Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/583

Rh the German Protestants their history passes beyond our present horizon, except to allude to the fidelity with which they endured the shocks of the counter-Reformation, and succeeded in transmitting to our own time the lessons which they had learned from Peter Waldo and John Wickliff. They brought across the Atlantic the union of fearless zeal with the gentler Christian virtues, and in the annals of Pennsylvania the name of Moravian came to represent all that serves as the firmest and surest foundation of social organization. Parkman has well indicated the contrast between the civilizing influence of the kindly Moravian missionaries and the manner in which their Jesuit rivals were content to substitute the cross as a fetich in place of the medicine-bag. The same well-directed enthusiasm endures to the present day. Small as is the Moravian Church, it maintained in 1885 no less than three hundred and nineteen missionaries scattered among the remote places of the earth, with over eighty-one thousand native converts as church members; and the more rugged and inhospitable the fields of labor the more earnest the zeal of the good Brethren But for them the savage coasts of Greenland would be almost destitute of Christian teaching, and in their truly apostolic work we may recognize that the blood of the martyrs of Constance was not shed in vain.∗

∗Parkman's Montcalm, II. 144-5.—I owe to the kindness of Bishop De Schweinitz the statistics of the Moravian Missions.