ry office of life strictly, or at least avowedly,
under the sanction of the faith of which they are the professors. There
may be hypocrisy in all this, though I could discover no traces of it,
for human nature is a curious compound at the best; but at least there
is a moral courage which commands our unqualified respect, inasmuch as
everything is done without parade, without moroseness, without the
utterance of a single expression which can convict them of a desire to
be admired of men, far less of undervaluing or mistrusting the motives
of others.

What the origin of the Hernhuters really is, seems to be a point as yet
scarcely determined. Mosheim, in his _Ecclesiastical History_, speaks
vaguely of them; and Dr. Maclaine, his English translator, has
attributed to them practices and opinions which are quite contrary to
fact. Confounding them with the Picards, whom John Ziska, the famous
Hussite general, well-nigh exterminated, the latter speaks of them as
practising all the absurd impurities of the Pre-Adamites, and he
appeals for support to Stinstra's pastoral letter,--one of the most
uncandid as well as impertinent productions that ever came from the pen
even of an Anabaptist. For my own part, I see no reason to doubt that
they are what they profess to be, the descendants of the Bohemian or
Moravian brethren, whom the bigotry of the house of Austria drove from
their homes, and of whom remnants are yet to be found, both in Poland
and Hungary. Their church is episcopal in its constitution; their
tenets agree with the Augsburg Confession of Faith; their ritual is
plain and bare, almost like that of the Presbyterian church of
Scotland; and their attention to psalmody very great. It has been much
the practice of the surrounding townships, as well in Bohemia as in
Silesia and Saxony, to speak slightingly of them. But a brief sojourn
among them, sufficed to convince me that they were at least as honest
as any of those by whom their honesty had been called in question.

The word Hernhut signifies "a seeker of the Lord;" and it was their
excessive earnestness in the service of religion, that, according to
one account, earned for them and their settlement the names which they
still retain. Another tradition says, that Hut was the name of the
individual by whom the first of the colony was led to this particular
spot; and that as from him, Herr Hut, or Gentleman Hut, their village
derived its appellation, so the inhabitants of t