pise God's Word and
all good outward order, blaspheme and frightfully and publicly desecrate
the Sacraments. Spiritus enim errorum et sectarum asylum sibi hic
constituit (For the spirit of errors and sects has here established his
asylum). And the chief fault and cause of this is the lack of provision
for an external visible church-communion. For since, as it were, the
first thesis of natural theology, inborn in all men, is 'Religiosum
quendam cultum observandum, A certain religious cult must be observed,'
it happens that these people, when they come here and find no better
external service, elect any one rather than none. For though they are
Libertinists, nevertheless also Libertinism is not without its outward
form, by which it makes itself a specific religion in none of them."
Falckner proceeds: "I and my brother [Daniel] attend the Swedish church,
although, as yet, we understand little of the language. And by our
example we have induced several Germans to come to their meetings
occasionally, even though they did not understand the language, and for
the purpose only of gradually drawing them out of barbarism and
accustoming them to outward order, especially as one of the Swedish
pastors, Mr. M. Rudman, for the sake of love and the glory of God,
offered to go to the trouble of learning the German language and
occasionally to deliver a German address in the Swedish church, until
the Germans could have a church of their own." In the following Falckner
dwells on the great help it would afford in attracting the Indians and
the children of the Quakers and drawing the young Swedes to the services
if an organ could be installed in the Swedish church. (G. Fritschel,
_Geschichte_, 35 ff.) The miserable condition spiritually of the
Lutherans in Pennsylvania appears from a letter of their representatives
to Dr. Ziegenhagen in London, dated October, 1739, in which they state:
"There is not one German Lutheran preacher in the whole land, except
Caspar Stoever, now sixty miles distant from Philadelphia." (Jacobs,
191.)

38. New Hanover, Philadelphia, Providence.--It was a motley crowd of
Germans that gathered in the land of the Quakers. Indeed, Pastorius, the
first mayor of Germantown, was a rather moderate pietist from the
circles of Spener, but, as stated above, with him and after him came
Mennonites, Tunkers, Moravians, Gichtelians, Schwenkfeldians, disciples
of the cobbler of Goerlitz, Jacob Boehme, and enthusiasts who as yet h