Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  After Stephen was burnt, many Waldenses united with the Moravians, and, in the midst of persecutions, they re-entered upon their career as a missionary church. They published the Bohemian Bible in 1470, and they multiplied copies of the Scriptures at two printing-offices in Bohemia and one in Moravia.

  Luther, after a preliminary quarrel with them about discipline, received a copy of their confession of faith, and acknowledged them worthy of all Christian love, a little before Charles V., declaring them worthy of all Christian hate, because he believed they influenced the Bohemians in their refusal to fight against the Protestant Elector of Saxony, confiscated their property, outlawed their nobles, and racked their bishops. Their sufferings continued throughout the Thirty Years’ War, and at its close the Protestant powers abandoned them to the fury of Austria, who disposed so effectively of their pestilent Bibles and other books, of their churches and their schools, that she might well believe herself to have extirpated them. Their Bishop Comenius, however, escaped to England, where he was received with all affection and respect by the Anglican clergy, and whence he went later to Holland, where he wrote the history of his church. Before he died he caused the ordination of two bishops, and thus transmitted the apostolic succession to the church in our times, through the few Brethren whom that devout man, Count Zinzendorf, found at Fulneck in Bohemia, and invited to a safer and quieter abode on his vast estates at Bertholsdorf. There, in 1722, they founded their famous hamlet of Herrnhut, and established their church once more in the ardor of its zeal and hope.

  They were for the most part simple peasant folk and artisans, but they were afterward joined by scholars and people of condition from all parts of Germany. It appears they did not in all cases bear their peace and security with so great dignity as they had borne their sorrows and wrongs. They sometimes fell into silly ecstasies of devotion, and permitted themselves a latitude of metaphor and expression that scandalized the whole Protestant world, — the excellent Protestant world, that had given them up to their mortal enemies, and had endured their calamities with such exemplary fortitude. Zinzendorf was himself an enthusiast, and unwittingly provoked the weaker Brethren to this verbal and sentimental excess, though he was afterwards first and severest in rebuking it, when the clamor rose against it. The offending zealots owned their indecorousness, and sent their apology to the other Protestant churches. Their folly had never passed beyond words; and in the mean time the works of the Moravian community were of a character to win it our profoundest respect, if they did not attract so much contemporary attention.

  During the first ten years after their colonization on Count Zinzendorf’s estates, and while not yet numbered but six hundred, the Moravians sent missionaries to all parts of the heathen world, to Greenland, to the West Indies, to Tartary, to Lapland, to Guinea, to the Cape of Good Hope, to Ceylon, and to North America. Their missionaries first landed upon our continent at Savannah in 1735, and attempted the conversion of the neighboring Creeks, but withdrew to Pennsylvania a few years later, and founded their town of Bethlehem, and entered upon their mission to the Delawares. They had afterwards their greatest success with this tribe; but the first Indian community seems to have been formed among the Mohicans at Shekomeko in New York and Pachgatgoch in Connecticut. There the efforts of the Brethren for the conversion and civilization of the Indians affected the whiskey traffic with the savages in a short time to such a degree that nothing but their interruption saved the border from ruin. It was certainly a cruel burlesque of their real character, and of their past, that these poor Moravians should have been accused as Papists; but in this quality they were dragged to and fro for several days about Connecticut, until at last they were brought into the presence of the governor, who promptly liberated them. Yet they could never hope to be free from molestation there: the traders instigated the savages to attempt their lives, and the local religious feeling was averse to their missionary enterprise; while in the Province of New York the intelligent conception that they were French spies gave them as great trouble as their reputed Papistry in Connecticut. The Moravians were non-resistants, and they had conscientious scruples about taking oaths; and the Provincial Assembly passed an act banishing from New York all who refused the oath of allegiance, and forbidding the missionaries to instruct the Indians. They were thus forced to abandon their missions in New York and Connecticut, and retire to Bethlehem, which had already begun to assume that character of spiritual capital still belonging to it among the Moravians. The whites near Shekomeko at once seized upon the lands of the Indian converts; and it is consoling to know that a pious struggle for their souls ensued between the local Christians and the local savages, the former striving to attach the converts to their churches, and the latter to drag them back into heathenism. The savages, however, got nothing at all; and the Christians, nothing but the land; for, after a great deal of suffering and molestation, the converts thought best to follow their teachers to Bethlehem.

  The Moravians were now confined in their enterprise to the Province of Pennsylvania, where the precedent of the Friends had already so far depraved public sentiment, that it was possible for them not only to refuse oaths and military service, but to pursue their benevolent efforts among the Indians without incurring so much resentment as in Connecticut and New York.

  This, however, was but for a time. Many Scriptural-minded colonists of that day held that the Indians were Canaanities; and many others, who knew enough of God to swear by, interpreted the Divine will to the extinction, not the conversion, of the heathen. The French War broke out, and it appeared certain to all these that people who treated the Indians with love and kindness, whereas God had imposed no duty toward them but the simple and elementary obligation of destruction, must in reason be French spies; while the heathen, on the other hand, took it into their wrong, thick heads that the Moravians must be the foes of their race, and secretly leagued with the English, being of such an inimical color as they were. The savages, therefore, fell upon a Moravian station on the river Mahony, and killed all the Brethren, with their wives and children, whom they found there. This unsettled the colonial mind somewhat concerning their complicity with the French, but did nothing to disabuse it of other prejudices. Some murders committed on the border exasperated the feeling against the converts to such degree that it was judged best by their teachers to abandon their exposed and isolated villages, and place themselves under the protection of the troops at Philadelphia. But when they repaired to the barracks, with the governor’s order for their admission, the soldiers would not let them enter, and they remained a whole night before the gate, exposed to the insults and outrages of the mob that gathered about them, and that threatened to revenge on these helpless folk the crimes and injuries of the savages. They were then sent to Province Island, where they were lodged for some months in comparative safety and comfort; but about the beginning of the year 1764 orders came from the government for their removal to New York, and, very scantily clad, and burdened with their old and sick, they set out on a journey which was attended with exposure not only to the seventy of the winter, but to the contumely of the mobs that followed them in all the stupid and wicked little towns, and assembled to revile them as they passed along their route.

  They had not reached the New York frontier, however, when they were met by a messenger from the governor of that Province, forbidding them to cross it; and so they returned upon their weary steps to Philadelphia, where the authorities now succeeded in lodging them in the barracks. For no other reason than that they were Indians, and with scarcely the pretence of any other reason, a mob assembled to destroy them, and nothing but the most prompt and energetic measures on the part of the military and the better citizens saved them. The danger was so great, and the intended outrage so abominable, that even some of the younger Quakers took up arms in defence of a people whose use and creed would not permit them to defend themselves; and indeed the Quakers, throughout the unmerited sufferings of these harmless Indians, were their true an
d steadfast friends, insomuch that one of them said, Even the sight of a Quaker made him happy. In this, as in other things, the Friends bore witness to the superior civilization of their sect, and to the faithful and generous spirit of their relations with the Indians, at which it has in these days grown easy and cheap to sneer. Next to the drab-coats it was the red-coats that treated the Christian Indians with the greatest tenderness and respect, and in effect protected them against the popular fury, until the end of the war, which came in December, 1764, after they had been under arrest a whole year. They were then set at liberty, the danger from partisans of either side being past; and with greatly enfeebled numbers (fifty-six had died of small pox during the summer) they repaired to a point on the Susquehanna, in what is now Bradford County, and there founded their first considerable town. The Indian name of the place was Wyalusing; but the Moravians, out of their thankful and hopeful hearts, called it Friedenshütten, or Tents of Peace. It is needless to relate at length how their hopes were turned to despair, as the whites encroached upon them, and the traders attempted to make their village a rendezvous whence they might debauch and plunder the neighboring savages. The great blow to their tranquillity and confidence was the sale of the whole region round about them, which was ceded to the English by the Iroquois, in violation of the solemn promises of that truculent and faithless tribe confirming the Christians in the possession of the lands on which they had settled. The Moravians had already extended their operations westward as far as the Ohio, and had a prosperous station on Beaver Creek, and there now came to them, for the third time, messages from the chiefs of the Delawares, inviting them to establish a mission in their country. The Lennilenape, as they called themselves, were then a numerous and powerful people, in alliance with many important tribes, who, having abandoned Pennsylvania, where they were subject to the Iroquois, now inhabited a vast and fertile country about midway between the Ohio River and Lake Erie, and had their principal towns on the Walhonding and Tuscarawas, whose confluence forms the Muskingum. It was from these capitals that the invitation came to the Christians at Friedenshütten, offering them lands and the protection of the Delaware nation, with full and free opportunity to the missionaries of preaching the gospel and introducing the arts of peace. The messages added that the land should never be alienated from them, as it had been at Friedenshütten by the Iroquois; and both teachers and people saw that in this invitation, from one of the mildest and most intelligent of the Indian nations, a great and smiling field of usefulness opened to them, remote alike from the evil influences of the border and the bad faith and secret enmity of the Iroquois. It was true, the governor of Pennsylvania had assured them that they should never be molested in the tenure of their lands, and had forbidden the survey of any territory within five miles of their villages on the Susquehanna; but their experience of the colonists had taught them to distrust, not the good will, but the strength of their authorities. Still less were the Moravians disposed to listen to the remonstrances and repentant prayers of the Iroquois, who now besought them not to abandon their country. They heard the Delaware embassy with favor, and sent out to Ohio David Zeisberger, their leading missionary, and five Indian families to look at the land offered them; and these arriving on the Tuscarawas made choice of a tract which, when they described it to the Delaware chiefs, proved to be the very land destined to them by the nation.

  The pioneers found the soil of their allotted domain excellent, and the game abundant in the forest, and with well-contented hearts they built themselves cabins, and laid out their peaceful city on the site of an old Indian town, long since deserted and falling to decay. Ramparts and other traces of ancient fortification were still visible beside the small lake where the gentle Moravian and his followers planned their home, and from the heart of the ruin burst forth that beautiful spring for which he named their city, Schönbrunn. All round them stood the primeval, many-centuried woods; the river, never vexed by keel, flowed beside them from solitude to solitude; even the lodges of their savage hosts and benefactors were a day’s journey out of sight.

  It was in April, 1772, and in the summer of the same year the whole community of Friedenshütten abandoned their houses and farms, and departed on their long pilgrimage through the wilderness, to seek the country given them beside the Muskingum; and though their historians set down

  “The short and simple annals of the poor”

  in terms something of the driest, yet an irrepressible pathos communicates itself to the reader as these writers tell how they all left their beloved village on the Wyalusing to the malice of men and elements, and trusted themselves to the promise of the desert. At Friedenshütten they had dwelt seven happy, prosperous years, which they had employed so well that their town wore a substantial and smiling aspect, with its great street eighty feet wide, and its lines of pretty cottages,— “built of squared pine logs,” and flanked by gardens, — radiating from the spacious chapel in the midst; while around it on every hand rippled their yellow wheat, and the broad acres of bladed corn spread their serried ranks. The green fruit mantled to ripeness in their generous orchards, and all the flattery of harvest was in the landscape from which this poor little people turned their heavy eyes.

  They must, of course, leave the greater part of their substance, but such things as were most necessary or most portable they carried with them, and departed a heavily laden train, bearing each one his burden, and all driving their well-freighted horses and their flocks and herds before them. Hundreds of miles of unbroken wilderness stretched between Friedenshütten and the land of promise; and their path was beset, not only by the sylvan beasts, but by the wild brethren of the new Christians. The converts had all the toils and fatigues of the pilgrimage to bear, and they must have often found a potent fascination in the desert, where the wildness without allured the wildness within them, and pleaded eloquently for their return to the allegiance of the woods. But they none of them faltered in obedience to the pious and humble teachers who led them, neither for love of the desert if it beguiled, nor for fear of the drunken savages, who sometimes molested their march.

  The pilgrims were far from suffering from hunger, for they killed a hundred deer upon their journey; but their course was through tangled depths of woodland and morass, across floods, and over mountains, and their steps were always in peril of rattlesnakes, which infested the wilderness in great numbers. Those who journeyed by land fared not more painfully and slowly than others of the brethren who descended the rivers towards the Ohio in heavily laden canoes, and over the long portages or beside the shrinking streams carried craft and freight alike upon their shoulders.

  Heckewelder, who tells us this much, tells little of all that it would now be so interesting to know of this strange pilgrimage, nor do other Moravian writers, except in a dry and general way, touch upon its events, at best vaguely sketching a picture which the reader’s fancy must fill up. Their thoughts are doubtless upon the things of which these wanderings were but the shadow and symbol; yet here and there a touch illumines the whole with a vivid and purely human interest. Such a one shows us a certain poor mother, who took her crippled son upon her shoulder, and so set out from Friedenshütten with the rest, and bore him many and many days’ journey through the desert. Sickness appeared among the pilgrims, and some of the little ones drooped and died; and that which shall one day ease us all of our burdens, whether they console or whether they oppress us, drew softly near the crippled boy. Day after day the poor mother found the load upon her shoulder grow lighter, and that within her breast heavier and heavier, as if the burden were shifted, till at last those walking at her side saw by his white lips and shrinking visage that the hand of death had touched the child. The cripple, between signs and sounds, made them understand that he desired baptism before he died, and, tenderly lifting him from his mother’s shoulder, they consecrated him by the ancient rites of that church of the poor and martyrs. So he died; and the mother mixed again with the rest, and we know her thenceforth only
as part of the sorrow of her people.

  In fact, the history of Gnadenhütten follows with certainty few individual fortunes; but its chroniclers, who touch upon no others in that march, tell us how every night, when the foot sore and failing train halted after their long day’s journey, they built a great fire in the midst of their camp, and, as around an altar, raised their voices in hymns of praise and thanksgiving. It may be that, at these times, when the echoes of the songs died away in distant solitudes, the teacher who led them sought to give his wild flock such ideas as they might grasp of their church’s past, and recounted her history to those who were keeping unbroken here, in another race and remote deserts, the long succession of her martyrs. Fancy may have her will as to what strange images of imperial Levantine and lordly German cities, of Byzantium, of Vienna, of Prague, and of the embattled life of those far-off lands, arose before the wondering eyes of these children of the forest, as the story ran; for not one of their kindred survives in any generation to refute her, but all have entered upon their inheritance.

  On the 23d of August, 1772, the pilgrimage came to an end, and beside the Muskingum the wanderers kindled their great camp-fire, and for the last time gathered about it to utter the common gratitude in songs and prayers. On the morrow they arose and began their guiltless warfare with the wilderness.