. Their leaders were
men of menial occupations--men who would have attracted no notice from
the officials of city or Church if they had been contented to conform
to any prevailing or recognized type of religion. Under the
inspiration which they received from the writings of Schwenckfeld they
formed "a little meeting"--in every respect like a seventeenth-century
Quaker meeting--in their own homes, meeting about in turn, discarding
all use of sacraments, and waiting on God for edification rather than
on public preaching. They read the books and epistles of Schwenckfeld
in their gatherings, they wrote epistles to other groups of
Schwenckfeldians, and received epistles in turn and read them in their
gatherings. They objected to any form of religious exercise which
seemed to them incomprehensible to their spirits and which did not
spring directly out of the inward ministry of the Word of God. They
were eventually discovered, their leaders banished, their books burned,
and their little meeting of "quiet spirituals" ("stillen Frommen") as
they called themselves was ruthlessly stamped out.[37] Societies
something like this were formed in scores of places, and continued to
cultivate their inward piety in the Fatherland, until harried by
persecution they migrated in 1734 to Pennsylvania, where they have
continued to maintain their community life until the present day.

But the most important effect of Schwenckfeld's life and work must not
be sought in the history of these {84} visible societies which owed
their origin to his apostolic activity. His first concern was always
for the building of the invisible community of God throughout the whole
world--not for the promotion of a sect--and his greatest contribution
will be found in the silent, often unnoticed, propagation of his
spirit, the contagious dissemination of his ideas, the gradual
influence of his truth and insight upon Christian communions and upon
individual believers that hardly knew his name. His correspondence was
extraordinarily extensive; his books and tracts, which were legion,
found eager readers and transmitters, and slowly--too slowly for
observation--the spiritual message of the homeless reformer made its
way into the inner life of faithful souls, who in all lands were
praying for the consolation of God's new Israel. Even so early as
1551, an English writer, Wyllyam Turner, in a book written as "a
preservative and treacle against the poyson of Pelagius