han any
others in converting the Indians, perhaps because they asked the most of
them. They made them give up all the vices which the Indians knew were
vices, and all the vices that the Indians thought were virtues when
practiced outside of their tribe. They forbade them to lie, to steal, to
kill; they taught them to wash themselves, to put on clothes, to work,
and to earn their bread. Upon these hard terms they had congregations
and villages in several parts of Connecticut, New York, and
Pennsylvania, which flourished for a time against the malice of the
disorderly and lawless settlers around them, but which had yielded
to the persecutions of white men and red men alike when, in 1771, the
chiefs of the Delawares sent messages to the Moravians and invited
them to come out and live among them in Ohio. The Lenni-lenape, as the
Delawares called themselves, had left the East, where they were subject
to the Iroquois, and they now had their chief towns on the Muskingum.
Near the place where the Tuscarawas and Walhonding meet to form the
Muskingum they offered lands to the Moravians, and in 1772 the Christian
Indians left their last village in Western Pennsylvania and settled
there at three points which they called Schoenbrun, the Beautiful Spring,
Lichtenau, Field of Light, and Gnadenhutten, the Tents of Grace.

It was in the very heart of the Western wilderness, but the land was
rich and the savages friendly, and in a few years the teachers and their
followers had founded a fairer and happier home than they had known
before, and had begun to spread their light around them. The Indians
came from far and near to see their fields and orchards and gardens,
with the houses in the midst of them, built of squared logs and set on
streets branching to the four quarters from the chapel, which was the
peaceful citadel of each little town. It must have seemed a stately
edifice to their savage eyes, with its shingled roof, and its belfry,
where, ten years before any white man had settled beyond the Ohio,
the bell called the Christian Indians to prayer. No doubt the creature
comforts of the Christians had their charm, too, for the hungry pagans.
They were not used elsewhere to the hospitality that could set before
them such repasts as one of the missionaries tells us were spread for
the guest at Gnadenhutten. A table furnished with "good bread, meat,
butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate," and such fruits and
vegetables as t