orable and most Christian
failure, more to be esteemed in the sight of God than many a splendid
success.

But his brief sojourn in America was not without visible fruit. He left
behind him the Moravian church fully organized under the episcopate of
Bishop David Nitschmann, with communities or congregations begun at nine
different centers, and schools established in four places. An extensive
itinerancy had been set in operation under careful supervision, and,
most characteristic of all, a great beginning had been made of those
missions to the heathen Indians, in which the devoted and successful
labors of this little society of Christians have put to shame the whole
American church besides. Not all of this is to be ascribed to the
activity of Zinzendorf; but in all of it he was a sharer, and his share
was a heroic one. The two years' visit of Count Zinzendorf to America
forms a beautiful and quite singular episode in our church history.
Returning to his ancestral estates splendidly impoverished by his
free-handed beneficence, he passed many of the later years of his life
at Herrnhut, that radiating center from which the light of the gospel
was borne by the multitude of humble missionaries to every continent
under the whole heaven. The news that came to him from the "economies"
that he had planted in the forests of Pennsylvania was such as to fill
his generous soul with joy. In the communities of Nazareth and Bethlehem
was renewed the pentecostal consecration when no man called anything his
own. The prosperous farms and varied industries, in which no towns in
Pennsylvania could equal them, were carried on, not for private
interest, but for the church. After three years the community work was
not only self-supporting, but sustained about fifty missionaries in the
field, and was preparing to send aid to the missions of the mother
church in Germany. The Moravian settlements multiplied at distant
points, north and south. The educational establishments grew strong and
famous. But especially the Indian missions spread far and wide. The
story of these missions is one of the fairest and most radiant pages in
the history of the American church, and one of the bloodiest.
Zinzendorf, dying at London in May, 1756, was spared, we may hope, the
heartbreaking news of the massacre at Gnadenhuetten the year before. But
from that time on, through the French wars, the Revolutionary War, the
War of 1812, and down to the infamy of Georgia and