arried members, and
large dormitories for the celibates. The meeting-house was built
entirely without metal, following literally the precedent of Solomon,
who built his temple "so that there was neither hammer nor ax nor any
tool of iron heard in the house while it was building." Wooden pegs
took the place of nails, and the laths were fastened laboriously into
grooves. Averse to riches, Beissel's people refused gifts from William
Penn, King George III, and other prominent personages. The pious
Beissel was a very capable leader, with a passion for music and an
ardor for simplicity. He instituted among the unmarried members of the
community a celibate order embracing both sexes, and he reduced the
communal life of both the religious and secular members to a routine
of piety and labor. The society was known, even in England, for the
excellence of its paper, for the good workmanship of its printing
press, and especially for the quality of its music, which was composed
largely by Beissel. His chorals were among the first composed and sung
in America. His school, too, was of such quality that it drew pupils
from Baltimore and Philadelphia. After his death in 1786, in his
seventy-second year, his successor tried for twenty-eight years to
maintain the discipline and distinction of the order. It was
eventually deemed prudent to incorporate the society under the laws of
the State and to entrust its management to a board of trustees, and
the cloistered life of the community became a memory.

A community patterned after Ephrata was founded in 1800 by Peter
Lehman at Snow Hill, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. It consisted of
some forty German men and women living in cloisters but relieving the
monotony of their toil and the rigor of their piety with music. As in
Ephrata, there was a twofold membership, the consecrated and the
secular. The entire community, however, vanished after the death of
its founder.

When Beissel's Ephrata was in its heyday, the Moravians, under the
patronage of Count Zinzendorf of Saxony, established in 1741 a
community on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, named Bethlehem in
token of their humility. The colony provided living and working
quarters for both the married and unmarried members. After about
twenty years of experimenting, the communistic regimen was abandoned.
Bethlehem, however, continued to thrive, and its schools and its music
became widely known.

The story of the Harmonists, one of the mo