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From this preposterous education, it followed necessarily that there could be little predilection between parties who had never seen each other in domestic life, and to whom indeed no opportunities of intercourse seem to have been afforded. In consequence therefore of this discipline, persons who were disposed to marry usually left the choice to the elders*, and even the rare cases where there happen

No sculptured monument was taught to breathe
His praises whom the worm devoured beneath ;
The high, the low, the mighty and the fair,
Equal in death, were undistinguished there.
Yet not a hillock mouldered near that spot,
By one dishonoured, or by all forgot;

To some warm heart the poorest dust was dear,
From some kind eye the meanest claim'd a tear.
And oft the living by affection led

Were wont to walk in spirit with their dead,
Where no dark cypress cast a doleful gloom,
No blighting yew shed poison o'er the tomb ;
But white and red with intermingling flowers
The graves looked beautiful in sun and showers.
Green myrtles fenced it, and beyond their bound
Ran the clear rill with ever-murmuring sound.
"Twas not a scene for grief to nourish care,

It breathed of hope, and moved the heart to prayer.
World before the Flood. Canto 5.

* Wesley had submitted to this part of their discipline in Georgia. The origin, or if Cranz be accurate in so affirming, the revival of this preposterous practice, is ascribed to a sister who afterwards made a considerable figure in London as General Elderess. "Among the sisters," says their historian, (p. 126.) "out of whom elderesses of the congregation had been chosen since 1728, after the example of the ancient brethren's church, the choice fell this time (1730) by lot, upon Anna Nitschmann, whose youth was supplied by a rich measure of grace imparted to her, to be co-elderess of the congregation. She soon after, on the 4th of May, entered into a covenant with seventeen single women who were of the same mind with her, to devote themselves entirely to the Lord; and among other things, to give no attention to any thoughts or overtures of marriage, unless they were brought to them in the way of the ancient brethren's order, by the elders of the congregation. This covenant gave afterwards occasion to the single sisters celebrating, since 1745, every year, the 4th of May, as a memorial day, for a solemn renewal of their covenant."

ed to be a previous preference, the approbation of the elders was necessary, and frequently the parties were mated by lot. It is said that unhappy marriages were seldom known among them, and this might be expected; not from any wisdom in the arrangement, still less from any such interposition of Providence as that whereon it presumes, but from the rule under which they lived, and the continual inspection to which they were subjected; for, except the power of withdrawing from the community, there was as little personal liberty at Herrnhut as in a convent, and less than in a Jesuit Reduction.

To this part of their discipline, and not to any depravity of manners, that fanatical language of the Moravians may be distinctly traced, which exposed them at one time to much obloquy, and which in any other age would most certainly have drawn upon them a fiery persecution, with every appearance of justice. Love in its ideal sense could have no more existence among such a people than among the Chinese, where a husband never sees the wife for whom he has bargained till she is sent home to him in a box. But when Count Zinzendorf and the founders of his Moravian Church had stript away the beautiful imaginative garment, they found it expedient to provide fig-leaves for naked nature; and madness never gave birth to combinations of more monstrous and blasphemous obscenity, than they did in their fantastic allegories and spiritualizations. In such freaks of perverted fancy, the abominations of the Phallus and the Lingam have unquestionably originated; and in some such * abominations Moravianism might have ended, had it been instituted among the Mingrelian or Malabar Christians, where there was no antiseptic influence of surrounding circumstances to preserve it from putrescence. Fortunate

*The reader who may have perused Rimius's Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhuters, and the Responsorial Letters of the Theological Faculty of Tubingen, annexed to it, will not think this language too strong.

ly for themselves and for that part of the heathen world, among whom they have laboured, and still are labouring with exemplary devotion, the Moravians were taught by their assailants to correct this perilous error in time. They were an innocent people, and could therefore with serenity oppose the testimony of their lives to the tremendous charges which upon the authority of their own writings were brought against them. And then first seeing the offensiveness, if not the danger of the loathsome and impious extravagances into which they had been betrayed, they corrected their books and their language; and from that time they have continued not merely to live without reproach, but to enjoy in a greater degree than any other sect, the general good opinion of every other religious community.

This beneficial change was not effected till several years after Wesley's visit to Herrnhut. He was not sufficiently conversant with the German language to discover the offence, and perhaps for the same reason remained ignorant of certain whimsical opinions, which might entitle Count Zinzendorf to a conspicuous place in the history of heresy. During his stay there, Christian David arrived. Wesley had heard much of this extraordinary man, and was prepared to expect great benefit from his conversation. When he mentions his arrival in the journal, he adds, “Oh may God make him a messenger of glad tidings!" "Four times," he says, "I enjoyed the blessing of hearing him preach, and every time he chose the very subject which I should have desired had I spoken to him before." This was his doctrine concerning the ground of faith. "You must be humbled before God; you must have a broken and contrite heart. But observe, this is not the foundation! It is not this by which you are justified. This is not the righteousness, it is no part of the righteousness by which you are reconciled unto God. This is nothing to your justification. The remission of your sins is not owing to this cause, either in whole or in part. Nay, it may hinder justification if you build

any thing upon it. To think you must be more contrite, more humble, more grieved, more sensible of the weight of sin before you can be justified, is to lay your contrition, your grief, your humiliation for the foundation of your being justified, at least for a part of it. Therefore it hinders your justification, and a hindrance it is which must be removed. The right foundation is not your contrition, (though that is not your own,) not your righteousness, nothing of your own nothing that is wrought in you by the Holy Ghost; but it is something with- ▾ out you, the righteousness and the blood of Christ. For this is the word, to him that believeth on God, that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.' This then do if you would lay a right foundation. Go straight to Christ with all your ungodliness; tell him, thou whose eyes are as a flame of fire searching my heart, seest that I am ungodly! I plead nothing else. I do not say I am humble or contrite; but I am ungodly, therefore bring me to him that justifieth the ungodly! Let thy blood be the propitiation for me!-Here is a mystery, here the wise men of the world are lost: it is foolishness unto them. Sin is the only thing which divides men from God, sin (let him that heareth understand) is the only thing which unites them to God, for it is the only thing which moves the Lamb of God to have compassion upon them, and by his blood to give them access to the Father. This is the word of reconciliation which we preach: this is the foundation which never can be moved."

Wesley, who wrote down the substance of this discourse, did not perhaps immediately perceive how easily this doctrine might be most mischievously abused; but he saw at once with what forcible effect it might be preached, and it will be seen how well. he profited by the lesson. He heard also from Christian David and from other of the Brethren, accounts of what is called their experience,-the state of feeling and conflicts of thought through which they had passed before they attained a settled

religious peace. This full assurance, or plerophory of faith as it is termed by Wesley, was defined to him by Arvid Gradin, a Swede. "I had," said the

Swede," from our Lord what I asked of him, the Tλngo@opia isεws, the fulness of faith, which is repose in the blood of Christ: a firm confidence in God and persuasion of his favour, with a deliverance from every fleshly desire, and a cessation of all, even inward sins. In a word, my heart which before was agitated like a troubled sea, was in perfect quietness like the sea when it is serene and calm." "This,"

says Wesley, "was the first account I ever heard from any living man, of what I had before learned myself from the oracles of God, and had been praying for, with the little company of my friends, and expecting for several years."

"I would gladly," he says, "have spent my life here: but my master calling me to labour in another part of his vineyard, I was constrained to take my leave of this happy place." After a fortnight's tarriance, therefore, he departed on foot as he came, and returned to England.

Requies in sanguine Christi; firma fiducia in Deum, et persuasio de gratia divinâ ; tranquillitas mentis summa, atque serenitas et pax ; cum absentiâ omnis desiderii carnalis, et cessatione peccatorum etiam internorum. Verbo, cor quod antea instar maris turbulenti agitabatur, in summâ fuit requie, instar maris sereni et tranquilli."

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