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On October 8, 1732 a Dutch sailing vessel slipped out of the Copenhagen harbor. Its destination—the Danish West Indies. On board were the first two Moravian missionaries. It was the beginning of an era.

In that year George Washington was born and 36-year-old James Oglethorpe succeeded in receiving a grant to establish the colony of Georgia—named for another George. In Philadelphia, the State House—later to be called Independence Hall—was rising in red-brick dignity. And Benjamin Franklin was wondering how people would like his first edition of “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”

Across the ocean, the future home of Great Britain’s prime ministers, No. 10 Downing Street, was under construction, London’s Covent Garden Opera House was opened and patrons founded the Acadamie of Ancient Music. Giving promise of the wonderful music in store for Europe—and the world—of the 18th Century, Franz Joseph Haydn was born in a village near Vienna. Bach and Handel’s music was attracting the attention of those affluent enough or high-born enough to attend the concerts.

Across Europe, the people and their rulers were breathing a sigh of relief after the bloody 17th Century. A general peace prevailed and not one of the “enlightened despots”—not Emperor Charles VI or Louis XV or Prussia’s Frederick William I—held anything like universal sway. The hierarchical feudal society descended from the Middle Ages was now in its “final phase.” Nobles, like the clergy, remained the two privileged classes, but a rising middle class often held the decisive purse strings. Nations and states were developing interests in the New World and tending to their domestic problems.

As the Columbia History of the World notes, “No monarch tried seriously to impose religious unity in Europe.” There were at least three reasons for this. In part, it was a tribute to the stature the Protestant churches had gained since the Reformation; Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican churches held favored positions and the smaller dissenting groups often found protection beneath their wings. It was due also to the anemic Catholic leadership—what H. G. Wells characterized as “weak popes, declining monasteries and lazy bishops.” But perhaps the chief reason lay in the dawning of “The Age of Reason.” The writings of Newton and a hundred other scientists and philosophers were raising serious questions which put religious dogma in jeopardy.

This leaning toward rationalism was having a predictably deadening effect upon the churches, Catholic and Protestant alike. In Germany, where Luther’s “revolt” had been successfully tamed by well meaning territorial rulers and theologians, “ emphasis was upon pure doctrine and the Sacraments as the constituent elements of the Christian life,” writes John Weinlick. “The layman’s role was the entirely passive one of accepting the dogmas which he heard expounded from the pulpit, of partaking faithfully of the sacraments, of sharing in the ordinances of the church. That kind of religion could not satisfy a crushed and poverty-stricken people.”

Thus the way was opened for Pietism, a return to the enthusiasm for Christ, this “heart religion,” flamed brightly in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, undoubtedly contributing to the Great Awakening. In Saxony, a Protestant state in what is now The German Democratic Republic, Pietism’s stronghold was Halle, from where numerous members of the nobility went into the service of the state. Among them was Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) who in 1722 established a religious community known as Herrnhut which would prove to be not only a shelter for Pietists, but more significantly a haven for persecuted Bohemian and Moravian Brethren fleeing across the border and bringing with them the dreams of a revived Moravian church. Descendants of the Hussites, they were destined to become the core of the renewed Moravian Church and to take the gospel of Christ for which they had suffered so long and so intensely, to neglected peoples on five continents in the next few decades—beginning in 1732.

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