temporary works by Labadie,
his associates and his antagonists, as well as studies of the subject
by Dutch and German scholars. The literature of Labadism in the New
World, which, in a manner, has been an outgrowth from the journal of
the Labadist envoys, is now ample for all serviceable purposes.

The journal of the Labadists, while primarily of value as elucidating
an obscure episode in the religious history of the New World, has
worth as a human narrative bearing upon incidents and personages and
social conditions in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and
Boston. Thus the student of social, economic, institutional, or
geographical conditions in the early period of the settlements upon
the Atlantic seaboard will find in this journal much of suggestive and
pertinent contribution. Danckaerts viewed his surroundings through the
eyes of a fanatical self-satisfaction. For this reason his criticisms
or strictures upon persons and conditions are to be received with much
discount. But he was an intelligent man, and a keen-eyed and assiduous
note-taker; and the variety and fecundity of his material is not a
little due to the trivial and relatively unimportant details which are
embodied in the narrative.

The two agents came to North America in search of a suitable place to
establish a colony of their sect. Two distinct sets of forces drew
them toward Maryland. One of these was the religious toleration which,
from the beginning, was established in that province. There is no
warrant in the journal for a presumption that this was an inducing
cause for their location within the domain of Lord Baltimore. There is
much, however, in their antecedent history, and the pressure of
persecution to which the Labadists were subjected, to make it
exceedingly probable that this policy in the government of Maryland
formed a circumstance in the selection that was made. The journalists,
who travelled under pseudonyms for the express purpose of keeping
their mission secret, might have established their colony in New York
had it not been under the rule of Governor Andros, a Catholic, and
therefore a subject of particular antipathy to the Labadists.

But the practical weave of circumstance that tended to attract the
Labadists to Maryland centred in the fact that, as stated in their
narrative, they met in New York one Ephraim Herrman, a young trader
from Maryland and Delaware, then recently married. This was the son of
Augustine Herrman, "