ther
church, these haggling for months and years over stipulations of salary,
and refusing to send a minister until the salary should be pledged in
cash; and their correspondents pleading their poverty and need.[188:2]
The few and feeble churches of the Reformed confession were equally
needy and ill befriended.

It seems to us, as we read the story after the lapse of a hundred and
fifty years, as if the man expressly designed and equipped by the
providence of God for this exigency in the progress of his kingdom had
arrived when Zinzendorf, the Moravian, made his appearance at
Philadelphia, December 10, 1741. The American church, in all its
history, can point to no fairer representative of the charity that
"seeketh not her own" than this Saxon nobleman, who, for the true love
that he bore to Christ and all Christ's brethren, was willing to give up
his home, his ancestral estates, his fortune, his title of nobility, his
patrician family name, his office of bishop in the ancient Moravian
church, and even (last infirmity of zealous spirits) his interest in
promoting specially that order of consecrated men and women in the
church catholic which he had done and sacrificed so much to save from
extinction, and to which his "cares and toils were given." He hastened
first up the Lehigh Valley to spend Christmas at Bethlehem, where the
foundations had already been laid on which have been built up the
half-monastic institutions of charity and education and missions which
have done and are still doing so much to bless the world in both its
hemispheres. It was in commemoration of this Christmas visit of Bishop
Zinzendorf that the mother house of the Moravian communities in America
received its name of Bethlehem. Returning to Philadelphia, he took this
city as the base of his unselfish and unpartisan labors in behalf of the
great and multiplying population from his fatherland, which through its
sectarian divisions had become so helpless and spiritually needy.
Already for twenty years there had been a few scattering churches of
the Reformed confession, and for half that time a few Lutheran
congregations had been gathered or had gathered themselves. But both the
sects had been overcome by the paralysis resulting from habitual
dependence on paternal governments, and the two were borne asunder,
while every right motive was urging to cooeperation and fellowship, by
the almost spent momentum of old controversies. In Philadelphia two
starve