathetic or
wrong-headed saints and solitaries. Yet the story of
the Separatists shows us people who with all their faults
and mistakes knew how to work and suffer and, if
need be, accept exile or death rather than surrender a
jot of what they believed to be the truth of God.
NOTE. The authorities on this part of the history are as before,
Goebel's "Christliches Leben," Seidensticker's admirable publications:
"Bilder aus der deutsch-pennsylvanischen Geschichte " (New York, 1885),
and "Geschichte der deutschen Gesellschaft" (Philadelphia, 1876),
Pennypacker's "Historical and Biographical Sketches" (Philadelphia,
1883), and 'Settlement of Germantown," (Philadelphia, 1889). The
Mennonite Christian Confession of Faith" and the hymn-book "Aus-
bund; das ist etliche Schöne Christliche Lieder," repay examination.
For the Wissahickon community Sachse's "Pietists of Provincial Pennsyl-
vania'
(Philadelphia, 1895) may be used, corrected by Seidensticker's
"Bilder." There is a scholarly monograph on the Labadist Colony in
Maryland in the Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. XVII, pp. 271-
317. Brumbaugh's "History of the German Baptist Brethren," (Mount
Morris, 1899), gives the best account of the Dunkers; Sachse's “Sectarians
of Pennsylvania" (Philadelphia, 1899-1900) contains the result of indus-
trious if indiscriminating collection. Sluyter and Dankers' journal has
been published in translation by the Long Island Historical Society,
(Memoirs, Vol. I.). The Dunker hymn-book, the "Kleine Davidische
Harfenspiel," the Ephrata Weyrauchs Hügel" and the "Chronicon
Ephratense," translated by J. Max Hark (Lancaster, 1889), should be
examined. Redmond Conyngham's MS. history of the Mennonites
is printed in Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania, Vol. VII, p. 129.
the two Christopher Saurs, authorities are Brumbaugh's "Brethren,"
Seidensticker's "Bilder" and "First Century of German Printing in
America "
(Philadelphia, 1893) and Sachse's "Sectarians'
"Sectarians"-valuable
in the order named. An examination of some imprints of the German-
town press is interesting and instructive.
For
52
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH PEOPLE
THE decade of 1730-40 is sometimes distinguished as
that of the emigration of the church people; that is, the
members of the two oldest German Protestant organiza-·
tions, the Lutheran and Reformed bodies.¹ But it is a
purely arbitrary date, selected more because it embraces
a decade than because of any decided change in the
character of the emigration at that particular time.
There had been a few "church people" mingled with
the Separatists and the "sects," ever since the Falkner
brothers were ordained to the Lutheran ministry from
the ranks of the Wissahickon Hermits, and Peter Miller
was sent to Conestoga to save the little Reformed
congregation there. But from this fourth decade of the
eighteenth century onward the sects outside of the
"great church" (as they frequently designated the two
churches taken together) and the individual Separatists
no longer composed the overwhelming majority of the
immigrants.
The two churches in their German home had been so
like in doctrine, polity and customs of worship that a
member of one could scarcely tell what were the dis-
tinctive points of his organization in respect to the other.
In earlier times, it is true, there had been much
¹ See Pennsylvania: A primer; Barr Ferree, (New York, 1904).
53
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
bitterness between them, and the Reformed-always the
stronger from its cradle in Zwingli's home, Switzerland,
along the whole course of the Rhine—had persecuted
the weaker Lutheran Church. But subsequently, with
the extinction of the Protestant line in the Pfalz and the
accession of the Catholic princes of the Neuburg line, all
Protestants were so harried and distressed that mutual
suffering drew the warring churches together. One in-
fluenced the other. The Lutheranism of the Rhine'
country was not so churchly as that of Luther's father-
land, Saxony; the denomination itself had not a separate
existence, it was counted and subsidized under the name
of the Reformed. It possessed two universities, Giessen
and Strasburg, the latter city being also the capital of a
country of which the Lutheran was the national church.
Würtemberg, too, was a Lutheran land. But excluding
these tiny countries, the Rhenish followers of the Saxon
reformer were a feeble folk.
The Reformed or Calvinistic church, on the other hand,
was on its native heath in the Rhine countries. The
people of the Palatinate (in spite of the Catholicism of
their later princes), the principalities of Zweibrücken,
Nassau, Baden, Hesse, were all Reformed, not to mention
the powerful influence of their Calvinistic neighbors of
German Switzerland and of Holland. The greater part
of the Waldenses, scattered by persecution along the
whole course of the Rhine, had formally entered the
Reformed church as early as 1532; the Revocation of
the Edict filled all Germany after 1685 with the Hugue-
not refugees-there were, it is estimated, one hundred
54
The Church People
thousand of them who fled to this nearest of Protestant
lands and the majority of them settled in the Rhineland.
The Reformed church had itself borne a persecution
little less severe during the devastation of the Palatinate
under Louis XIV and under its own Jesuit-ridden.
princes; their churches taken from them, their pastors
and school-teachers unpaid in an effort to starve them
into submission, the dragonnades, which had proved so
effectual in France, used also here. Before this cross
was removed, one-fourth of the population emigrated,
some to other parts of Germany, some to America.
The church under its Catholic rulers was not only
oppressed but corrupted; in the Reformed consistory
which managed church affairs, simony was notorious and
unashamed. Pietism was to this enfeebled and harassed
church as great a blessing as to the Lutheran body under
one of whose clergy it took its rise. But there was this
difference; that, while the Pietists among the Lutherans
were at first a despised and persecuted sect, in the
Reformed body they composed the whole church.
Labadie, in his work of reviving the church, had an
anticipator in Untereyck of Bremen. When the little
circles for prayer and Bible study were formed, the
Calvinistic Synods approved of them, and only ordered
that pastors give the movement direction and oversight.
Such was the history and such the character of the
"church people" who began to flee to America in the
first years of the eighteenth century, and who by the mid-
dle of that century composed the majority of its German
immigrants. The Lutherans among them did not fol-
55
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
low the stricter liturgical traditions of their own church;
the Reformed ones preferred free prayer and a simple
worship. All were strongly pietistic in their leanings, for
in this school of thought were found most of the earnest
and devout souls of the state churches; those Palatines
to whom their religion was a mere external formality,
could easily escape persecution by conforming to the
Catholic creed of their princes. They edified themselves
from the writings of Arndt, the prayer-book of Conrad
Mel, Lobwasser's version of Marot's Huguenot psalms,
the hymns of the great Lutheran writers and of Neander
and Tersteegen. Their zeal was made more ardent by
the persecution they endured from the formalists of their
own churches, from Catholic rulers, or from hyper-
orthodox opponents of Pietism and "enthusiasm," and
that zeal was doubtless increased by the presence among
them of descendants of the exiled Waldenses and of
many Huguenots who had, in their own persons, borne
dragonnades, plundering, exile, imprisonment and the
galleys rather than give up their faith. They were
narrow minded, our early German fathers,—ignorant,
unaccustomed to participation in the government of
either church or state; but those who made up their
minds to leave their "dear German-land"¹ stood for the
more energetic and forceful elements, and so, as in the
New England emigration, "God sifted a whole nation
that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness.
¹ Pastorius' ode in the Germantown records, translated by Whittier.
2 “Delivered in a sermon preached at Boston in New England, April
29th, 1668," by the Rev. Wm. Stoughton.
56
The Church People
Both the Lutheran and Reformed churches, though
early planted on these shores, fell into neglect, and in
the lack of clergy were obliged to depend for the shep-
herding of their earliest congregations upon pious and
zealous laymen. Often the first movement toward
gathering a church was given by the activity of a sec-
tarian leader in the neighborhood. Thus Tempelman, the
Calvinistic school-master who founded a congregation in
Conestoga, was impelled thereto by Beissel's efforts in
the same region. The earliest emigration not impelled
by religious persecution, the great exodus of Queen
Anne's time, was chiefly of the Reformed people, and
those among these hapless refugees who settled in New
York State, coming under the care of the Dutch
Reformed church there, finally were absorbed in it.
Two German missionaries, Haeger and Oehl, who had
received Episcopal ordination in London, tried to detach
the Germans from the faith of their fathers, but without
success. De Graffenried's colony at New Berne had a
Reformed clergyman for chaplain; but the church he
founded was absorbed by the Presbyterians. At the
same date there came to Pennsylvania a Swiss Reformed
minister, the Rev. Samuel Guldin, who having fallen
under the suspicion of being a Pietist, had been inter-
dicted from preaching in Berne and banished to a
country parish. He then left Switzerland, came to
Germantown and preached there and in the surrounding
country during all the rest of his long life, confining
himself, however, to this evangelistic work and not
attempting to organize any churches.
57
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
The organization of new churches fell to the hands of
a pious school-master, John Philip Boehm, the son of a
Reformed clergyman of Hesse. Coming to Pennsylvania
in 1720, he began services as a lay "reader," was
besought with tears by the elder, Henry Antes, to
minister to their congregation, and although at first
refusing because he had not been ordained, he finally
consented, "protesting before God that he could not
justify his refusal of so necessary a work." About the
same time and in the same way Conrad Tempelman, a
pious layman, a tailor by trade, founded some congrega-
tions near Boehm's mission. Subsequently Boehm was
ordained (by the Dutch Reformed), after some friction
with a young and over-zealous minister, George Michael
Weiss, who, although he was pronounced by Jedidiah
Andrews "a bright young man and a fine scholar,"
seems to have lacked discretion and brotherly charity in
dealing with the conditions of a new country and the
limitations of his earnest, if irregular, fellow-laborer.
Presently the Rev. John Peter Miller, scholarly, pious
and regularly ordained by the presbytery of Philadelphia,
was sent to minister at Conestoga. We have seen how
this ended-in Beissel's conversion of Miller and the
entry of "Brother Jaebez" into the Ephrata cloister.
Then Henry Antes, "the pious Reformed elder of
Falkner's Swamp," tried to start a Union movement
which should embrace all religious people, but this ended
in taking Antes into the Moravian body. So that all
was confusion, feebleness and discouragement among the
few Reformed in the province of Pennsylvania, and they
58
The Church People
were more numerous there than in any other American
province.
Their petitions to Europe for ministers and particularly
for a superintendent had been unheeded. At length the
Fathers in Holland procured a young Swiss-German,
Michael Schlatter, who was willing to go to Pennsylvania
and endeavor to bring order out of confusion.
He was
young, energetic, fond of travel, of good family and
education. Before completing his education at St. Gall
he had attended the Dutch and German universities,
and appeared just the man for the place. Schlatter
started for America in June, 1746, meeting on the way
with pirates and perils of shipwreck. He had expected
not to take a congregation, but the religious destitution
among the Reformed so appealed to him that he accepted
the pastorate of the Philadelphia and Germantown
charges, serving without salary for the first year—“in
order," he says, "that by deeds I might convince them
that I did not serve them merely for the sake of my
bread." With immense energy and devotion he set
about the work of visiting the congregations, organizing
them properly, ordaining unordained laborers like
Tempelman, procuring new ministers from Europe,
straightening out the involved accounts of several
benevolent funds and finally organizing a general body,
the Coetus or Synod. In his journeys he went not only
through and through Pennsylvania but to Maryland,
Virginia, and frequently to New York City, also regularly
ministering to congregations in New Jersey. His course
was not unvexed by quarrels, and even a trial before a
59
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
civil court to determine the ownership of a church build-
ing; there were many differences in the infant coetus
over doctrinal points, the moral and intellectual character-
istics of ministers, etc., but the later meetings became
more harmonious.
In 1751 Schlatter went over to Europe and represented
the cause of the poor and struggling Reformed Church
of Pennsylvania to the rich Calvinists of Holland; he
also went to Switzerland and the Palatinate in search of
ministerial candidates who might go to Pennsylvania, but
found none who were willing. He then addressed him-
self to the university of Herborn (in reality only a high
school with a small but learned and pious faculty) which
sent six young men back with Schlatter to provide the
German Reformed with clerical ministrations. Herborn
was strongly pietistic in its spirit-" the churchly Pietism
of the Reformed of Germany." (Good: German Re-
formed Church in U. S. p. 404.) Schlatter had scarcely
reached America with his six young ministers, when he
fell into trouble with his fellow clergymen; a rival coetus
was set up under the presidency of Weiss, Boehm's
former opponent, and Schlatter again returned to Europe.
There he resigned his home-missionary superintendency
under the Holland deputies and was probably very glad
to be employed by a new society-organized in London
by the tireless efforts of the Rev. David Thomson, an
English Presbyterian pastor at Amsterdam-for "the
propagation of the knowledge of God among the Ger-
mans." About the same time that Schlatter was in
London, there came thither the Rev. Wm. Smith, provost
60
The Church People
of the University of Pennsylvania, an energetic and
enthusiastic man who sometimes let his zeal outrun his
discretion. In a "Brief History of the Charitable
Scheme for the Relief and Instruction of Poor Germans," ¹
which he published on Franklin's press the year after his
arrival, Mr. Smith showed that he knew nothing of the
schools which had previously been established in connec-
tion with the German churches, nor of the condition of
the frontier Germans, who were neither "exposed an
easy prey to the total ignorance of their Savage Neigh-
bors on the one Hand, or the Corruptions of our
Jesuitical Enemies on whom they border, on the other
hand." The notion that the Germans might become.
Indians because they were exposed to the incursions and
alarums of Indian war parties, or would likely conspire
with the French to escape whose devastations most of
them had come, would have been ridiculous had not the
consequences of the misapprehension been so serious,
both for Schlatter and the schools.
2
A powerful opponent, too, was raised up against them
in the person of old Christopher Saur, who thundered
against the project in his newspaper as well as in private
letters, and although the American trustees did their best
to counteract it, even using some of their funds to start
an opposition press and paper, Saur's vast influence with
the "sect people "—especially the Dunkers-could not
"A Brief History of the Rise and Progress of the Charitable Scheme
carrying on by a Society of Noblemen and Gentlemen in London for the
Relief and Instruction of Poor Germans," etc. Philadelphia, Franklin
and Hall, 1755.
2 p. 6, Brief History.
61
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
be counteracted. Saur saw, or thought he saw, an
endeavor to influence the peace sects among the Germans
to elect to the Assembly men who would vote money for
a militia, frontier forts and other defences against the
Indians, with whom the province, after the defeat of
Braddock, was just beginning to have its first troubles.
To be sure, the Germans on the frontier, among whom
these schools would chiefly be established, were by no
means non-resistants, but fought doughtily under the
leadership of Conrad Weiser for the defence of their little
log-huts and clearings. Saur, however, was able to
prejudice many against the plan, and in a few years the
zeal of the English contributors declined, money ceased
to come in and the Charity School project fell into ruin.
Schlatter, during the declining years of the project,
sought and obtained a chaplaincy in the Royal American
Regiment recruited from among the Pennsylvania Ger-
mans by Col. Henry Bouquet, and in his military.
capacity accompanied the regiment to the capture of
Louisburg; subsequently he went with the gallant
Bouquet to Pittsburg in 1764.
At the close of his army life, Schlatter retired to a
little farm in the vicinity of Philadelphia, where he died
in 1790.
After his dismissal to take charge of the un-
lucky Charity-School project, he never resumed the con-
nection with the coetus which he had founded, and the
German Reformed church, in Pennsylvania where it was
strongest and proportionately in the more southern.
colonies of Maryland and Virginia, suffered for want of
the energetic and capable supervision which he had at
62
The Church People
one time given it. In New York, as we have seen, the
Germans united with the Dutch Reformed, while in the
middle and southern provinces, as in the case of the
Reformed church at New Berne, they were largely taken.
up into the Presbyterian fold, or, where there were Union.
churches, they threw in their lot with their better-
shepherded Lutheran brethren.
The Lutherans had been in as bad a state as the Re-
formed ever were; for years nearly all the work among
them in Pennsylvania was done by one man, John Caspar
Stoever. The Kocherthal colony, forerunners of the
large emigration under Queen Anne's patronage, was
brought over to the province of New York under the
leadership of a Lutheran pastor, Joshua von Kocherthal.
During the first winter in the new land dissensions broke
out among them; some of the colony were accused by
others of being Pietists, and, to his great bewilderment,
the English Governor was requested to withdraw rations
from the misbelievers. He, not knowing what a Pietist
was, sent a commission to inquire into the matter. This
and other things discouraged Kocherthal who returned
to England for assistance. There he encountered the
large body of Palatine refugees encamped near London,
and came back on the same ship with three thousand of
them. These refugees were finally settled along the
Hudson, at Rhinebeck, New Paltz and other localities,
and Kocherthal ministered among them until his death
in 1719.
But some years before the coming of Kocherthal's
colony or that of Queen Anne's poor Palatines, the
63
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
church in New York City had secured the services of
the Rev. Justus Falkner, who with his brother Daniel
had left the Hermit community of the Wissahickon and
gone into the Lutheran ministry. Justus Falkner was
a devout and devoted clergyman. For twenty years
he ministered not only to the city congregation but in
the summer went as far as Albany, visiting the scattered
Lutherans, preaching and administering the sacraments.
Frequently after a baptismal record, he would add a
short prayer for the spiritual welfare of the child, as for
instance, "Lord! Lord, let this child be and remain
engrossed upon the book of life through Jesus Christ.
Amen." "Bless, O Lord, this child also with everlast-
ing happiness through Jesus Christ. Amen." On the
baptism of a negro child, "Lord, merciful God, who
lookest not upon the person, but from whom different
creatures that fear thee and do right find favor, let this
child be clothed in the white robe of innocence and
righteousness and so remain through the grace of
Christ, the savior of all mankind. Amen." And when
a Carolina Indian slave was baptized by the name of
Thomas Christian, Falkner prayed, "That the Lord
would henceforth cause this unbelieving Thomas to
become a believing Christian." Falkner's useful and
pious life ended in 1723; his successor, Berkenmeyer,
who married a daughter of Pastor Kocherthal, also
ministered in Albany and up and down the Hudson.
Later the colonists at Schoharie had a minister of their
own, Sommer, who served the Germans, by this time
spread along the Mohawk, "making it for fifty miles a
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German stream." He had preaching places at Palatine
Bridge, Stone Arabia and other settlements of that
region, serving with unwearied diligence and a simple
heroism which has won the admiration of the secular
and unsympathetic historian Kapp.
He
In the south there were German congregations at
many of the early settlements such as Frederica and
Purysburg, but it is often impossible to decide whether
they were Lutheran or Reformed—a fact which has been
a greater grief to denominational historians than to
anyone else. Probably the poor and alien colonists
were too glad to secure occasional services in their native
tongue to be very critical as to the ecclesiastical connec-
tion of their preacher. In South Carolina the Germans
had been settled in the State for more than sixty years
before the first German minister, the Rev. John Ulrich
Geissendanner, came to the Orangeburg district.
died shortly after his arrival and his successor,—who was
his namesake and nephew,-presently secured the Epis-
copal ordination, and both pastor and congregation
passed into that church. This was the history of many
congregations in South Carolina. At Saxe Gotha the
first Reformed minister there found a weird sect called
the Weberites, which had arisen out of prayer meetings
held by a few ignorant Swiss people. For a time they
read the Scripture, prayed and edified each other as well
as they could, but presently the leader, Jacob Weber,
began to have revelations to the effect that he was a
divine incarnation and that a certain neighbor was Satan,
who must be destroyed; so Weber and others of the
5
65
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
sect smothered their supposed devil to death under a
feather bed. For this crime Weber was executed, leav-
ing a pathetic confession which shows him to have been
a sincere but deluded man-probably suffering from
religious insanity. The church at Charleston was almost
the only flourishing one in South Carolina and from
there some missionary work was done among the desti-
tute people further up the State; after the German
settlement in the Orangeburg and neighboring districts.
increased, several pastors came thither from the Charles-
ton church. This church, St. John's by name, had its
own troubles, although during the pastorate of Martin
they were wealthy and benevolent enough to form a
"German Society" for the care and help of poor
emigrants. At one time they procured a student to
serve as vicar to their feeble minister-a young man
who arrived without his trunk, which he said had been
stolen from him in Holland. A benevolent elder paid
his passage and bought him clothes, the old minister
examined, ordained and installed him, also "marrying
him, on his sick bed, to one of his own daughters besides
giving him the necessary books and skeletons of sermons."
More than this seems to have been "necessary" to
make a creditable minister out of the young man, for
presently we find Mühlenberg-who had been called in
as usual when any Lutheran church anywhere was in
trouble-saying, "when a minister makes himself familiar
with drunkards, flourishes with his sword at night along
the streets, throws stones at windows, etc., and his wife
frequents the theater at night, leads in the dance at
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weddings, etc., we can easily imagine what impression
this must make." They finally recalled the Rev. Mr.
Martin, a self-taught man, ordained by the Ebenezer
pastors, but who served them faithfully until his patriotism
caused him to be exiled from the city by the British
troops in the Revolution.
The story of Lutherans in North Carolina is much
more encouraging than the forlorn tale of the southern
province; and this is largely because the immigration.
there was from Pennsylvania and the churches of various
denominations were generally supported from the north.
One group of churches in Western North Carolina,
however, sought and obtained help from Germany. It
is an unusual story; two little churches of the Lutheran
faith had been organized: St. John's in Mecklenburg
County, and Zion's, commonly known as "Organ
Church" because it alone of all its sister churches
possessed such an instrument. Failing in their applica-
tion to Pennsylvania for ministers, they sent two elders
to Europe to apply to the Lutheran consistory of
Hannover for help, and received not only grants of
money, but the services of two faithful missionaries,
Adolph Nussman, a very learned and devoted man, a
converted Franciscan monk, and Gottfried Arndt, at first
a school-teacher but afterwards ordained.
These two,
undeterred by the disturbances of the Revolution which
cut off temporarily their German subventions, labored
for fifteen years all through western North Carolina, and
planted churches in the whole region west of the Catawba
river.
67
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
Except "old Guldi," who only preached occasionally,
there was not a single ordained minister of either church
in Pennsylvania until 1717. It was the work of pastors
Boehm and Stoever a little later on that saved the
Reformed and Lutheran churches.¹ John Caspar
Stoever was the son of a Lutheran pastor of the same
name from Strasburg, who, having ministered for years.
to a struggling congregation at Germanna, Governor
Spotswood's village in Virginia, went abroad to procure
help for them, died and was buried at sea on his return
voyage. The son was not ordained—there being no one
to perform it in America at that time-but he did an
almost incredible amount of work among the Lutherans
of Pennsylvania, itinerating for years through the rural
parts of the province from his home in New Hanover;
later he removed to Lancaster, whence he went to the
verge of settlement beyond the Susquehanna, founding
churches and ministering at the Codorus and Conewago
settlements, not yet called "York" and "Hanover."
Later he removed to Quitapohilla, "the Snake's Hole"—
now Lebanon-still following the frontier and the rude,
hardy German pioneers. At Lebanon, it is said, pastor
Stoever used to carry his gun with him on all his
journeys, and even into the pulpit, yet he went to his
York congregation on the other side of the Susquehanna
regularly once a month for ten years. About this time
he succeeded in obtaining ordination. He had his faults;
perhaps he was, as Mühlenberg told the Halle fathers,
hot-headed and censorious. He was not inclined to
Schmauk, Lutheran Church in Pennsylvania, p. 221.
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Pietism and when Mühlenberg, the new superintendent,
came fresh and zealous from Halle, the old frontiersman-
preacher probably received him with little courtesy and
gratitude; but the Halle Reports do scant justice to his
heroic work. 'He endured more hardships with much
more equanimity than Mühlenberg; the material side of
things doubtless had a large degree of interest and charm
for him; he insisted on orthodoxy strenuously and even
violently and he lacked the deeper spiritual sense, the
inner spring of piety which Mühlenberg possessed."
But with all, Stoever did a great, noble, and unap-
preciated work.
He was involved in the distressing and disgraceful
affair known as the Tulpehocken Confusion, when the
two parties of Lutherans and the Moravians struggled
for years about the church of Tulpehocken. In the
course of this bitter dispute, Zinzendorf deposed Stoever
from the ministry. A number of Germans of prominence
were mixed up with this affair, which served to give it
undesirable publicity. It began in the colony so
heroically founded by emigrants from Schoharie, fleeing
from what they thought the oppressions of the New York
government. At first they were beautifully harmonious
in their new Pennsylvania home; Conrad Weiser, a man
of power and intelligence, ministered to them as a Bible-
reader and gave them extracts from the works of Spener
and Francke. He it was, too, who urged them to send
to Halle for a regularly-ordained minister. During the
lengthy and eventually fruitless negotiations incident to
¹ Schmauk, Lutheran Church in America, p. 250.
69
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
this matter, Weiser, who through all his busy and
changeful life cherished a warm friendship for Peter
Miller, the Reformed clergyman at Conestoga, was drawn
with him into the Ephrata cloister. Miller said that
"Wisdom drew them into her net," but as to Weiser
the snare was soon broken and he escaped, saying that
when they began to reject Christ and turned to the
writings of Dippel the mystic instead of those of the
Halle Pietists, he must give them up. Meanwhile
Stoever struggled violently against the opponents of his
church and himself, though in vain until Mühlenberg at
last brought a minister who gave satisfaction to the dis-
tracted congregation at Tulpehocken.
Stoever's relations with Mühlenberg continued.
strained neither could understand or appreciate the
good in the other-but in the later years of Stoever's
long life they became reconciled, insomuch that Stoever
connected himself with the ministerium founded by
Mühlenberg. Stoever's death took place at Quitapohilla
in his seventy-fifth year. He was to administer the rite
of confirmation and, not feeling well enough to go to the
church, sent for the young confirmants to come to his
house; there, while in the act of confirmation, he dropped
dead.
We have frequently alluded to Mühlenberg ;—it
seems desirable to give his biography at length, for from
the time of his landing in 1742 to his death in 1787 that
biography is the history of the Lutheran Church in
America. Henry Melchior Mühlenberg descended from
a noble family of North Germany, impoverished and
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reduced by the wars of the sixteenth century.
He was
a graduate of the university of Göttingen, and an ard-
ent Pietist. When on a visit to Halle, Francke asked
him whether he would be willing to accept a call from
America; Mühlenberg immediately answered that "if
such were the will of God, he would certainly go." And
go he did in a few months thereafter, arriving at Charles-
ton, South Carolina, in the autumn of 1742. Thence he
went to Ebenezer, the settlement of the pious and per-
secuted Salzburgers, whose welfare was always near and
dear to his heart.
The story of the Salzburg exiles reads like a romance,
yet it is the soberest of fact. After a persecution lasting
for two hundred years, with intervals whose peace was
purchased by submitting to external regulations, meeting
in cellars and dens and caves of the earth, the zeal of a
new archbishop finally drove them out. Twenty thousand
Lutherans-giving up their homes, their property, even
their children, who had been taken from them to be
brought up on Catholicism-left their country in the
depths of winter and went out not knowing whither they
went. Yet the procession of exiles was not only a brave
but a triumphant one; singing hymns, they marched
through Protestant Germany everywhere received by
their fellow-believers with prayers and tears and gifts.
Many went to Brandenburg, where the Elector had
invited them. A band of them passing through Augs-
burg excited the Christian sympathy of Pastor Urlsperger;
writing an account of the emigration for some English
friends, the interest elicited by it enabled Urlsperger to
71
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
procure means to carry fifty families to the new colony
of Georgia just then founded by Oglethorpe. Space
fails to tell of their piety, their hardships, and their grati-
tude to God and to godly friends for this refuge provided
them beyond the ocean. They settled at Ebenezer, near
Savannah, under the care of two Lutheran pastors,
Boltzius and Gronau, supplied them by the ever-faithful
Halle Institution. There the Salzburgers lived and
labored, conducting services also among some scattered
Germans in their neighborhood, and there not only
Mühlenberg, but the Wesleys and Whitefield had profit-
able intercourse with them.
Leaving the Salzburgers, Mühlenberg, after tedious
delays, arrived in Philadelphia, where he found the
Lutheran congregation sadly disturbed by the possibly
well-meant but divisive efforts of Zinzendorf. Having
settled this trouble, Mühlenberg turned to the country
congregations. He fixed his residence at Providence,
(the Trappe), where a church building soon took the
place of the barn in which services had been conducted.
He married the daughter of Conrad Weiser, now Indian
Interpreter for the province, and thus allied himself to
the American pioneers who had preceded him.
began his visitation of the country congregations—
feeble, scattered and distracted by the results of Moravian
evangelistic zeal; presently he extended his supervision,
as did Schlatter, to Maryland and Virginia, and where,
along the Monocacy and the Shenandoah Valleys, the
tide of Pennsylvania-German emigration, re-enforced
from the Fatherland, was pouring a flood. Like the
Now
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emigration from Germany which had peopled Pennsyl-
vania, this was led by the sects-Dunkers and Mennon-
ites--but now the church people were following in their
wake. Mühlenberg paid several visits to New York,
both to the city and the province, and also to New
Jersey. The feeble and scattered Lutherans of the
Carolinas claimed his attention, when after the middle of
the eighteenth century Pennsylvania-German emigration
reached so far. The eccentric Hartwig, the pioneer
preacher of New York, was a friend and guest of
Mühlenberg. Hartwig was once called to the little knot.
of Germans who, plundered and deserted, had been cast
on the Maine coast at Waldoboro, but he was unable
to accept and the shepherding of this flock was left
largely to the Moravians. Even as far as Nova Scotia,
the German colony of Lunenberg looked to Mühlenberg
for aid and, on the advice of Schlatter, called him to
become their pastor.
This brings into notice the brotherly and broad-minded
charity of his relations with other bodies of Christians.
He was intimate with the Swedish Lutheran Wrangel,
whose position in his own communion was something
like that of Mühlenberg among the Germans; he main-
tained friendship with Michael Schlatter, with the Pres-
byterians, such as the two Tennants, Gilbert and William,
with Whitefield-in short, with everyone but Zinzendorf
and the Moravians. The Episcopalians were very
friendly with the learned and dignified Superintendent of
the Lutherans. Mühlenberg said of them: "During the
thirty-two years of my sojourning in America, time and
73
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
again occasions were given me to join the Episcopal
church and to receive four or five times more salary than
my poor German fellow-members of the Lutheran faith
gave me; but I preferred to preach in and with my
people to the Treasures in Egypt."
1
He early formed the ministers of his faith into a Synod,
which presently died, but was resurrected into what is
the oldest Lutheran body in America-the Ministerium.
He began in a humble way a theological seminary, tak-
ing a few young candidates and training them; subse-
quently this infant seminary was passed over to the care
of Wrangel. He formed a common liturgy from the
different ones which were used, each pastor having
previously conducted services according to his own ideas,
or used the liturgy of the little principality from which
he himself came. Mühlenberg furnished a model for a
church constitution-an important matter in a denomi-
nation as strongly congregational in its leanings as is the
Lutheran. In short, there is no part of the country, no
province of church government, in which Mühlenberg's
hand was not busy or his influence felt. It was the
superior good fortune of the church he represented to
have him continue his work through the whole remainder
of the Colonial period. Had he, like Schlatter,
abandoned the work of supervision and the connection
with his Synod just as his work of organization was well
under way, the Lutherans like the Reformed might have
declined and decreased and been absorbed into other
bodies. It is a testimony alike to the character of
¹ Quoted in Dr. Mann's Life of Mühlenberg, p. 455.
74
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Mühlenberg and to the discernment of his church, that
he is still revered among Lutherans of all names and races
as the "Patriarch of the Lutheran Church" in America.
The last one of the "tolerated confessions
tolerated confessions" which
made up the church people of Germany, the Catholic,
has been passed over as so small in the Colonial period
as to be beneath notice. Thus one authority says that
at the opening of the Revolution there were only
thirteen hundred Roman Catholics between Canada and
Florida;¹ Seidensticker estimates the number of German
Catholics in Pennsylvania at two thousand. But in the
same year that Mühlenberg received his call to America
the number of German Catholics was so great that Ger-
man-speaking Jesuits were sought out and sent to min-
ister to them.
2
One of them, Father Schneider, a Bavarian, went to
Goshenhoppen, where, by 1745, he managed to get
built what Archbishop Carroll calls "a noble church."
The land was sold him in a fit of pique against his own
denomination by a Mennonite, who rightly judged that
nothing would exasperate his brethren more.
So poor
was this pioneer priest that he could not buy himself a
missal and therefore copied one for his own use, a volume
of more than seven hundred MS. pages, -a
-a monument
alike of his piety and poverty. He was the pastor of the
German Catholics in Philadelphia for many years, and
his parish extended into Delaware and New Jersey, mass
being celebrated at the Geiger house near Salem.
¹ Rise of Religious Liberty in America, Cobb, p. 451.
2 Geschichte der deutschen Gesellschaft, p. 17.
75
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Father Schneider seems to have itinerated from Goshen-
hoppen as a center; his first record is of a baptism per-
formed at a house in Falkner's Swamp, the infant's god-
mother being, as he notes, a Lutheran. His companion,
Father Wapeler, a Westphalian by birth, was sent to the
mission of Conewago (near Hanover, though in Adams
County). There Wapeler erected a log-house for a
chapel; after he left Conewago with health broken by
the hardships of his frontier parish, he is said to have
founded the church in Lancaster. Wapeler's successor,
Pellentz, was also a German, as was a later laborer,
Father Manners, his name being a translation from
Sittensperger. From 1758 St. Joseph's church in Phila-
delphia had a German Jesuit stationed there who was
especially charged with the direction of the German
population. This was the Rev. Ferdinand Farmer,
whose name affords no key to his nationality until we
learn that it was in reality Steynmeyer. He had been
previously at Lancaster, whence he had made journeys
to "Geiger's" like his predecessor.
At the end of the Revolution-during which we must.
remember there was no German immigration-these
preponderantly Teutonic parishes reported a total of
twenty-two hundred communicants-more than have
been estimated as the whole Catholic population in the
United States at that time. It is not probable that
there was any large, or indeed appreciable, number of
Teutonic Catholics in any other colony. In New York
and New England "Catholicism was virtually extinct."¹
1 J. G. Shea, Catholic Church in Colonial Times, p. 396.
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Many colonies, we know, had severe laws against
"Papists." In Maryland, the only especially Catholic
colony, Governor Calvert wrote: "I have reason to think
the greater numbers of the Germans that are imported
profess that religion," but their numbers were much
over-estimated both by their friends and their enemies.
1
Thus, about the same year, 1740, we find the three
churches, Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic, awakening
to the fact that there were hundreds and thousands of
Germans beyond the sea who were alike destitute and
desirous of the ministrations of religion; and we see all
of them organizing-sending missionaries, ordaining
clergymen, supplying superintendence, books, churches,-
but all of the work was pitifully inadequate to the needs
of these Germans so far off in the wilderness who, like
the man of Macedonia in St. Paul's vision, were calling
to their brethren and fathers in Europe, "Come over
and help us!"
1 ¹ July 9th, 1755. See letter in Scharf's History of Maryland, Vol. 1, p.
461.
NOTE.--The chief authorities which have been followed on this period
are, as before, Goebel's "Christliches Leben," Good: " History of the
Reformed Church in Germany" (Reading, 1894); and "History of the
Reformed Church in America," by the same author (Reading, 1899);
Dubbs: "Historic Manual of the Reformed Church" (Lancaster, 1885).
Volume VIII of the American Church History Series on the German Re-
formed Church is also by Dr. Dubbs and is a valuable condensation of the
above; Dr. Schmauk's excellent History of the Lutheran Church in
Pennsylvania" (publications of the Pennsylvania German Society, volume
XI, part I, Lancaster, 1902), of which, unfortunately, but one volume has
been published. Dr. Schmauk has incorporated in this work a partial
translation of the Hallesche Nachrichten" or Halle Reports, an invalu-
77
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
able source of American Lutheran history. Vol. IV of the American
Church History series, on the Lutheran Church, by the Rev. H. E. Jacobs,
necessarily brief, may be supplemented by various local and special histories.
Strobel's "History of the Salzburgers" (Baltimore, 1855), does not make
the most of a fine subject; Von Reck's "Journal" (London, 1734), and
the "
Urlsperger Nachrichten" (Halle, 1735), are well summarized by
Jacobs. See also Bernheim: "History of the Lutheran Church in North
and South Carolina" (Philadelphia, 1872). For the Charity Schools,
there are a number of different authorities; Horace W. Smith's "Life of
William Smith, D.D.," gives many original documents; a copy of the
"Brief History" is in the Library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.
For the German Catholics, see De Courcy's "Catholic Church in the United
States," translated by J. G. Shea (New York, 1856); Shea's "Catholic
Church in Colonial Times" (New York, 1886); Cobb: "Rise of Religious
Liberty in America" (New York, 1892).
78
CHAPTER IV
THE MORAVIANS
As in the case of Mühlenberg, the names of the
Moravians and their leader, Zinzendorf, have been men-
tioned in these pages before any extended explanation
or history of the movement was given. Like other
movements in the religious life of the German colonists,
it showed itself most prominently in that distracted
decade, when, as the Ephrata chronicler says: “Many
were driven into such straits that they knew not what to
believe."
The history of the Moravian church, or the Unitas
Fratrum, as they should be called, is a long and intensely
interesting one, dating in its beginning from the move-
ment begun by Huss, though not ended with his death.
When the Hussite wars came to an end in the utter
exhaustion of both parties, persecution forced them into
a separate existence; but they secured an episcopate—
procuring ordination from a bishop of the Waldenses-
and in Luther's time had a church of 200,000 members,
a confession of faith, catechism and hymn-book-the
latter the earliest Protestant work of the sort. Persecu-
tion under Ferdinand II almost blotted them out at the
beginning of the Thirty Years' War; in Poland they
coalesced with the Reformed, in Moravia they secretly
preserved the doctrine and usages of "the Unity":-
79
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
((
this is called in Moravian parlance the time of the Hidden
Seed. 'God searched out two extremes of society for
his agents in the resuscitation of this almost extinct
evangelical church: a count and a carpenter."¹
The carpenter was Christian David. Giving himself
to the work of an evangelist, he came in contact with
the Hidden Seed and assured them of a refuge on the
estate of a certain pious Saxon count. This was Nicholas
Ludwig, Count of Zinzendorf, not to mention other
titles, whose grandfather had emigrated from Austria,
esteeming the loss of all his estates more than counter-
balanced by the superior liberty of conscience which he
thus obtained." 2
The youthful count had been brought up by his
grandmother, a pious but somewhat stern and arbitrary
lady, whose strict discipline seems not to have shadowed
the loving, joyful piety of her grandchild. After studies
at Halle-where the Pietist authorities tormented him.
to produce a sufficiently gloomy "conviction of sin "-
and travels over the continent, receptions at various
courts and religious conversations wherever he went, the
young nobleman married a daughter of the noble house
of Reuss and settled upon an estate called Berthelsdorf,
withdrawing himself as often as possible from his court
employments at Dresden to perform the duties of a
village catechist and school-master at his country estate.
Here he gave refuge to the Moravian exiles and also
1 ¹ Hamilton's Moravians; American Church History series, vol. 8, p. 433.
2 Latrobe's preface to Spangenberg's Life of Zinzendorf, p. 6. English
translation and abridgment by Samuel Jackson.
80
The Moravians
to the little Protestant sect of the Schwenkfelders, founded
by a contemporary of Luther and existing ever since
under more or less persecution, until the existing Catholic
house of Hapsburg so annoyed them by Jesuit mission-
aries that they, like Zinzendorf's forefathers, left the
Austrian dominions and took refuge in Saxony.
After a time Zinzendorf was gradually drawn nearer
and nearer to the Moravian brethren whose colony,
named Herrnhut (the protection of the Lord), was
meanwhile augmented by a constant influx of refugees.
The count finally received ordination as a Lutheran
clergyman, after explanations, petitions and appeals to
the various powers that were in the Germany of his time,
as though he had purposed some terrible crime in his
evangelistic aims. But neither his rank, his high con-
nections, nor his blameless intentions could save him
long. Presently he was ordered by the Saxon govern-
ment to sell his estates, then banished, and after a time
permitted to return; then he was forbidden longer to
give shelter to the Schwenkfelders. In anticipation of a
final exile, Zinzendorf endeavored to provide some place
of refuge, and four Moravian colonies were projected in
various parts of the world. One of these was to be in
Oglethorpe's colony, Georgia, whither Zinzendorf
directed the Schwenkfelders, having succeeded in obtain-
ing land in that State, and a free passage thither. But
on arriving at Haarlem the Schwenkfelders met with
friends who arranged for them instead to proceed to
Pennsylvania.'
1 The Schwenkfelders arrived in Pennsylvania September 24, 1734,
6
81
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
The tract in Georgia thus abandoned by the Schwenk-
felders was taken up by the Moravians, who sent a few
brethren to occupy it. Meantime, the long impending
blow had fallen in Herrnhut. The Count received his
sentence of banishment, and although he was subse-
quently permitted to revisit Herrnhut, he had henceforth
"no continuing city," but spent the remainder of his life.
in evangelistic journeys over the Continent, England, the
West Indies, and America. "His state of pilgrimage,"
says Spangenberg, "commenced with this, and only ter-
which has ever since been observed by the sect as their "Memorial Day,"
with religious services lasting all day; between the morning and afternoon
services they partake of a meal of bread, butter, and apple-butter, whence
the familiar name of the occasion-"Apple-butter Day.' For
For many years
after their arrival the Schwenkfelders refrained from anything which re-
sembled an organized church with services and preachers, having on this,
as well as other subjects, views singularly akin to those of the Quakers.
They were always zealous for education, industrious, highly honorable in
their dealings, and very charitable. Their young people were instructed
largely by the means of copying Schwenkfeld's works by hand, and
numerous volumes of these manuscripts written and bound by the members
of the sect are still extant. They early instituted a habit of correspondence
with religious friends in Germany, and of these letters, often beautifully
written and composed, as many as thirty or forty were prepared in a single
year. At the end of our period, in 1782, they finally adopted a constitution
composed by their minister Schultz; before this, many of the sect strayed
into various opinions, several being earnest students of Boehme and his
English disciple, Jane Leade. Spangenberg lived a good while at the house
of Christopher Wiegner, one of the sect, having been sent there by Zinzen-
dorf to look after the welfare of these religious refugees in the new world.
At this time he wrote: "As to my outward occupation it is at present farm
work; but this is as much blessed to my soul as formerly my studying and
writing, for whatever is done by the blessing of God thereby becomes good."
Spangenberg grew so fond of the Schwenkfelders that Zinzendorf declared
he had become one of the sect.
82
The Moravians
minated with his life."1 At the time of his banishment,
Zinzendorf finally received Moravian ordination as a
Bishop of the Brethren's Unity. At the same time, while
on a visit to Denmark, his attention being called to for-
eign missions as a duty of the church, the first of the far-
famed Moravian missions—that to the negroes of the
West Indies—was begun. The Georgia settlement was
largely kept up from a desire to teach the Indians there,
but various hindrances-lack of obedience on the part of
the missionaries sent there, the impossibility of access to
the Indians, and, finally, threatenings of war-led to its
discontinuance. Meanwhile, "the banished count" had
gone with his "pilgrim congregation" to Marienborn in
the Wetterau, always a refuge for those persecuted either
for righteousness or fanaticism's sake. Here at Herrn-
haag was the center of the Moravian church, and here
the Count made his home whenever he was not on some
religious journey, and all his journeys were religious.
Presently he went to St. Thomas, to see the progress of
2
'Life of Zinzendorf, translated by Jackson. The type of religious life
which Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren finally developed was not at
all mystical, it was rather pietistic; but it was a reaction from the gloom
and narrowness of some later Pietism. It was a religion of peace and joy,
of enthusiasm, of warm love to God, and helpfulness to our neighbor. This
type, no longer concerned with orthodoxy of belief, nor with mystical visions
and ecstasies, but with helping men to realize the love of Christ to them
and to show forth that love to their fellowmen, produced Moravian evan-
gelistic endeavors-their home missions, the Diaspora work among the
members of the European State churches, and their glorious and self-sacri-
ficing foreign missions: all were a part of the same movement and motived
by the same loving zeal.
2 It will be remembered that the Dunkers had one of their earliest con-
gregations at Marienborn twenty years before.
83
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
the mission there, and thence to the Continent of North
America. He was accompanied on this journey by one
member of his family, the Countess Benigna, his eldest
daughter, a vigorous and devoted girl of sixteen. Zinzen-
dorf's interest had been much aroused by accounts of
the religious destitution suffered by the German colonists
in America,—accounts given him by George Whitefield,
the English evangelist, at that time a warm friend and
admirer of the Moravians, with whose society in Fetter
Lane he frequently met.
Zinzendorf had sent to Pennsylvania a Moravian
brother, Andrew Eschenbach, who had begun labors
at Oley (now Berks County). Whitefield, also, finding
the distressed condition of the Moravian colony in
Georgia-they had made another unsuccessful effort,
this time to preach to a forlorn little Swiss-German
settlement at Purysburg, S. C., and evangelize the slaves
there-took the remnants of the pious band to Pennsyl-
vania in his own sloop, and set them to building an
orphan house for him on a tract of land which he had
just acquired at Nazareth; but in the midst of the work,
it being the beginning of winter, Whitefield fell out with
them. It seems that a discussion had most inoppor-
tunely arisen on that perennial subject of contention,
the doctrine of election, and the Moravian leaders were
discovered not to be believers in a limited atonement.
Thereupon Whitefield, with as little logic as charity, re-
torted by enjoining them to "quit this land at once."
It is but just to note that this occurred at the time of
Whitefield's break with the Wesleys on the same doc-
84
The Moravians
trine; and he was probably harassed and sensitive. The
remnant of those sorely tried Christians began a log
house on the Lehigh, and there they were cheered by
the intelligence that Count Zinzendorf was on his way
to America. Landing at New York and stopping only
to hold a few religious meetings in its neighborhood, he
and his party reached the settlement on the Lehigh just
before Christmas. The season, and the fact that the
brethren were housed in a cabin part of which was used
as a stable, naturally suggested the name of Bethlehem
for the place. Zinzendorf did not long remain in Beth-
lehem; he felt so strongly the need of religious work
among the neglected church people and the warring
sects of Pennsylvania that he almost immediately began
his labors in this outer field. The forlorn Lutheran con-
gregation in Philadelphia called him and he became its
pastor, suggesting the young minister-Pyrläus-as his
assistant. On "Second Christmas" (December 26th) of
the same year, Henry Antes, "the pious elder of Falk-
ner's Swamp," had sent out a call for a meeting of what
was afterwards known as the Pennsylvania Synod-" not
for the purpose of disputing, but in order to treat peace-
ably concerning the most important articles of the faith,
and to ascertain how far they might all agree in the most
essential points for the purpose of promoting mutual
love and forbearance." (Antes' Call.)
At the first Synod delegates were present from nearly
all the religious bodies of Pennsylvania; but the Menno-
nites and Schwenkfelders soon withdrew-the latter, in-
deed, were treated by Zinzendorf more in the tone of a
85
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
feudal lord dealing with disobedient vassals than of a
humble minister of the gospel; besides, the Schwenkfel-
ders had a feeling respecting the church and the sacra-
ments much like that held by the Quakers, while Zinzen-
dorf always took a strongly Lutheran view of these
matters. This probably alienated the Mennonites and
Friends, among whom the Moravians had no success.
A delegate from the Dunkers reported: "For three
days I heard queer and wonderful things there. After
my return home I went to my Superintendent and said
that I looked upon the Count's conferences as snares for
the purpose of bringing simple-minded and inexperienced
converts back to infant baptism. We consulted with
each other what to do and agreed to hold a yearly con-
ference, or, as we call it, a Great Assembly. This is the
beginning and foundation of the Great Assembly of the
Baptists" or, as it is now called, the Annual Meeting.
The Dunkers' conscience seems to have been troubled
because baptism was administered by sprinkling instead
of immersion. Prior Onesimus (Eckerlin), of the Eph-
rata Cloister, with several brethren, was also present at
the early conferences, but Beissel was unfavorable to
them, as he was to everything undertaken or approved
by the Eckerlins, and soon the Ephrata Brethren ceased
their attendance. Before long the church people sus-
pected the Moravians of intending to set up another de-
nomination, though in reality nothing could be further
from Zinzendorf's thought. He, however, could not
attend all the seven meetings which were held in differ-
¹ Brumbaugh; German Baptist Brethren, p. 477.
86
The Moravians
ent places through the settled parts of the province, for
he was absent during the summer visiting the Indians,
with whom he had a great desire to begin mission work.
Beside a preliminary visit among the Delawares, he in-
spected the new work at Shekomeko on the border be-
tween New York and Connecticut, and made a trip full
of hardship and danger to Wyoming, where even he was
compelled to admit that no lasting impression had been
made, and where he was in danger of his life, being
rescued by the timely reappearance of Conrad Weiser.
Meantime, Boehme, the earliest Reformed minister in
Pennsylvania, had stirred up certain fellows of the baser
sort to lock the Lutheran congregation out of their
church and assault Pyrläus; later, he issued a violent
pamphlet against Zinzendorf. "Gilbert Tennant, the
Presbyterian minister at Philadelphia, preached from the
pulpit," writes Zinzendorf, "that Benigna, Countess of
Zinzendorf, is not my daughter, but a child that I had
taken from the lieutenant of a vessel; and everybody
asked my child if it is so."'¹
Gilbert Tennant published several sermons against "a
pernicious new sect of people called Moravian Brethren
or Hezenhouters," in which he thundered against "the
detestable doctrine of the Moravians," "the Count's
damnable heresies and errors," called them Antinomians
and Universalists and finally declared that "it would take
a large stretch of charity to conclude there is the least
measure of Saving Grace in them, notwithstanding of all
their great appearance." His book is concluded by the
1 Zinzendorf's letter to Lord Granville, May, 1753.
87
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
translation of a sermon having no apparent relation to
the Moravians, by Abraham Hellenböck of Rotterdam,
on "Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil our
vines," a wondrous allegorical performance.
Shortly after Zinzendorf's return to Bethlehem from
his perilous expedition to Wyoming, Mühlenberg arrived
in Philadelphia. He had, of course, no connection with
the disturbances which had accompanied the preaching
of the Moravians in the Lutheran congregation at that
place, and Zinzendorf resigned the work into his hands.
without any open discord. The Count had received
news from Europe concerning church matters there
which made him feel his presence in Europe important,
and he and his daughter therefore returned in the early
months of 1743. Before leaving, Zinzendorf made an
address, which he called his "Pennsylvania Testament,"
in which he laid down, to a company of his sympathizers,
the principle that America must be treated in quite a
different manner from Europe, "for to stretch both over
the same last would spoil everything in the Saviour's
cause."
It is unfortunate for the Moravian church in our coun-
try that Zinzendorf, a man peculiarly apt to be swayed
strongly by passing impressions, did not permit his
brethren to live up to this doctrine, but sometimes in-
sisted upon applying European rules to the very differ-
ent conditions of America. Particularly was this the
case as to the avoidance of proselytizing, the urging of
converts to remain in connection with their own denomi-
nation while also being connected with the Moravians;
88
The Moravians
which inevitably led, under the conditions of those times,
to a divided allegiance and to the accusation of Jesuitry
and false pretence.
Spangenberg, now left to be the leader of the Breth-
ren, was better fitted to work in a new country than was
the noble, ardent, impractical gentleman who had just
left Pennsylvania. Under the former's administration
the Brethren continued their missionary and itinerary
work, going not only to many places in Pennsylvania,
but to Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina, a number
of preaching places in New Jersey, Monocacy in Mary-
land, and even as far as "Canatschochary (Canajoharie)
beyond Albany," where they found destitute Lutherans
very glad to listen once again to the gospel in their own
language. A number of missions were founded among
the Indians in which the difficulties experienced were
quite as much from the opposition of the whites as
from the hardheartedness of the Indians. Schools were
opened in several places, mainly, however, to educate
the children of the community. The famous Moravian
boarding-schools had a later origin.
Bishop Cammerhoff took an especial interest in this part
of church work. In the Indian missions, also, he showed
the warmest interest, and his death was brought about
after but four years of episcopal work, by the hardships.
and dangers of his daring missionary tour to the Onan-
dagas in New York State. In some respects Cammer-
hoff had an unfortunate influence, for he brought over
with him much of the puerile and extravagant fashion in
speaking of religious things which prevailed in the
89
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
European Unity during what was afterwards known as
the Sifting Time; this distressed and alienated many of
their strongest and warmest friends, especially Henry
Antes.
In
One of the great monuments to Spangenberg in the
Moravian church was his foundation and management
of what is known as the Economy at Bethlehem.
this community all worked for the good of all, receiving
board and clothing, and the missionaries their traveling
expenses; the product of their farming partly supported
the community, besides which thirty-two different trades
were carried on, ranging from milling and tanning to
soap-boiling and shoe-cleaning. Besides this a number
of houses and workshops were built at various settlements
and Indian missions, and even a missionary ship, the
snow Irene," which served the Brethren ten years,
until captured in 1758 by a French privateer. The
church settlement at Nazareth was not so much a mission
station as Bethlehem; it was managed on what was called
the patriarchal plan, the settlers being expected to raise
in farming what was needed to support the Bethlehem
((
servants of the church." But they always asked a
blessing on the sweat of the brow and faithfulness in
business," and hymns were written and love feasts cele-
brated for many different trades and occupations in the
Nazareth settlement. Spangenberg also
Spangenberg also presided at
several Synods which were gradually becoming exclu-
sively Moravian; and finally Zinzendorf's idea of a union
of all Christians under the banner of the "Enthroned
¹ A petition still in use in the Sunday morning Litany of the Moravians.
90
The Moravians
Lamb of God" was given up and in 1748 the formation
of a Moravian denomination in America was at length de-
cided upon and accomplished under the presidency of
Bishop de Watteville. We may call the crowning achieve-
ment of Spangenberg's superintendency the establish-
ment of the church settlement of Wachovia in North
Carolina, which was founded amid almost insuperable
hardships and difficulties, Spangenberg having gone with
the exploring party which located the tract and named it
after an Austrian estate of the Zinzendorf family. The
motives for beginning this settlement were much the
same as those which led to the founding of Bethlehem-
a desire to do home mission work among the whites
there, and to preach Christianity to the Indians.
first colonists cheerfully put up with a deserted log hut;
but soon a settlement grew and other villages were
founded in the surrounding tract. Most of these villages
were given religious names, such as Bethabara, Bethania,
Hope, Friedland, Salem-the last named became the
largest and finally was the center of the settlement and
capital of the southern province in the American church.
But all this expansion of the Brethren's Unity is not
different from the annals of any other church, save as the
Economy and the church-settlement idea are peculiar.
The unique features of what might be called the Mora-
vian period in the religious life of the Germans in this
country showed themselves at the period of the first
transplanting of Moravianism to America, and most
strongly under the influence of Zinzendorf.
It is difficult to give a dispassionate view, even at this
91
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
length of time, of Moravianism as an episode in religious
history. From one point of view it appears as a grand
but premature attempt at Christian union; from an-
other—and that the standpoint of most of Zinzendorf's
ecclesiastical contemporaries-as a confusing and divi-
sive effort. It is quite evident that Zinzendorf's idea of
forming a Unity of pious and enlightened people outside
of and above their various denominational connections
was impossible of realization, though something of
the sort had been accomplished by the founders of
Pietism in their "colleges" within the two Protestant
churches. Apparently the state of religion among
German-Americans was not so desperate as Zinzendorf
supposed; at all events, they were not willing to ad-
mit him and his Moravians as their preachers and
teachers.
One knows not how to regard Zinzendorf; whether to
revere and admire him as did many of his own people;
to think him an enthusiast, a mischievous interloper, or
a disturber of the peace of the church as did many of
the churchmen his own contemporaries; or to hold a
middle course and think him and his fellow-laborers men
sincerely desirous of doing good, and who frequently
accomplished much, but who were sometimes mistaken,
sometimes misled in the methods which they chose.
Certainly no one can read the story of the Moravian
movement without feeling the sincerity, the self-sacrifice,
the loveliness of spirit which were the most marked
characteristics of those who so earnestly sought to do
good to the scattered, ignorant people-English and
92
The Moravians
German, Quaker, Lutheran and Separatist, Indians,
negroes or white men-in America.
NOTE.-A good sketch of the Moravians is that by J. Taylor Hamilton,
American Church History series, Vol. IV. (N. Y., 1895). Spangenberg's
"Life of Zinzendorf" is translated and abridged by Samuel Jackson,
(London, 1838). L. T. Reichel's Early History of the Moravian
Church," (Nazareth, 1888), unfortunately goes only to 1748, but the his-
tory is to a certain extent carried on by another volume, II, of the trans-
actions of the Moravian Historical Society (Nazareth, 1888), which contains
sketches of many Moravian leaders and of the church in their time. J.
M. Levering, "History of Bethlehem in Pennsylvania," (Bethlehem,
1903), also gives much more than its title promises. For the Schwenk-
felders, see volume XIII, Proceedings of the Pennsylvania-German So-
ciety; H. W. Kriebel, "Schwenkfelders in Pennsylvania," (Lancaster,
1904), and Clewell, " History of Wachovia in North Carolina," (N. Y.,
1902), for its subject. See also Gilbert Tennant, "The necessity of hold-
ing fast the truth presented in three Sermons, etc.” (Boston, 1743.)
93
CHAPTER V
THE METHODISTS
THE influence of German religious life upon the early
leaders of Methodism is not generally acknowledged,
perhaps not generally known. The reciprocal influence
of Methodism on the religious life of Germans in
America is apparently still less known. The great fore-
runner and companion of John Wesley, George White-
field, had, as told in a previous chapter, some unpleasant
dealings with the Moravians on "the Nazareth tract,"
but he had earlier as well as later intercourse with them,
and with other German Christians which was more
agreeable and profitable. In his early ministry at
Savannah he speaks with delight and admiration of the
Salzburgers' modesty and piety and gratitude,¹ of their
clergymen "two such pious ministers as I have not
often seen;" he was encouraged by their example and
that of "Prof. Francke," to found his Orphan-house in
Georgia. Both here and in London he met and liked
the Moravians, and "could not avoid admiring their
great simplicity and deep experience in the inward
life." 2 Afterward, at Germantown, Whitefield went to
see one Conrad Matthew, an aged Hermit, who has
lived a solitary life near forty years; he was heir to a
((
1
¹ Journals, July 11, 1738.
2 Journals, p. 229.
94
The Methodists
great estate, but chose a voluntary poverty; he has
worked hard, but would always work without wages; he
is now unable to do much, but God sends somebody or
other to feed him.” This was the last survivor of the
Hermits of the Wissahickon.
*
The Journal of Seward, Whitefield's traveling com-
panion, says, under date of April 24, 1740, "Came to
Christopher Weigner's plantation in Skippack where
many Dutch people are settled and where the famous
Mr. Spalemberg resided lately. It was surprising to
see such a Multitude of people gathered together in
such a Wilderness Country, Thirty Miles distant from
Philadelphia. Our Brother was exceedingly carried
out in his Sermon, * * and after he had done, our
dear Friend, Peter Boehler preach'd in Dutch to those
who could not understand our Brother in English.
Came to Henry Antes' plantation in Frederick Town-
ship, Ten Miles farther in the country, where was also
a Multitude equally surprising with that we had in the
Morning. * They were Germans where we dined
and supp'd, and they pray'd and sang in Dutch, as we
did in English, before and after eating." Whitefield
writes subsequently that he has "had sweet times with
some Lutheran ministers in Philadelphia. After
Whitefield's death, one of the many funeral sermons
preached was by Zubly, the eloquent Reformed minister
of Savannah," at his meeting, which was also in mourn-
ing," as noted by the Georgia Gazette.
* *
1
The connection of the Wesleys with German relig-
¹ Journal, October 8, 1746.
95
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
ious life is much more extensive and better known.
The conversations which John Wesley had with the
Moravian brethren, led by Nitschmann, who were going
out, on the same ship with the Wesleys, to continue
their Georgian mission, the incident of the storm and
the Germans' calm and pious courage which so im-
pressed Wesley, his conversings with Spangenberg and
Nitschmann-even permitting the Moravians to cast the
lot upon his intended marriage-are well known. So
are his and his brother's frequent interviews with Peter
Böhler in London and Oxford, and John Wesley's New
Birth while listening to "one reading" of Luther's preface
to the epistle to the Romans. It is not so often men-
tioned that John Wesley put himself under the spiritual
direction of the Moravians, visited Baron de Watteville,
and subsequently Zinzendorf in his banishment at
Marienborn, then went to Herrnhut and also to Halle.
At the latter place he would not be likely to find a very
favorable opinion of the Moravians, for the spirit of the
old pietistic university was now opposed to them.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why Wesley soon
began to question the principles and practices of his
new religious friends. Nevertheless he admired many
things which he had seen and heard sufficiently to pub-
lish jointly with his brother Charles a volume of "Hymns
and Sacred Poems," in which we find, out of the one
hundred and thirty-nine "Sacred Poems," twenty-two
translations from the German, many of which have be-
1 By John and Charles Wesley, Phila. Published by Andrew Bradford,
"Sold for the benefit of the poor in Georgia.”
1740.
96
The Methodists
come naturalized as English hymns. They are among
the best lyrics in a book which contains much that is
"devout, but literary rubbish, and utterly unworthy of
being used in public worship." In the same year John
Wesley published a translation and abridgment of one
of Francke's treatises, "Nicodemus or the Fear of Man."
But later the "unhappy divisions" occurred between
the Moravian Society in Fetter Lane and the Wesleys.
The brothers had been at first appointed as its ministers,
but later a young German, Molther, (whose wife had ac-
companied Benigna, Countess of Zinzendorf, to Bethle-
hem), was sent from Marienborn to assist them. He
soon became the favorite in the congregation, and taught
with much vehemence the wildest theories and expres-
sions current in the German Unity during the Sifting
Time. After much unprofitable and confusing discus-
sion, Wesley was finally excluded from ministering in
Fetter Lane and led his few adherents to the Foundry, a
half-ruined manufactory; in this building the first Meth-
odist society was formed in July, 1740. Attempts of a
later date to effect a reconciliation were in vain; each
church went its own way; but the Wesleys had taken
much, in hymnology, doctrine, and details of organiza-
tion, from the Germans, and these things still mark the
Methodist Church with the German influences of its
birth.
Many years afterward, in 1758, Wesley being in Ire-
land, visited a little settlement at Court Mattrass near
Limerick, "a colony of Germans whose parents came
1 Tyerman: Life and Times of John Wesley, p. 291.
7
97
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
out of the Palatinate fifty years ago. Having no minis-
ter, they were becoming eminent for an utter neglect of
all religion. But they are washed since they heard the
truth which is able to save their souls. An oath is now
rarely heard among them, or a drunkard seen in their
borders. Court Mattrass is built in the form of a square,
in the middle of which they have placed a pretty large
preaching house."1
These now pious and prosperous people were the
descendants of a colony of three thousand "poor Pala-
tines" sent to Ireland by Good Queen Anne in 1709,
when thousands of distressed Germans came to London
and were sent, some to North Carolina, some to the
province of New York, and some to other parts of the
United Kingdom. A few years after Wesley's visit,
several of the Palatines of Court Mattrass emigrated to
New York; their local preacher, Philip Embury² and his
cousin, Mrs. Barbara Heck, were among the emigrants.
"In the new land, amid the struggles to establish
themselves which awaited the little company of poor
Palatine weavers, Philip Embury demitted his humble
ministry. At this juncture there arose a mother in
Israel,'-Barbara Heck. Coming one day into a neigh-
bor's house, she found some Palatines engaged in card-
playing. To the pious Wesleyan woman this was a
threatening of perdition. She threw the cards in the
fire, and left the terrified card-players, to go immediately
¹ Wesley's Journal abridged; quoted in Diffenderfer's German Exodus to
England, p. 335.
2 Amburg-See Diffenderfer's German Exodus.
98
The Methodists
to Embury's house. There she knelt at the feet of the
young preacher, beseeching him with tears no longer to
be silent, but to preach to his backsliding countrymen.
'God will require our blood at your hand,' she declared.
Embury responded to the appeal of his slumbering sense
of duty. Barbara Heck went out, collected four other
like-minded ones, and to this little company Embury
preached, they sang hymns, a 'class' was formed, and
Embury became its leader,-the first class-leader of
American Methodism." ("The Germans in Colonial
Times," pp. 78, 79.) Barbara Heck devised a plan by
which a plain church-building was erected.¹ Philip Em-
bury wrought upon the church, being a carpenter by
trade, and for this he received pay, which with occasional
donations, was all the salary he ever received. There
were many converted; presently, Capt. Webb, the mili-
tary evangelist of early Methodism, came to help them.
In a few years Embury removed to Camden, (Washing-
ton County), New York, accompanied by several friends;
his kinsman, Peter Switzer, and Abraham Büninger, a
Moravian missionary among the Indians and whites, who
had crossed the Atlantic with Wesley, in 1735. Here,
again, Embury founded a little Methodist society, to
which he ministered during the remainder of his short
life, for he died in his forty-fifth year, having injured him-
self fatally while mowing. His relatives and those of
Barbara Heck subsequently emigrated to Canada.
¹ Back of this was finally erected a parsonage for the use of the travel-
ling evangelists and furnished by gifts from the female members: thus
"Mrs. Benninger" gave a window curtain and “Mrs. Hickey" one chair
and cushion.
UorM
99
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
There was apparently some Methodist missionary work
done among the Germans of the Pipe Creek region of
Maryland before Embury's preaching was resumed in
New York but the evidence of it is largely traditional
and fails to give reliable dates. A class-leader, named
Robert Strawbridge, came to this country in 1760, went
to Sam's Creek, (Frederick County, Md.,) and as soon as
his log house was finished, began to hold meetings there.
Subsequently, while itinerating in Maryland, Strawbridge,
contrary to Wesley's advice, administered the ordinances;
but his converts were much on his side and a German
Reformed minister, Benedict Swope, is quoted as saying,
"Mr. Wesley did not do well in hindering Methodist
preachers from giving the ordinances to their followers."
Perhaps Swope's opinion was biassed by the fact that he
himself ministered a good while previous to ordination.
When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, As-
bury attended the Baltimore conference of Methodists.
which met at Pipe Creek, he noted in his journal (Vol.
III, p. 27), "Here Mr. Strawbridge formed the first
society in Maryland and in America,”—which would give
it the priority over Embury's church in New York.
Among those in connection with this society was a
travelling preacher, John Hagarty, who is said (in spite
of his name) to have been able to preach in German and
in English. In the reminiscences of an early itinerant
we have an account of his meeting in 1813 with one of
Strawbridge's German converts: "I was traveling a soli-
tary path in the woods, between Barnesville and Marietta,
¹ Autobiography of James B. Finley, pp. 262-3.
MoU
100
The Methodists
do?"
Ohio, and came upon an old man of the most grotesque
appearance, trudging along at a slow rate, half bent, with
an ax and two broomsticks on his shoulder."
As I ap-
proached him I said, “Well, grandfather, how do you
He was a German and replied, "It ish well."
'You seem to be poor as well as old?" "O, yes, in dis
world I has noding, but in de oder world I has a King-
dom." "Do you love God?" "Yes, mit all my heart,
and Gott loves me." "How long a time have you been
"Dis fifty years. "Do you belong to
"
loving God?"
"Where
"I jine de Metodists in
any church?" "O yes, I bees a Metodist."
did you join the Methodists?"
Maryland under dat great man of Gott, Strawbridge, in
Pipe Creek, and my wife, too, and Gott has been my
Vater and my friend ever since; and I bless Gott I vill
soon get home to see him in Himmel." This aged Ger-
man's conversion under Strawbridge must have been
about 1763.
Another of Strawbridge's converts was the means of
awakening Philip Gatch, son of a Prussian redemptioner
of Maryland, who afterwards was one of the first native
American Methodist itinerants. Strawbridge also min-
istered to the community at Bohemia Manor, among the
chief families, the Bayards and Sluyters, descendants of
the Labadists, with whom Whitefield had had a great
work. "Mr. Solomon Hersey that lived below the
present Bohemia Mills at what was then called Sluyter's
Mill was the first available friend to Methodism: he
had the preaching at his house a number of years
and the first society on the Eastern Shore (of Mary-
ΙΟΙ
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
land) was formed at Hersey's in 1772." (Lednum,
P. 73.)
A few scattered notes concerning Germans who be-
came connected with the Methodist movement in these
pre-Revolutionary days may be added: they are neces-
sarily scattered, for the bonds which united these con-
verts into organized bodies-those of the United
Brethren, and the Evangelical Association often called
German Methodists-were not yet formed; this took
place only after the Revolutionary storm was over.
But these names and incidents may furnish some idea of
the widespread nature of the Methodist movement
among the Germans and show how when the German
Methodist leaders, Martin Boehme and Henry Albright,
arose, they found much people in that place.
It is said that Strawbridge preached at Martin
Boehme's. In Montgomery County Hans Supplee built
a church which he called Bethel before he knew of "the
people called Methodists" only believing that "the
Lord would raise up a people in that neighborhood to
serve him."
The first Methodist meeting-house in Philadelphia
was also provided through the agency of Germans,
though quite involuntarily on their part. About 1763, a
number of Germans, members of the Reformed con-
gregation there, began to build a church and were not
able to finish it—indeed some of them were imprisoned
for debt contracted in connection with the building.
Looking out of the debtors' prison, passers-by inquired
for what they were imprisoned, to which they answered,
102
The Methodists
"For building a church." This unusual crime became.
a current joke in the city. The Methodists bought the
edifice from these unfortunate promoters of church
extension and called it "St. George's M. E. Church.”
"}]
A work which in its final development became con-
nected with Methodism was that inaugurated and
developed by a band of German Reformed ministers
led by the Rev. William Otterbein of Baltimore.
Otterbein, one of the young ministers brought over
from Germany by Schlatter in 1742, was the son and
grandson of Calvinistic clergymen ; five of his brothers
were in the service of that church. His mother had
been wont to say, "I think my William will be a mis-
sionary, he is so frank, so open, so natural, so like a
prophet," and when the call came to him she gave him
up to the vocation, with prayers and tears. Otterbein
made a useful, active, and beloved minister on the
frontier, going first to Lancaster, then evangelizing
through York County, then at Frederick and at York,
at all of which places he labored with much acceptance
until reluctantly constrained to leave New York and
assume the pastorship of the divided and distracted
German Reformed church at Baltimore.
church at Baltimore. There an
1 A whimsical anecdote is told of one of the earliest German Methodists
in Chester County, George Hoffman by name. While at his devotions he
was interrupted by a knocking over his head and an unearthly voice which
seemed to call thrice, "Yorick! Yorick! Yorick!" (the Pennsylvania Ger-
man form of Jörg-George, his Christian name). Nothing doubting that
this was a heavenly messenger, he cried out, I'll go with you as soon as
I put on my new buckskin breeches. Thus apparelled for translation, he
rushed into the yard to discover that the summoning angel was a wood-
pecker or flicker, tapping and calling on his house-roof.
103
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
unordained man, probably an elder of the Reformed
church, Benedict Schwob, whose approval of Straw-
bridge's measures has been quoted, had attained great
popularity in his ministrations, insomuch that the little
congregation thought of calling him in place of their
regular minister. The disaffected party finally retired.
and were ministered to by Schwob, who was presently
ordained.
A year or two afterward, Francis Asbury came to
Baltimore, preaching the doctrines of the Methodists
and there met "Mr. Swoop, a preacher in High Dutch ;
he appeared to be a good man and I opened to him
the plan of Methodism." Subsequently Asbury met
Otterbein and says that he and Schwob "agreed to
imitate our method as nearly as possible." They there-
fore organized "classes" at five places in Maryland.
and arranged that the Reformed ministers in that State
were to have the supervision of the work and meet
semi-annually to receive reports.
These assemblings were no new nor especially Metho-
distic affairs; they were but the old assemblings for edi-
fication of Spener, of Labadie, of Untereyck, Lodenstein,
Lampe and the other leaders of the German pietistic
movement, or the choir meetings of Zinzendorf and the
Moravians. "The ground and object of these meetings,"
says the earliest minutes, "is to be that those thus united
may encourage each other, pray and sing in unison, and
watch over each other's conduct. At these meetings
they are to be especially careful to see to it that family
worship is regularly maintained; all those who are thus
104
The Methodists
united are to take heed that no disturbances occur among
them and that the affairs of the congregation be con-
ducted and managed in an orderly manner."¹ They
were thus no separatistic conventicles which the “United
Ministers," as they called themselves, inaugurated; the
unions were often organized by some ministers thereto
appointed and the report from each society-they soon
grew to be twelve in number-always states that they
are "at peace”—“except," say the minutes once, “a
little trouble at Antietam which has been covered up
with the mantle of charity," they are "prosperous and
serious," "prosperous and at peace;" "the friends at
Little Pipe Creek are at perfect peace and we trust enjoy
a blessing." "The friends in Baltimore are prosperous
and meet as formerly. The congregation has, however,
been considerably weakened by disturbances caused by
the war." This entry in the last minutes of the United
Ministers in 1776, shows why this promising way of sup-
plying the vacant churches of Maryland ceased for a
time, and when it was again resumed, came under the
influence of Asbury,2 to become a body separated from
the German Reformed church and connected with the
Methodists under the name of the "United Brethren in
¹ See the minutes translated and republished by Dr. Dubbs. (Reformed
Quarterly Review, January, 1884.)
'A strong personal friendship subsisted between Asbury and Otterbein;
it must have been strong indeed since it survived Otterbein's frank criticism
of Asbury's poetical efforts. The Methodist apostle wrote some religious
verse which he showed his German brother before publishing, asking his
opinion of it, to which Otterbein replied, Brother Asbury, I don't think
you was born a poet," and the pious effusions were therefore unprinted.
105
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Christ." Between Otterbein's work and the formation
of the United Brethren comes the great gulf of the
Revolutionary War, changing the political relations of
Americans not more than it did their religious and
ecclesiastical ones.
German
NOTE: Sources for the preceding section are Whitefield's "Journal,”
(London, 1739, 5th edition); Seward's "Journal," (London, 1740); Gil-
lies: "Life of Whitefield," (N. Y., 1774) ; J. and C. Wesley: Hymns
and Sacred Poems," (Philadelphia, Andrew Bradford, 1740). Also Julian's
Dictionary of Hymnology," and the personal assistance of Dr. Louis
F. Benson, editor of the Presbyterian Hymnal; Diffenderfer :
Exodus of 1709," (Transactions of the Pennsylvania-German Society, Vol.
VII, Lancaster, 1897). Stevens: "History of Methodism," (N. V., 1864)
Lednum, John ; History of the Rise of Methodism in America," (Phila-
delphia, 1859). Kuhns: "German and Swiss Settlements in Colonial
Pennsylvania,'' (N. Y., 1901); American Church History Series, Vol. XII,
Berger : "History of the United Brethren," (apparently written without
knowledge of German or of the German Reformed sources) and Spreng:
"History of Evangelical Association," (N. Y., 1894). See also Harbaugh:
"Fathers of the Reformed Church," (Lancaster, 1872), Vol. II, sketch of
Otterbein; also the histories of the Reformed Church by Good and Dubbs,
and especially Dubbs : "Otterbein and the Reformed Church," published
in Reformed Quarterly Review, January, 1884; also in pamphlet form, and
the main facts incorporated in Dr. Dubbs' "Historic Manual of the Re-
formed Church," previously cited.
106
CHAPTER VI
THE GERMAN CHURCHES DURING THE REVOLUTION
THE influence of the Revolutionary War upon
German religious life was very different in respect to
the peace sects and the church people. The non-
resistant sects, Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders,
and the Moravians, who are
are otherwise commonly
classed as church people, were all much harassed by
the Test Act requiring them to take an oath, which was
against their principles, and punishing with heavy fines
their refusal to join the militia. Undoubtedly these
measures were frequently used as the cloak of a private
hostility; and there was also suspicion that these people
who would not fight would yet plot secretly and were,
indeed, disguising Toryism under the garb of peace
principles; but this suspicion was in most instances
groundless, though, of course, Tories did exist among
the sects as among the church people. They were.
never numerous in any German denomination—the
Teutonic element, religious or non-religious, being, as
Bancroft says, "on the side of Liberty." The care
given by them to wounded soldiers went far towards.
producing a favorable opinion of the non-resistants.
Those communities which possessed large buildings
suitable for hospital purposes such as Ephrata, Beth-
107
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
lehem, and Salem in North Carolina-had the best
opportunity to display such charity.
Many of the younger members of the peace sects.
went into the army, naturally sacrificing their church.
connection in so doing; thus, early in the war, the
Lutheran pastor Helmuth reported that many Menno-
nites were drilling and "in great numbers are denying
their former religious principles." Saur's paper also
told of young Mennonites in Lancaster County who
were taking up arms;
up arms; and many of the younger
Moravians disdained to make use of the exemption
afforded those in the church settlements who were con-
sidered and treated as clergymen, and drilled with the
rest. In the Saucon Valley a constable who had made
it his business to worry non-resistant Mennonites, after-
wards transferred his attention to the Moravians around
Bethlehem. Two Mennonites, John Bear and his wife,
volunteered to nurse the soldiers during the fearful out-
break of typhus in the Ephrata hospital; in a few weeks
John Bear fell a victim to his Christian charity and a
fortnight later his wife followed him to the grave-both
unknown and unhonored martyrs to patriotism and
religion.
The most prominent victim of the Test Act persecu-
tion among the German non-resistants was Christopher
Saur, Jr., the Dunker preacher and printer. In his own
manuscript account of his sufferings because "he was
not free to take the oath to the States," he tells how on
returning to Germantown after taking refuge with his
(Tory) children in Philadelphia, he was seized, stripped
108
The German Churches During the Revolution
"Were
"No,"
and treated with contemptuous cruelty until "God
moved the heart of the most generous General Mühlen-
berg to come to me." Mühlenberg procured Saur a
pass to go to Metachton, which was indeed generous, as
Saur and his father before him had unsparingly abused
Mühlenberg's father, "the Patriarch" of the Lutheran
church. Subsequently Saur's property in Germantown
was sold, on suspicion that he had gone to Philadelphia
to give information to the Tories, and because Saur, as
a consistent Dunker, declined the Test Oath.
you so attached to the King?" they asked him.
answered Saur, "it was not attachment to the King;
but as you have in your act that they that do not take
that oath shall not have a right to buy nor sell, and as I
find in the book of Revelations that such a time will
come when such a mark would be given, so I could not
take that oath while it stood on that condition." "But
you went to the English in Philadelphia," said an
officer. "Do you know why?" asked Saur. "No,"
said the officer, "nor do I want to know." They took
everything, even his medicines, of which he protested
that none but he knew the use. "Then I beg'd for
nothing more except my spectacles, which was
granted."
Saur, thus reduced from prosperity and honor to
poverty and contempt, found refuge in a little room in
the upper story of a spring-house at a neighboring
farm. His devoted daughter Catherine went with him
-his wife having died shortly before-and ministered
to her father for the few remaining years of his life.
109
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
Various Brethren and friends sent money to relieve the
necessities of this martyr to his principles; sums in
"dollars, congress" and guineas, with tea, coffee, sugar
are carefully recorded in Saur's diary with the note:
"all of which I promise honorably to repay as soon as
God places me in condition to do so
*** and I
have trust in God that He will richly reward what I
am not able to restore;" but in his last days he was en-
abled to write, tremulously, in that old diary: "The
above has all been paid." On the birthday next fol-
lowing his impoverishment, Christopher Saur wrote a
hymn, an acrostic on his name, the first verse of which
runs:
Christians here must suit themselves
To the Cross's narrow path,
Here by patience and by stooping
We must rise to heaven-heights;
He who hopes with Christ to dwell
Must the cross remember well.
Those who there will be rewarded
Crowns of thorns here too will carry.¹
To the spoiling of his goods Saur made little protest;
but the taking away of his good name he felt bitterly.
He inquired of the Brethren's Annual Meeting whether
they thought it inconsistent with their principles of non-
resistance to evil to make some effort for the recovery of
his reputation: "If a man is openly declared a traitor
without a cause, without a trial,
is it just to
* * *
him let lie forever under that reproach?"
¹This hymn and Saur's own account of his sufferings, are translated in
Brumbaugh's History of the Brethren, pp. 415, et. seq.
IIO
The German Churches During the Revolution
By the time of the Revolution the numbers of the
Ephrata community of Dunkers had so declined that it
was a negligible quantity to the military authorities; but
it was in possession of large buildings which could be
used for hospitals, and after the battle of the Brandy-
wine the authorities took the convent buildings Kedar
and Zion for that purpose. About five hundred soldiers,
some wounded in the battle, some suffering from typhus
fever, were sent to Ephrata, and few indeed were sent
away. The mortality, especially from the fever, was
fearful. We have told of the self-devotion of the Men-
nonite John Bear and his wife: Brother Joannes Anguas
of the Cloister took into one of the community's houses
a young surgeon mortally ill with the fever, nursed him
until his death, contracted the fever from his patient, and
died of it. Ten of the brethren and sisters died during
the hospital occupation of the Cloister, though it is by
no means certain that all sacrificed their lives in nursing,
as did Brother Joannes; all the community, however,
helped in the care of the sick. Everything which could
be of use in hospital or the army in the field was taken
for the purpose-grain, blankets and quilts from the Sis-
ters' House, paper for cartridges, even to the prayer and
hymn-books in the "Saal," as the Ephrata Community,
with determined separatism called the church building
of their Cloister. The buildings used as hospitals were,
Of
it is said, destroyed because of their infected state.
the eight hundred soldiers brought there, two hundred
died and were buried in the secular graveyards. For
many years the only memorial to these patriots and
III
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
martyrs was the inscription on the picket fence surround-
ing a brambly enclosure: "Hier ruhen die Gebeine
vieler Soldaten;" but of late years a suitable shaft has
been erected. Other property of the Society was
sequestrated to keep it from falling into the hands of the
British. Continental soldiers took away the unbound
sheets of part of the great Martyr-Book, the brethren
deciding that they could not give the paper to be used
in war; but they would not resist force; so a guard of
soldiers was sent who removed the property and thus
saved the consciences of the non-resistant brotherhood.
Their press was taken and put to the base use of printing
Continental currency during Howe's occupation of
Philadelphia.
It is said that the learned prior, Peter Miller, translated
the Declaration of Independence into seven foreign
languages. Probably he was the only person in the
colonies who could have done it, but the evidence that
he actually did so is not conclusive. Neither is that for
the oft-told stock of Miller's Christian charity in saving
from the gallows as a Tory spy, Michael Widman, a
bigoted Reformed elder in Miller's old church, who
abused, vilified, and even spat upon "Brother Jaebez"
after he entered the Cloister. When Miller learned of
his former enemy's peril he is said to have appealed to
Washington's clemency. Washington deplored his ina-
bility to help the prior's "friend;" whereupon Miller
explained that it was in reality not his friend but his bit-
terest enemy for whom he interceded. Washington,
touched by Miller's forgiving nature, gave Widman's
I 12
The German Churches During the Revolution
pardon into his hands, and Brother Jaebez walked twenty
miles, from Valley Forge to the place where the execu-
tion was to take place, arriving just as the sentence was
to be carried out. Widman, seeing Miller in the crowd,
begged time of the officer to ask forgiveness of "the
man he had most deeply wronged," and learned that this
man was the bearer of his pardon.¹
The tiny sect of Schwenkfelders might have seemed
small enough to escape harassment on account of their
conscience against war and oaths, yet they did not. At
the first stirrings of patriotic feeling, Christopher Schultz,
their most important leader, was on the Committee of
Observation for his country, and he with another
Schwenkfelder went as delegates to the provincial con-
vention of 1775. At a meeting of various conscientious
non-resistants at Reading in the same year, Reeser, an
intimate friend of Schultz, said that they "were fully
sensible of the justice of our cause and willing to con-
tribute to its support." The sect observed the day of
prayer appointed by Congress in 1776; Schultz conducted
the services, reading Leviticus XVI and preaching from
the text, "Shall there be evil in the city and the Lord
hath not done it?” But they also suffered persecution
under the Test Act. George Kriebel was imprisoned for
a time in Easton on charges preferred by his neighbors,
and in his old age he remembered how on Memorial Day
of that year they held but a half-day's services. "We
1 The story in the form later given to it may be found in Sachse's "Sec-
tarians" and also in Walton and Brumbaugh's "Stories of Pennsylvania."
It seems probable that it was, at least, founded on fact, and shows what was
the common opinion of Miller's character.
8
113
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
were uneasy about our families because in some cases
wife and children, or even only the children, were at
home; we considered it therefore advisable to dismiss at
noon and return to our homes." It is believed that
none in connection with the Schwenkfelder society took
up arms. Christopher Schultz wrote in 1777 to Ger-
many : "On account of war all things go wrong; the
demands, injunctions and forcible extortions can scarcely
be told which continually plague those who do not
blow the horn of the war party. In spite of all this
we have not allowed ourselves to be forced into the
war."
The experiences of the Bethlehem Moravians during
the Revolution are known to us in more detail than those
of any other non-resistants. The geographic situation of
Bethlehem made it convenient as hospital, refuge and
prison, and these experiences, however trying at the
time, brought the inhabitants of the "church settlement”
in contact with many interesting persons and events.
Moreover, the Moravian practice of keeping a "Diary"
or history of a church settlement and its various interests
and happenings, has preserved to us records, always
contemporary and often vivid, of many men and things.
The Moravians had the same troubles with the Test
Acts and with militia service, from the suspicions of ill-
disposed neighbors of the unneighborly sort whose com-
plaints had led to the imprisonment of Kriebel the
Schwenkfelder, just mentioned. The society, along with
other non-resistants, paid the heavy fines levied on mem-
bers who would not drill. Franklin interfered to pre-
114
The German Churches During the Revolution
vent their suffering for their principles, as a kindly letter
from the sage to Bishop Seidel evinces.
Presently troops began to pass through on their way
to the seat of war;-first the York County riflemen,
pioneers in fringed hunting shirts marching "the nearest
way" to the relief of Boston. Some of the officers
stayed over a night and attended evening service.
Troops often asked to have sermons preached to them,
sometimes saying it might be their last opportunity in
life to hear the gospel. Morgan's riflemen came through
from Virginia, and among those sharpshooters, as with
the York County men mentioned above, were many
Germans, the serious ones among whom must have en-
joyed services in their native tongue. Next came a
forlorn band of British prisoners, and following them
and even more forlorn, their families in sleighs, it being
the depth of winter;-to these poor shivering folk the
good Moravians gave a donation of blankets. When
the summer of 1776 brought around the fateful day of
July 4th, "Brother Nathanael" (Bishop Seidel) ex-
horted his brethren "to remember the situation of
things before the Lord."
But later in that same year came the first test of the
Unity's readiness to give such help as they conscien-
tiously could, when the hospital of the Continentals was
moved there, the Brethrens' House being taken therefor,
and the brethren exhorted to "act on this occasion as
becomes men and Christians.'
1
¹It was announced by the following letter from the Director General of
the Continental Hospitals: "It gives me pain to be obliged by order of
115
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
About two hundred and fifty soldiers were brought to
Bethlehem, cases which could the least bear movement;
an equal number were taken on to Easton and Allentown,
but this was too far for some poor fellows-two soldiers
died in the wagons which brought them. Bishop Ettwein
officiated as hospital chaplain, visiting and comforting
the sick and burying the dead; while the carpenters of
the settlement made the coffins for those who died.
At the same time the Moravians of other settlements
had been harassed about the Test Oath and militia acts,
or were having hospitals and prisons placed in their
church buildings. Thus, at Emmaus twenty-five mem-
bers of the congregation were imprisoned for a month,
and kept on bread and water, for refusing to take the oath.
At Hebron, near Lebanon, a church settlement had
been projected, but only a chapel was built with a par-
sonage or residence for the minister in the lower story.
In 1777 this was occupied by Brother Bader and his
wife, who were greatly surprised and distressed by hav-
ing the chapel confiscated to the use of several hundred
captured Hessians taken at Trenton. These men were
accompanied by women who sold liquor to them; they
took the church bass-viol and danced to its music, disre-
garding alike the rebukes of the pastor and of their
officers; presently when they left, Brother Bader dis-
Congress to send my sick and wounded soldiers to your peaceable village—
but so it is. Your large buildings must be appropriated to their use. We
will want room for two thousand at Bethlehem, Easton, Allentown, etc.
These are dreadful times, consequences of unnatural wars.
[Signed.]
"W. Shippen."
116
The German Churches During the Revolution
gustedly remarked, "the chapel looks like a pig sty."
Later powder and munitions of war were stored in the
chapel to the great terror of the pastor.
But when a
party of officers came to inspect the improvised arsenal,
Brother Bader played for them on the organ; and the
charms of the music apparently so soothed their savage
breasts that the explosives were removed and the chapel
restored to its former peaceful use.¹
At Lititz a hospital was established in those dark days
of the winter of Valley Forge; there also "putrid fever"
desolated the wards. Of two hundred and sixty-four
patients, one hundred and twenty died, and their very
burial place is to this day unknown. Of the Moravians
who volunteered to help in the hospitals, five brethren
caught the fever and died, among them Pastor Schmick,
who having sometime before entered the service of
his beloved Indian congregation at Gnadenhütten, in an
alarm had been sent by the frightened Indian assistants
back to Bethlehem, and thus met his death in a work
of mercy at peaceful Lititz. At length in August, 1778,
the diary of the settlement records: "We are devoutly
thankful that the heavy burden of the hospital in our
midst has been removed, and we certainly find it de-
lightful to enjoy again our former peaceful life."
1 Extracts from Records of Moravian Congregation at Hebron, Pennsyl-
vania, 1775-81, republished in Pennsylvania Magazine, Vol. XVIII, pp.
449, et seq., Philadelphia, 1904. During the occupation of the Hebron
chapel, the officers of this regiment invited Bader to a Fourth of July
celebration, adding, "The Rev. Mr. Bucher [their chaplain] would likewise
be glad of your agreeable company," but the Moravian declined.
2 Cited in Jordan: "Military Hospitals."
117
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
After this hospital occupation of Bethlehem was over,
came streams of refugees; passing troops who usually
behaved well, frequently attending church services; then
prisoners, among them the soldier-preacher, Captain
Webb, whom we have seen before as Philip Em-
bury's helper. He resided in Bethlehem some time
with his family as a prisoner on parole, and during this
residence ministered to any soldiers who chanced to be
there.
The Liberty Bell was brought through the town
under guard of Mickly, who took it to Allentown and
secreted it under the floor of the German Reformed
Church; the wagon bearing the bell broke down in
"the square" and many went to gaze upon what was
even then a beloved object. But after the battle of
Brandywine Bethlehem was a second time turned into a
place of hospitals. Like Ephrata at the same epoch,
and like the other community, it then experienced all
the horrors of a typhus epidemic, the mortality being
as fearful as at the Zion cloister, with the addition that
there were many times more patients. No one ever
will know the number of the dead, save that it exceeded
a thousand; they were buried secretly, without services,
without coffins, their names unrecorded, the bodies
carried away in carts through the dusk of the winter
mornings. Some of the surgeons and soldiers who died
were buried in the church graveyard; the "Stranger's
Row" was first opened in that time of pestilence.
Bishop Ettwein's son John, a youth of nineteen, minis-
tering in the hospitals, caught the plague and died.
118
The German Churches During the Revolution
The hospitals were not finally removed until the spring
of the year 1778.
One of the distinguished patients nursed at Bethle-
hem was the Marquis La Fayette, who was brought
there wounded at the Brandywine, and nursed at the
house of Brother Boeckel by his wife Barbara and his
daughter Liesel, and well nursed it appears, for he
recovered sufficiently to leave before the typhus epi-
demic broke out. During La Fayette's illness, another
foreign nobleman and volunteer for the cause of Ameri-
can freedom came to visit him-Pulaski. It was at this
time that Pulaski procured the banner to which Long-
fellow's poem refers, and which was probably ordered
and paid for in a purely business way from the Sisters
who did much beautiful embroidery and who were not
"nuns" any more than the little "Old Chapel" con-
tained a "dim mysterious aisle ;" but the poem was the
production of an eighteen-year-old boy for whom better
excuse can be made than for certain older describers of
Bethlehem who are even more wildly imaginative.
The next representatives of foreign nobility to whom
the Moravians were asked to extend their kindness,
were the Baron and Baroness Riedesel and their family.
Other prisoners of war and officers of the Brunswick
regiment of foreign mercenaries stayed in Bethlehem
for some time, passing Holy Week there, at which time
they partook of communion with the congregation.
Their chaplain added to the ties between them and the
townsfolk by his marriage to a Bethlehem girl.
Scarcely had the Brunswick chaplain and his Agnes
119
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
departed when the town was flattered and delighted by
a sudden visit from "Lady Washington;" her august
husband himself came later in the summer of 1782,
and in his stately way showed himself very gracious.
Then followed soldiers and sailors; Ziegler, who had
met some of the European brethren at St. Petersburg
while he was in the Russian service, and John Paul
Jones, who spent some time in the settlement.
In all the annoyances and worries of these troubled
battle years it must have been a great comfort to the
Brethren to have the help of Bishop Reichel, sent over
from the conference of the Unity at Herrnhut to assist
the aged "Brother Nathanael." He remained for two
years, but unfortunately had left before the terrible news
of the massacre of the Indian converts at Gnadenhütten
in Ohio, killed by report the old Bishop Seidel who
had been instrumental in founding this settlement and
removing thither the converts from their first town on
the banks of Beaver creek.
Thence, invited by the wild Indians, they had gone.
under the advice and conduct of their devoted mission-
aries, Zeisberger and Heckewelder, to the banks of the
Muskingum where more than two hundred Indian con-
verts from the Moravian missions of eastern Pennsyl-
vania joined them, crossing the Alleghenies in a great
cavalcade, descending the Ohio by means of canoes.
which they built, and so increasing the settlement on
the Muskingum that there were presently three towns:
Salem, Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhütten-"a candlestick
in the Delaware country." The pioneers hated the
120
The German Churches During the Revolution
they
Indian converts and suspected them of Toryism; the
British at Detroit, on the other hand, thought
took the American part," and that the missionaries were
spies. Toward the end of the Revolution, the whole
community were captured and taken to Sandusky
Creek, where they settled and where they "so much
disliked the situation that they gave the town no name.”
Famine afflicted the exiles; their beloved missionaries
were torn from them to go into captivity at Detroit; so
the Indians sent an expedition south to their old
villages in order "to fetch provisions, a report prevail-
ing that there was no danger in these parts.”
Never was a report more unfounded. Instantly a
party of white militia was raised on the Ohio to surprise
the Indians at Gnadenhütten; Gibson, the commandant
at Fort Pitt, sent a warning but it was too late. A
chance white man also warned them, but the Indians
were not afraid, because they thought there was "nothing
to fear from the Americans." The militia first encount-
ered in the woods young Schebosch, the son of a mis-
sionary and his Indian wife, and though he begged for
his life, saying he was the son of "a white Christian.
man," they cut him to pieces with their hatchets. Ar-
riving at Gnadenhütten the militia assured the Indians
of their sympathy, saying they had come to escort them
to a safe refuge at Fort Pitt; the Indians delivered up
their guns and arms, showed where they had hidden
provisions in the woods, and "even emptied all their
bee-hives for their pretended friends." The frontiersmen
expressed a desire to see the other town of Salem, and
121
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
the converts took them thither, having religious conver-
sation by the way. The Salem people were brought
over to Gnadenhütten and the militia then threw off the
masque of friendship, disarmed the Salem Indians even
to their pocket-knives, thrust all their prisoners into two
cabins, and after granting them time to prepare for
death, killed and scalped them every one, ninety-two
persons, among them some of the most valuable "Indian
assistants" or native missionaries; one-third of the
number, however, being children. The militia-men com-
mented upon the Moravian Indians' behavior, that they
must have been good people, "for," said they, "they
sang and prayed to their latest breath." The Schoen-
brunn people were saved through the providential dis-
covery by a messenger sent to them from Detroit, of
young Schebosch's mangled body in the woods. The
Indians of Schoenbrunn hid themselves, watched the
militia plunder their houses and then depart with the
scalps taken at Gnadenhütten. The horses, blankets and
other plunder, were afterwards exhibited and sold at
Fort Pitt. In this manner was Brother Schebosch first
apprised of his son's death.
After this story of martyrdom and suffering it seems
an anti-climax to speak of the troubles of the Moravians
in "the Wachovia tract" centering about Salem in North
Carolina; troubles brought upon the community mainly
by their opposition to war and oaths. They were finally
overcome, as in the case of the Northern brethren, by
the care given the wounded soldiers who were brought
to Salem for nursing.
At one time, however, suspicion
122
The German Churches During the Revolution
of these pious non-resistants' loyalty ran so high that it
was expected that the Legislature would confiscate their
land; the people of Salem made preparation to leave
their homes, the surrounding inhabitants had already
selected the tracts of land which they would take up and
filed claims for them, when the Legislature decided to
permit affirmation in place of the oath and the houses
and lands of Salem were saved. Prisoners, unruly and
plundering militia, wounded men and high officials of
the provinces passed through Salem as through other
Moravian towns; twice the Legislature endeavored to
meet there but could not get a quorum; at length, on
July 4, 1783, the congregation in Salem kept a peace
jubilee, with "a psalm of joy" written for the occasion
and beginning "Peace is with us! peace is with us!"
which doubtless expressed in some measure their joy
and relief.
In the story of the Revolution as it affected the
Lutheran and Reformed, we find no such tales of non-
resistants' sufferings for conscience sake as we have met
among the "peace sects:" the church people not only
had no objection to fighting, but they were, many of
them, very fiery and militant in their patriotism. Many
of the soldiers of the Revolution were prominent mem-
bers of either denominations; thus Colonel Antes, the
four brothers of the Hiester family who entered the army,
and Michael Hillegas, the treasurer of the Continental
Congress, were all of the Reformed church, as were
Herkimer, the gallant defender of the Mohawk valley,
the hero of Oriskany-and General Steuben, who was an
123
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
elder in the German Reformed church in New York
City.
The great body of the clergy stood for liberty; they
preached numerous sermons the texts of which consti-
tute a quaint collection; some went into the army as
chaplains, like Michael of Lehigh County, and John
Conrad Bucher, who had been a soldier before he was a
preacher and now returned to the army as a chaplain in
Marsteller's regiment. Gobrecht of Hanover preached.
to companies on their way to the war; while Weyberg
of Philadelphia was so persuasive in his patriotic sermons
that it was said that had the British not imprisoned him,
all the Hessians who heard him would have left the
British service. During Weyberg's imprisonment the
large, fine church building was taken for a hospital; his
first sermon after his liberation was on the text, "O God,
the heathen are entered into Thine inheritance; Thy
holy temple have they defiled." The Reformed churches
at the Trappe, East Vincent, Skippack and Falkner's
Swamp were also taken for hospitals, as was that at
Lebanon. The aged Schlatter, in his modest cottage at
Chestnut Hill, was plundered and taken a prisoner to
Philadelphia. At Guilford in South Carolina, Suther
and his patriot parishioners were driven out by the Tories
of the congregation and their possessions plundered.
In New Jersey, Nevelling, a cousin of the eloquent
pastor Weyberg, lent all his money to the Continental
cause, and lost it,—a serious matter to him in the long
years of invalidism which closed his life when he was old,
blind and paralyzed. Nevelling was so valuable to the
124
The German Churches During the Revolution
British that they are said to have offered a reward for
his apprehension, and so valued by Washington that he
sent a troop of horse to guard him. Faehring, another
Reformed pastor of New York State died from the con-
sequences of exposure endured in his flight from the
British. Hendel had congregations "beyond the Blue
mountains" which he desired to serve in those troublous
times despite dangers from British and Indians, so his
expectant hearers used to send an escort to meet him,
stand guard around the church while he preached, and
then accompany him home across the mountains. At
the Cacusi church near Wernersville, built in 1766, an
inscription over the door announced that "all who go
out and in must be true to God and the King;" but after
the war, during which many of the members went into
the Continental army, one of the builders climbed up
and chiseled out the word "king." The inscription re-
mains to this day in that mutilated condition. Stahl-
schmidt left his congregation at New York because it
contained some Tories who would not have a patriotic
minister. Returning to Germany, he became a suc-
cessor of Tersteegen in leading the pietistic party in the
principality of Siegen, and his influence was instrumental
in preserving that part of the country from the ration-
alistic influences which threatened at one time to blight
the church. The driving out of Weber, another patriotic
pastor from his Eastern Pennsylvania charge, wrought an
undesigned good work also; for Weber, going into the
wilds of Westmoreland County, became the pioneer of
Reformed Home Missions in that region, preaching as
125
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
far as Fort Pitt. Runkel ministered to the soldiers at
Valley Forge, and it is testified of him that "he was a
devout Christian and true patriot, one of the hardest
workers in the cause of religion and his presence among
Washington's soldiers was always attended by good re-
sults." His ministrations were not always strictly relig-
ious, as when once following the suffering troops on the
march, he found a soldier whose feet were so cut and
bleeding that he could no longer march. Runkel picked
him up, put him on his back and carried him to Morris-
town where he had friends. The energetic and helpful
pastor also assisted Baron Steuben in drilling the troops,
translating the German officers' commands into English
to Steuben's great satisfaction.¹
Not all the Reformed ministers were so ardently
patriotic as these just mentioned, and of those who did
not rise to the height of the occasion the greatest name.
is that of Zubly, "the most eminent Reformed minister
of America." John Joachim Zubly, a native of St.
Gall in Switzerland, member of a family of influence.
and position there, joined his father at Purysburg, South
Carolina, while a young man, though already ordained
and a "boy preacher" of unusual talents and promise.
He did much evangelistic work among the German
settlements of the Carolinas and Georgias, ministering
at Frederica, Orangeburg and Charleston; thence he
was called to an important church in Savannah, com-
posed of Reformed, Lutherans, and Catholics, where he
officiated with great success and acceptance, preaching
¹Good: German Reformed Church in United States, p. 627, foot note.
126
The German Churches During the Revolution
to his diverse congregation in English, German and
French. Mühlenberg who visited him said, "He has
a larger collection of fine books than I have seen else-
where in America." Princeton honored him with the
title of D.D. He was a near friend of Whitefield who
called him "his son in the Lord," and for his orphanage
project, Zubly made a collecting tour through the
north, which had as a personal result a number of calls
from prominent churches there. But the brilliant Swiss
preferred to dwell among his own people who loved and
honored him, and who sent him at the beginning of the
Revolutionary movement to Philadelphia as a delegate
to the Continental Congress.
Zubly could not endure the thought of an entire sep-
aration from the mother country; he left Philadelphia a
few months before the Declaration of Independence
was adopted and returned to Savannah, where he found
himself now hated, proscribed, and exiled.
"rebel
His prop-
erty was confiscated, first by the patriots, afterwards,
during their occupation of the city, by the British, who
knew no more of him than that he had been a
leader." At length the tide turned; he was recalled to
Savannah by his people, and ministered to them for a
few years; but he was a broken man and died before
the end of the Revolution, in 1781. His career in
Church and State can hardly be called more than a
brilliant failure." "
In regard to the Lutherans' attitude toward the Rev-
olution, it is difficult to discriminate between them and
1 Dubbs: Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, p. 219.
127
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
the Reformed and tell what part to credit to the
followers of Luther specifically, because so many
people made use of the services of either denomination
and most of the country churches were "union" ones,
ministered to by Lutheran and Reformed on different
Sundays, but with otherwise little distinction. When,
at the outbreak of the Revolution, the German church
people of Philadelphia desired to fire the patriotism of
the Mohawk Valley and the southern Germans, the
officials of both Reformed and Lutheran churches joined.
with the officers of the benevolent "German Society"
in the "Address" they issued.¹
The Lutheran pastor Helmuth, of Philadelphia, has
already been quoted; he says further regarding the
state of feeling in that city in 1775: "Where a hundred
men are desired many more than that number imme-
diately appear, who then because they are not all
needed are turned back to their own great dissatisfac-
tion. In my own slight acquaintance with history, I
know of no parallel state of affairs. Regions of which
one was obliged to believe that it would be years before
the people freely gave themselves to martial affairs, as
soon as the news of the first clash at Lexington was
heard, became very warlike in a few weeks. *
The whole land from New England to Georgia is all of
one mind to risk body and life in order to assert its
freedom. The few who think otherwise dare not speak
* *
1 Schreiben des Lutherischen und Reformirten Kirchen-raths an die
Teutschen Einwohner, etc., quoted in Seidensticker's Bilder and summarized
in my "Germans in Colonial Times," p. 240.
128
The German Churches During the Revolution
*
otherwise. * * In Philadelphia the English and
German pupils in the schools have formed soldier com-
panies and are drilled like regular troops. Would God
that men might once assert their spiritual freedom as
zealously and unanimously as they here in America
rise to the defense of their bodily freedom." (Repub-
lished in Schmauk; Lutheran Church in Pennsylvania,
PP. 335-36.)
In Charleston, the Lutheran pastor, Streit, who had
served as chaplain of the Third Virginia regiment, was
obliged to flee from the city when the British took pos-
session. The church to which Streit ministered, St.
John's, was so patriotic that a whole company of Conti-
nental troops, the "German Fusileers," was formed out
of members of his congregation: they took part in sev-
eral engagements, their captain being killed in action at
Savannah. Another of their pastors, Martin,—it was a
collegiate church-because he would not pray for the
king, had his property confiscated by the British at the
taking of Charleston, and was forced to flee from the city.
The church provided itself ad interim with two other
ministers "less exceptionable to our foreign rulers," as
they said; probably more willing to pray for King
George. In Western North Carolina, Nussmann's con-
gregations suffered much in the war, losing both lives
and property in the cause. Nussmann's coadjutor, Arndt,
was obliged to remain in hiding on account of his
patriotic outspokenness. At Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the
congregation in 1780 called the Rev. John George
Butler (Bottler) who, before he entered the ministry, had
9
129
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
been a soldier in the Continental army, serving in Vir-
ginia. One of the Ebenezer pastors, Rabenhorst, had
his homestead burnt as well as his church turned into a
stable by the invaders; several of his parishioners were
active and prominent on the "rebel" side. But Triebner,
the other pastor, officiated as guide to the British force
and found it prudent to go with the invaders when they
left South Carolina. So did a Northern clergyman,
Hausihl, who accompanied some exiled German loyalists.
to Nova Scotia.
The best known of all the German patriots of the
Revolution is probably that son of the patriarch Mühlen-
berg, who so dramatically exchanged the Geneva gown
for the Continental uniform, in the Lutheran church of
Woodstock in Virginia. This Peter Mühlenberg had
already undergone Isbé military experience, for, when
sent as a boy to Halle for his education, he ran away and
enlisted in a dragoon regiment, where a British officer
recognized him, extricated him with some difficulty,-
enlistments in the German army were then for life;-
and brought "Peter the Devil," as he was known in the
ranks, to America as his secretary. Peter now com-
pleted his education without further mishap, was ordained
in London and became pastor of a German church in
the Shenandoah Valley. There Washington learned to
know and value him, asking him at the outbreak of the
Revolution to take the colonelcy of the Eighth Virginia
Regiment. In January, of 1776, the Reverend Peter
preached at Woodstock from the third chapter of
Ecclesiastes: "To every thing there is a season, and a
130
The German Churches During the Revolution
*
time to every purpose under the heaven: *
a time
of war and a time of peace:" and ended his sermon with
the statement that "in the language of Holy Writ there
was a time for all things-a time to pray and a time to
preach—but those times have passed away; there is a
time to fight, and the time to fight is here!" Then he
prayed; "Hold us up, O Lord, Lord our God, that we
may live; and let our hope never make us ashamed.
Help us by thy might, that we may wax strong; and so
shall we ever delight ourselves in thy statutes," gave the
benediction,' removed his clerical gown and showed him-
self attired in a colonel's uniform. Three hundred men
of his congregation enlisted under him.
He fought at Sullivan's Island, was made a Brigadier
General, and at Brandywine his troops and those of
Weedon (the German Baron von der Wieden) bore the
brunt of the action; here, as he himself used to tell, some
German dragoons, seeing him heading a charge, recog-
nized him as their former comrade, and cried out "Here
comes Peter the Devil!" At Germantown General
Mühlenberg had a narrow escape. A British officer
seized a musket, loaded it and would have killed him,
had not the General drawn his pistol and shot the other
dead. He fought also at Monmouth and Stony Point,
served under Steuben against the traitor Arnold in Vir-
ginia, and finally led the assault at Yorktown.
He was
made a Major General at the close of the war, when he
¹This account of Peter Mühlenberg's last sermon is pieced together from
many sources;
the prayer
is taken from the manuscript of the liturgy which
he used, in his own handwriting.
131
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
removed to Pennsylvania. He never re-entered the
ministry, but was prominent and useful in civil life.
His younger brother, Frederick Augustus, went also
to Halle for education. Finishing his course there, he
was ordained and became pastor of a Lutheran church.
in New York City, his piety, fine education, eloquence
and polished manners fitting him well for a metropolitan
position. But he proved as outspoken in his patriotism
as the rest of the family, and when the British took pos-
session of New York, was obliged to seek refuge in
Philadelphia. That city sent him as a delegate to the
Continental Congress, and afterwards to the State Legis-
lature; he also filled other prominent civil positions.
Like his brother, the General, he never returned to the
ministry.
Ernest Mühlenberg, the youngest son of the patriarch,
continued a Lutheran clergyman all his life. He was at
Halle with his brothers, then became a pastor in Phila-
delphia, but was too patriotic to find a stay there safe
during Howe's occupation;-taking refuge in the coun-
try he interested himself in botany and mineralogy and
became distinguished in their pursuit. He was a pastor
in Lancaster from 1780 until his death.
These chronicles of German church life in this mo-
mentous epoch seem mere catalogues of names and
trifling details, but it is only in this way, by giving the
slight, often homely events, that we can see what the
Revolution was as it came to the homes, hearts and con-
sciences of men. From these scattered remnants of
history, we may picture to ourselves the many nameless,
132
The German Churches During the Revolution
unknown heroes and patriots and Christians who made
our country "free and independent." In this great task
the Germans, pastors and people, bore a large and hon-
orable part.
"
NOTE: The history of German religious life during the Revolution is
found scattered through the special histories before cited: Brumbaugh :
'History of the German Baptist Brethren;" Seidensticker: "Bilder;"
Pennypacker: "Historical and Biographical Sketches;" "Ephrata monu-
ment designed and to be erected over the remains of two hundred American
soldiers, etc.," 1845; Sachse : "Sectarians;" Kriebel: "Schwenk-
felders in Pennsylvania; Levering: Bethlehem in Pennsylvania;
Clewell: "Wachovia ; " Dubbs: "Historic Manual; " and "Reformed
Church in Pennsylvania; " Jacobs:
"Lutheran Church; in American
Church History series, Vol. 4; Jordan: "Military Hospitals at Bethlehem
and Lititz;” (Philadelphia, 1896). Loskiel: History of Missions,"
translated by Latrobe (London, 1794), gives a good account of the Mora-
vian missions among the Indians and a dispassionate story of the Gnaden-
hütten massacre. I am indebted to Mr. Jordan for supplying me with his
"Extracts from Records of Moravian Congregation at Hebron, Pa., 1775-
81,” republished in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,
Vol. XVIII, pp. 449, et seq. I have also used H. M. M. Richards:
"Descendants of H. M. Mühlenberg," Pennsylvania German Society's
transactions, Vol. X, part 3.
133
CONCLUSION
IN taking leave of this study of the religious life of
the Germans in America during the Colonial period, a
few general impressions are left upon the student's mind
which may be worth recapitulating. One concerns the
opinion held of the German churches and church people
by the English colonists; another the judgment passed
upon the Germans by some of their clerical fellow-coun-
trymen. In the first case, the Germans were not so
ignorant as was generally supposed by men who could
not read or speak their language. Secondly, moral con-
ditions were not so bad among them as they appear to
some observers and reporters of the German race and
language.
That the Germans were not so illiterate and brutish
as the founders of the Charity School project thought
them, has frequently been stated;—the gloomy picture
drawn by Provost Smith could scarcely have applied to
any but a few small and remote frontier clearings. The
earliest emigration of Separatists and sectarians was
characterized by the number of learned men who dwelt
among such communities as Germantown and that of the
Wissahickon Hermits. These men were often "cranks,"
but frequently it was much learning which had made
them mad. In the later emigration of the church people,
one is struck with the number of university graduates
134
Conclusion
among the clergymen-mostly of course from the pietistic
centers of Herborn, Halle and Giessen. The prominence
of the schoolmaster in the early settlements is another
witness to German zeal for education; this personage, in
early times, frequently conducted services, read sermons,
and, among the Lutherans, baptized children who were
thought to be in the article of death, besides teaching
reading, writing, the catechism and hymns. Often such
a schoolmaster developed into a religious worker, or-
dained or unordained. The later movements of Mora-
vianism or Methodism made greater use of the "pious.
laymen" than was encouraged in the Lutheran and
Calvinistic churches; but we have seen that these two
denominations owed their origins here to laymen only
subsequently ordained-to Stoever and to Boehm re-
spectively. But even in the later movements mentioned,
the leaders were university men and clergymen, "pious,
learned and regularly ordained,"¹ for among those lead-
ers were, beside the Englishmen Whitefield and the
Wesleys, Germans fully their equals, such as Spangen-
berg, Zinzendorf, John Wesley's teacher Böhler. Of
the church people one need only mention such names as
Mühlenberg and his three ministerial sons, Schlatter,
Otterbein and Zubly,-leaders and representatives of
scores of faithful, learned and earnest men who laid the
foundations for the churches of the Fatherland in this
new land. Among the sects, such as the Mennonites,
Dunkers and Schwenkfelders, who disapproved of a
¹To quote the testimony of Mühlenberg to the character of one of the
writer's ancestors, Rev. John Georg Bager of St. Michaels, Conewago.
135
German Religious Life in Colonial Times.
paid and "man-made" ministry, it is evident that there
was not great ignorance; the literary activity of the
Dunker monks of Ephrata, the support of Saur's press
and paper-the latter with a circulation of several
thousands, the manuscripts of the Schwenkfelders, the
school and school-books of the Mennonite Christopher
Dock, all show a condition the reverse of ignorance or
of illiteracy.
As the intellectual state of the Germans was not so
bad as painted by the English Charity School Society,
so neither was the moral one such as one might gather
from the accounts which German observers sent back
to Europe those of Mühlenberg for instance, in the
Halle Reports. These rather refer to the lack of
clergymen and of regularly organized churches than to
real moral or ethical decadence. Surely people as
anxious as these struggling pioneers showed themselves.
for the ministrations of the church were not sunk in
indifference and irreligion. They paid the passage of
clergymen, they built churches, they flocked in crowds.
to services; in default of a minister, schoolmaster or
elder read a sermon or a service; they were instructed
in the Scriptures, the hymns, the devotional works of
the Fatherland. The universal testimony of the Eng-
lish colonists, who neither liked nor understood the
Germans, shows that their moral character compelled.
favorable opinion. This was the case with the celibates
of Ephrata whose whole manner of life brought them
under suspicion, and with the Moravians, who were
preceded or followed in their earlier years by the most
136
Conclusion
violent denunciations from highly-esteemed religious
leaders, both English and Continental, and whose
peculiarities of life and expression laid them open to
much misconstruction.
The effect of the events which separated the colonies.
from the mother country was almost entirely a good one.
The rule of the various European bodies which gave
direction or help to the struggling congregations in the
American wilderness had been important and well
intentioned; but from distance, uncertainty of com-
munication, and, most of all, from ignorance of Ameri-
can conditions, became, instead of a help, a yoke not
easy to be borne. The Calvinistic "Fathers in Hol-
land," the Lutheran pietists at Halle, as well as the
Mennonite Committee in Amsterdam, were all alike in
their insistence that nothing should be done without
their advice. They wanted to appropriate the money,
direct the action, ordain the clergymen,-in short, do
whatever under their various constitutions, might be
proper for a superior body to do. They frequently
treated their American brethren with that "certain con-
descension" which a much later authority has noticed in
"foreigners." Though at first the German Americans,
left to themselves, felt and showed the lack of contact
with European culture and there was in Church as in
State, in German as in English colonists a certain
intellectual and moral decadence, a critical period to
pass through, yet, at the end, independence here
opened a new era of renewed activity, and led to the
production in the German religious life, as elsewhere,
137
German Religious Life in Colonial Times
of an American type of church life instead of a
European one. It was the end of an era of following,
of imitation, of essential provinciality, and the begin-
ning of a religious life characterized by freedom and
independence.
NOTE. In the nature of things, no references can be given for any
statement in the foregoing section. The reader may rest assured that
these generalizations are made from many particular instances, and that in
making them, although not giving author and page, the present writer
does not speak without the book.
138
INDEX
Adams County, (Pa.), 76
Albany, 64, 89
Albright, 102
Alleghenies, 120
Allentown, 116, 118
Ames, 33
Amish, 33, 34
Amsterdam, 35, 60, 137
Anabaptists, 15, 16, 24, 25
Andreä, 14-16
Andrews, 58
Antes, Col., 123
Antes, Henry, 58, 85, 90, 95
Antietam, 105
Antinomians, 87
Appomattox, 29
Arndt, Gottfried, 67, 129
Arndt, Johann, 13, 14, 16, 23, 56
Arnold, Benedict, 131
Arnold, Gottfried, 13, 36, 37
Asbury, 100, 104, 105
Augsburg, 71
Augsburg Confession, 13
Austria, 80
Bach, 12
Baden, 54
Bader, 116, 117
Bager, 135
Baltimore, 100, 103, 105
Baltimore, Lord, 27
Berks County, (Pa.), 34, 84
Berleburg, 37, 47
Berlin, 18
Berne, 35, 57
Bernheim, 78
Berthelsdorf, 80
Bethabara, 91
Bethania, 91
Bethlehem, 85, 88, 90, 91, 93. 97,
107, 108, 114, 116, 119, 133
Beyaert, (Bayard), 28, 101
Bismarck, II
Boehler, 95, 96, 135
Boehm, J. Philip, 58, 60, 68, 87
Boehm, Martin, 102
Boehme, Jacob, 14, 16, 19, 31, 32,
37,82
Boeckels, 119
Bogatzky, 22
Bohemia Manor, 27, 28, 101
Bohemia Mills, 101
Boltzius, 72
Boston, 56, 115
Bouquet, 62
Braddock, 62
Brandenburg, 71
Brandywine, 111, 118, 119, 131
Bremen, 55
Brethren, German Baptist, see
Dunkers
Brother Joannes Anguas, III
Brother Obed, 46
Brother Onesimus, 45, 86
Brumbaugh, 39, 48, 52, 86, 110, 113,
133
Brunswick, (reg't), 119
Bucher, 117, 124
Büninger, 99
Bancroft, 107
Barnesville, 100
Basel, 42
Bax, 22
Bear, 108, 11I
Beaver, 120
Becker, 42, 43
Beethoven, II
Butler, 129
Beissel, 19, 42-48, 57, 58, 86
Bengel, 13, 22
Cacusi, 125
Benson, 106
Calvert, 77
Berger, 106
Calvin, 17
Berkenmeyer, 64
Camden, (N. Y.), 99
139
Index
Cammerhoff, 89
Canada, 75, 99
Canajoharie, 89
Canstein, 19
Carlisle, 129
Carroll, Archbishop, 75
Catawba, 67
Catholics, 16, 17, 27, 54-56, 75-78,
81, 126
Charity Schools, 51, 62, 78, 134, 136
Charleston, 66, 71, 126, 129
Chester County, (Pa.), 103
Chestnut Hill, 124
Clewell, 93, 133
Cobb, 75, 78
Codorus, 68
Concord, 26, 27
Conestoga, 35, 43, 45, 46, 53, 57,
58, 70
Conewago, 68, 76, 135
Connecticut, 87
Conyngham, 34, 52
Court Mattrass, 97, 98
Crefeld, 25-27, 36, 40-42
Cresheim, 33
Croese, 31
Cromwell, 30
Dankers, 28, 52
David, Christian, 80
Declaration of Independence, 112,
127
DeCourcy, 78
Detroit, 121, 122
Delaware, 30, 75,
Delawares, (Indians), 87, 120
Denny, 49
Denmark, 83
Diffenderfer, 98, 106
Diaspora, 83
Dippel, 70
Dock, 49, 136
Dresden, 18, 80
Dubbs, 77, 105, 106, 127, 133
Dunkers, (Tunker), 36, 42-44, 47,
50, 52, 61, 73, 83, 86, 107-109, III,
135, 136
Dürer, 12
Easton, 116
East Vincent, 124
Ebenezer, 67, 71, 72, 130
Eckerlins, 43, 45, 46, 86
Eder, 40
Eichers, 43
Elsass, 25
Embury, 98, 99, 100, 118
Emmaus, 116
England, 82, 98
Ephrata, 43-49, 52, 58, 70, 79, 86
107, 108, III, 118, 133, 136
Episcopal Church, 57, 65, 73, 74
Ettwein, 116
Ettwein, John, 118
Evangelical Association, 102, 106
Faehring, 125
Falkners, 32, 53, 64
Falkner's Swamp, 58, 76, 85, 124
Farmer, (Steynmeyer), 76
Ferdinand, 79
Ferree, 53
Fetter Lane, 84, 97
Finley, 100
Florida, 75
Fort Pitt, 121, 122, 126
Foundry, 97
France, 46, 55
Francke (elder and younger), 18,
19, 36, 47, 69, 71, 94, 97
Francke, Kuno, 23
Frankfort, 17, 18, 20, 26, 37
Franklin, 33, 47, 48, 61, 114
Frederica, 65, 126
Frederick, 103
Frederick County, (Md.), 100
Frederick (township), 95
Freytag, 21, 22
Friedland, 91
Friesland, 42
Gatch, 101
Geiger, 75, 76
Geissendanner, 65
Gellert, 12
Geneva, 16
George, King, 129
Georgia, 72, 81-84, 89, 94-96, 126,
128
Gerhardt, 12
Germanna, 68
Germantown, 27-35, 37, 42, 44, 45,
47, 49, 50, 56, 57, 59, 94, 108, 109,
131, 134
Gettysburg, 29
Gibson, 121
Giessen, 36, 54, 135
Gillies, 106
Gnadenhütten, 117, 120, 122, 133
Gobrecht, 124
Goebel, 22, 24, 52, 77
Görlitz, 14
140
Index
Goethe, 11, 21, 23, 41
Göttingen, 71
Good, 77, 106, 126
Goshenhoppen, 75, 76
Granville, 87
Graffenried, de, 35, 57
Great Swamp, 35
Gronau, 72
Guilford, 124
Gulch, 41
Guldin, 57, 68
Haarlem, 81
Haeger, 57
Hagarty, 100
Halle, 19, 21, 36, 47, 68-72, 77, 80,
96, 130, 132, 135, 137
Hamilton, 80, 93
Handel, 12
Hannover, 67
Hanover, 68, 76, 124
Harbaugh, 106
Hapsburg, 81
Hark, 52
Hartung, 73
Hausihl, 130
Hazard, 52
Hebron, 116, 117, 133
Heck, Barbara, 98, 99
Heckewelder, 120
Hedges, 23
Hedwig, Countess, 37, 40
Heidelberg, 43, 46
Hellenböck, 88
Helmuth, 108, 128
Hendel, 125
Herborn, 60, 135
Herder, 12, 23
Herford, Abbess of, 27
Herkimer, 123
Hermann, Augustine, 28
Hermann, Ephraim, 28
Herr, Hans, 35
Herrnhaag, 83,
Herrnhut, 81, 82, 96, 120
Hersey, 101, 102
Hesse, 54, 58
Hessians, 116, 124
Hiester, 123
Hillegas, 123
Hochmann von Hochenau, 25, 36,
41
Hoffman, 103
Holland, 24, 25, 28, 35, 54, 59, 60,
66, 137
Hope, 91
Howe, 112, 132
Hudson, 63, 64
Huguenots, 54, 56
Huss, 12, 79
Indians, 44-46, 61, 62, 64, 83, 87, 89,
91, 93, 99, 117, 120-122, 125, 133
Ireland, 97, 98
Irene, 90
Isenburg-Büdingen, 20
Jackson, 80, 83, 93
Jacobs, 78, 133
Jansenists, 17
Jesuits, 17, 27, 75, 76, 81
Jews, 37
Jones, John Paul, 120
Jordan, 117, 133
Joris, 37
Julian, 106
Jung Stilling, 41
Kapp, 65
Karl Ludwig, 25
Kedar, III
Keith, 32
Kelpins, 32
Klopstock, 12, 23
Koch, 41
Kocherthal, 63, 64
Koster, 32
Kriebel, Geo., 113, 114
Kriebel, H. W., 93, 133
Kuhns, 106
Kündig, 35
Kurtz, 34
Kurtz (Church History), 23
Labadie, 16, 17, 28, 55, 104
Labadists, 25, 27, 52, 101
La Fayette, 119
Lampe, 104
Lancaster, 68, 76, 103, 132
Lancaster County, (Pa.), 34, 35, 44,
108
Latrobe, 80, 133
Laurenti, 22
Lau, 51
Leade, Jane, 37, 82
Lebanon, (Quitapotilla), 68, 116,
124
Lednum, 102, 106
Lehigh, 85
Lehigh County, (Pa.), 124
Leibnitz, 12, 21
Leipzig, 18
141
Index
Lessing, 12
Levering, 93, 133
Lewes, 30
Lexington, 128
Libe, 42
Limerick, 97
Lititz, 117, 133
Lobwasser, 56
Lodenstein, 104
London, 57, 60, 61, 63, 94, 96, 98, 130
Longfellow, 119
Loskiel, 133
Louis XIV., 17
Lunenburg, 73
Luther, 12, 19, 79, 81, 96, 128
Lutherans, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 32, 36,
Chapter III., 81, 85-89, 93, 95, 108,
109, 123, 126-130, 132, 133, 135, 137
Mack, Alexander, 38, 39, 42, 44
Mack, Alexander, Jr., ("Brother
Sander "), 44, 51
Maine, 73
Manatany, 35
Mann, 74
Manners, (Sittensperger), 76
Mannheim, 35
Marienborn, 40, 83, 96, 97
Marietta, 100
Marot, 56
Marsay, 25
Marsteller, 124
Martin, 66, 67, 129
Maryland, 27, 28, 52, 59, 62, 72, 77,
89, 100, 101, 104, 105
Matthew, Conrad, 94
Mecklenburg Co., (N. C.), 67
Mel, 56
Mengs, Raphael, 12
Menno, 15, 24, 33, 37
Mennonites, 16, 24-31, 33-37, 42, 47,
49, 52, 73, 75, 85, 86, 107, 108, III,
135, 137
Metachton, 109
Methodists, Chapter V., 13
Michael, 124
Mickly, 118
Miller, Peter, ("Brother Jaebez")
43, 46, 47, 53, 58, 70, 112, 113
Mohawk, 64, 123, 128
Molther, 97
Moltke, 12
Molinos, 37
Monmouth, 131
Monocacy, 72, 89
Moravia, 79
Moravians, 58, 69, 72, 73, Chapter
IV., 94, 96, 97, 99, 104, 107, 108,
114-117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 133,
135, 136
Morgan, 115
Morristown, 126
Mühlenberg, H. M., 66, 68-75, 79,
88, 127, 130, 133, 135, 136
Mühlenberg, Gen. Peter, 109, 130,
131
Mühlenberg, Ernest, 132
Mühlenberg, F. A., 132
Münster, 15
Muskingum, 120
Nassau, 54
Nazareth, 84, 90, 94
Neander, 56
Netherlands, 35
Neuburg, 54
Nevelling, 124
New Berne, 57, 63
New England, 11, 56, 76, 128
New Hanover, 68
New Jersey, 59, 73, 75, 89, 124
New Netherlands, 30, 31
New Paltz, 63
New River, 46
New York, 31, 44, 57, 63, 69, 73, 76,
87, 98, 99, 125
New York City, 59, 64, 73, 85, 100,
103, 124, 125, 132
Nitschmann, 96
North Carolina, 35, 67, 73, 78, 89,
91, 93, 98, 108, 122, 129
Nova Scotia, 73, 130
Nürnberg, 37, 38
Nussman, 67, 129
Nymwegen, 35
Octoraro, 34
Oehl, 57
Oglethorpe, 72, 81
Ohio, 101, 120
Ohio, (River), 120, 121
Oley, 84
Onandagas, 89
Orange, 17, 24
Orangeburg, 65, 66, 126
Oriskany, 123
Otterbein, 103-106, 135
Oxford, 96
Palatine Bridge, 65
Montgomery Co., (Pa.), 34, 102
Pastorius, 26-28, 33, 37, 43, 51, 56
142
Index
Peasants' War, 15
Pellentz, 76
Penn, 24, 26, 33, 36
Pennsylvania, 26, 27, 32-35, 41, 43-
47, 51, 53, 58-60, 63, 67-69, 73, 75,
81, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 103, 106, 117,
TA
120, 125, 127, 129, 132, 133
Pennsylvania Germans, 62, 72, 73,
93, 133
Pennsylvania, University of, 61
Pennypacker, 29, 32, 34, 49, 52, 133
Petersen, 37
Pfalz, (Palatinate), 25, 33, 35, 40,
42, 54, 55, 60, 98
Philadelphia, 46, 58, 59, 62, 72, 75,
76, 85, 87, 88, 95, 102, 108, 109,
112, 124, 126, 128, 129, 132
Philadelphian" Society, 37
Pietism, 12, 13, 16, 18-22, 36, 55, 56,
60, 69, 83, 91
Pietists, 26, 37, 43, 45, 57, 63, 70,
71, 80
Pipe Creek, 100, 101, 105
Pittsburg, 62
Plockhoy, 30, 31
Poiret, 37
Poland, 79
Pordage, 37
Presbyterians, 57, 60, 63, 73, 87
Princeton, 127
Providence, (the Trappe), 72, 124
Pulaski, 119
Puritans, II
Purysburg, 65, 84, 126
Pyrläus, 85, 87
Quakers, 27-29, 31-34, 82, 85, 93
Quitapohilla, see Lebanon
Rabenhorst, 130
Raikes, 46
Reading, 113
Reck, von, 78
Reeser, 113
Reformation, II, 13
Reformed Church, 16-18, 24, 27, 46,
Chapter III., 79, 87, 95, 100, 102-
106, 112, 118, 123-126, 128, 133
Reformed (Dutch) Church, 57, 58,
63
Reichel, 93
Reichel, Bishop, 120
Reuss, 80
Revolutionary War, 51, 67, 75, 76,
106, Chapter VI.
Rhine, 15, 17, 19, 54, 55
Rhinebeck, 63
Richards, 133
Riedesel, 119
Rock, 19
Rodigast, 22
Rosicrucians, 14, 15, 31, 33
Rotterdam, 32, 88
Royal American Regiment, 62
Runkel, 126
Ruttinghausen, 28, 30
Saalhof, 26
Sachse, 52, 113, 133
St. Gall, 59, 126
St. Petersburg, 120
St. Thomas, 83
Salem, (N. J.), 75
Salem, (Ohio), 120, 121, 122
Salem, (N. C.), 91, 108, 122, 123
Salzburgers, 71, 72, 78, 94
Sam's Creek, 100
Sandusky, 121
Saucon Valley, 108
Saur, Catherine, 109
Saur, Christopher, Sr., 43, 44, 47-
49, 52, 61, 62, 136
Saur, Christopher, Jr., 49, 50, 52,
108-110
Savannah, 72, 94, 95, 126, 127, 129
Saxe Gotha, 65
Saxony and the Saxons, 12, 16, 18,
19, 35, 54, 80, 81
Schebosch, 121, 122
Schiller, 11
Schlatter, 59-62, 72-74, 103, 124, 135
Schmauk, 68, 69, 77, 129
Schmick, 117
Schneider, 75, 76
Schoenbrunn, 120, 122
Schoharie, 44, 64, 69
Scharf, 77
Schultz, 82, 113, 114
Schwarzenau, 37-40, 42, 45
Schwarzenau Taüfer, 36
Schwenkfeld, 82
Schwenkfelders, 81, 82, 85, 93, 107,
113, 114, 133, 135, 136
Seidel, 115, 120
Seidensticker, 52, 75, 128, 133
Semler, 22
Separatists, 14, 15, Chapter II., 53,
93, 134
Seward, 95, 106
Shea, 76, 78
Shekomeko, 87
143
Index
Shenandoah, 72, 130
Shippen, 116
Siegen, 125
Sister Marcella, 44, 47, 49
Sister Petronella, 46
Skippack, 35, 95, 124
Sluyter, 28, 52, 101
Sluyter's Mill, 101
Smith, H. W., 78
Smith, William, 60, 78, 134
Sommer, 64
South Carolina, 65, 66, 73, 78, 84,
124, 126, 130
Spangenberg, 80, 82, 89-91, 93, 95,
96, 135
Spener, 16-20, 22, 69, 104
Spotswood, 68
Spreng, 106
Stahlschmidt, 125
Steuben, 123, 126, 131
Stevens, 106
Stone Arabia, 65
Stony Point, 131
Stoever, 63, 68, 69, 70, 135
Stoughton, 56
Strasburg, 45, 54, 68
Strawbridge, 100-102, 104
Streit, 129
Strobel, 78
Sullivan's Island, 131
Supplee, 102
Susquehanna,
68
Suther, 124
Switzer, 99
Switzerland, 15, 16, 38, 54, 57, 60,
126
Swope (Schwob), 100, 104
Tacitus, 21
Tempelman, 57-59
Tennants, 73, 87, 93
Tersteegen, 25, 40, 41, 56, 125
Test Act, 107-109, 113, 114, 116
Thirty Years' War, 11-14, 21, 79
Thomasius, 13, 18, 21, 36
Thomson, 60
Tories, 107, 108, 109, 112, 124, 125
Triebner, 130
Trenton, 116
Tulpehocken, 44, 69, 70
Tyerman, 97
Untereyck, 55, 104
Urlsperger, 71, 78
Valley Forge, 113, 117, 126
Vaughn, 23
Virginia, 35, 59, 62, 68, 72, 89, 115,
129-131
Wachovia, 91, 93, 122, 133
Wagner, II
Waldenses, 54, 56, 79
Waldoboro, 73
Walton, 113
Wapeler, 76
Washington County, (N. Y.), 99
Washington, George, 112, 125, 126,
130
Washington, Lady, 120
Watteville, de, 91, 96
Webb, 99, 118
Weber, 65, 66
Weber (Pastor) 125
Weedon, 131
Weiser, 43, 44, 48, 62, 69, 70, 72, 87
Weiser, Madlina, 44
Weiss, 58, 60
Wernersville, 125
Wesleys, 72, 84, 94-100, 106, 135
West Indies, 82, 83
West Virginia, 46
Westmoreland County, (Pa.), 125
Westphalia, Peace of, 24
Wetterau, 18, 83
Weyberg, 124
Whitefield, 72, 73, 84, 94, 95, 101,
106, 127, 135
Whittier, 27, 56
Widman, 112, 113
Wiegner, 82, 95
Wieland, 23
Wiewaert, 28
William the Silent, 24
Winkworth, 23
Wissahickon, Hermits of the, 31,
32, 52, 53, 63, 95, 134
Wittenberg, 19
Wittgenstein, 20, 43
Woman in the Wilderness," 31,
32
Woodstock, 130
Woolman, 29
Wrangel, 73, 74
United Brethren, 102, 106.
Universalists, 87
Würtemberg, 14, 31, 54
Wyoming, 87, 88
144
Index
York, 68, 103
York County, (Pa.), 103, 115
Yorktown, 131
Zeisberger, 120
Ziegler, 120
Zimmermann, 31, 32
Zinzendorf, 69, 72, 73, 79, 80-88,
90-93, 96, 104, 135
Zinzendorf, Countess Benigna, 84,
87,97
Zion, III, 118
Zubly, 95, 126, 127, 135
Zurich, 25
Zweibrücken, 54
Zwingli, 2, 15, 54, 116.
THE END
145

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