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 collection of materials for the historian. “Of what sort our records must be amidst such great disquietude and persecutions,” writes Bishop Nigranus, in 1556, to the well known Reformer, Flacius Illyricus, “thou mayest safely judge.” Moreover, both the law of self-preservation and the rule of Christ taught them to combine the wisdom of the serpent with the harmlessness of the dove. Hence they intentionally concealed some occurrences that would have inflamed the wrath of their enemies. Bishop Blahoslav writing, in 1571, to Lasitius, who was preparing an history of the Church, says: “He (Esaias, his pupil, by whose hands he sent the letter) will indicate to thee the reasons which have led the Brethren to prefer that their affairs should remain unknown rather than be published abroad. They do not wish to extol themselves and make themselves the subject of their own praise: they prefer peace and tranquility to all things, being, namely, men east down, oppressed and greatly afflicted.”

In the next place, their earliest archives, which were deposited at Leitomischl, in Bohemia, together with the private library of Bishop Augusta embracing most valuable records, totally perished, in 1546, in a conflagration which swept away that entiretownentire town [sic].

And, finally, the great mass of their numerous publications which were issued at a later period fell a prey. in the Bohemian Anti-reformation, to the fury of Jesuits and imperial dragoons sent through the country to search out and burn every vestige of evangelical literature. Upon this point the Roman Catholic historian, Gindely—of whom more hereafter while carefully withholding the true cause, which would stigmatize his church, is nevertheless constrained to acknowledge: The writings of the Brethren in particular seem to have been devoted to annihilation. We are not astonished that, as a general thing, but one or two copies of works in manuscript have come down to us from former days: but that printed works, circulating by the hundreds and thousands scarcely two and a half centuries ago, have in part altogether