Page:Our Hymns.djvu/129

 THEIR AUTHORS AND ORIGIN. 109

ing memoir, &quot; Singing was another of the means of religious im provement to which he attached great importance, and, with the assistance of his secretary, Tobias Frederick, who was a good musician, he organized meetings for psalmody. His stock of hymns, which he could at any time recall, was as wonderful as his power of extemporaneous composition. Sometimes he would sing a number of verses taken from various hymns, and interspersed with others composed at the moment, thus producing a kind of lyric discourse an echo to the voice of the Hebrew prophets which seems to have produced a profound impression.&quot;

In the year 1732, Zinzendorf received an order to sell his estates and quit the country. This arose from the mismanage ment by his aunt, at Hennersdorf, of her Bohemian settlement. The settlers, weary of her restraint, removed to Herrnhut, and could not be prevailed upon by the count to return to his relative. They wandered about, and some were imprisoned, and they became a cause of annoyance and anxiety to the government, and most unreasonably the count was made to suffer for this unhappy state of things. In 1734, Zinzendorf went to Stralsund, and without revealing his title, passed an examination, and obtained a certificate of orthodoxy. Afterwards, he had recourse to the Faculty of Theology at Tubingen, and at last obtained the requisite authorization to act as assistant pastor at Herrnhut. After this, he went on his evangelical errand to Denmark, Holland, Prussia, and England ; and on the 20th of May, 1737, he re ceived episcopal consecration at Berlin, but not finding admis sion to the pulpits there, he opened his own house, where he gave addresses daily for four months. These were subsequently pub lished by the name of the &quot;Berlin Discourses.&quot; They went through many editions, and were translated into several lan guages.

In 1729, Zinzendorf paid a short visit to St. Thomas, and in 1741 he paid a missionary visit to America, where he remained more than a year doing a good work in Pennsylvania, and attempting something for the North American Indians. After

�� �