The story of the religious war which ensued ought to be written in a popular form, and read in all countries: no portion of history exemplifies more strikingly the impolicy of persecution, the madness of fanaticism, and the crimes and. the consequences of anarchy. And these aweful lessons would be rendered more impressive, by the heroic circumstances with which they are connected; for greater intrepidity was never displayed than by those peasants, who encountered armed enemies with no better weapons than their flails; and the modern science of fortification may be traced to that general who, after he had lost his only eye in battle, continued to lead his devoted troops to victory; and who, with his dying breath, ordered that a drum should be made of his skin: "the sound of it," he said, "would put the Germans to flight." This struggle for reformation was made too soon; that under the Elector Palatine too late. His feeble attempt at maintaining the kingdom to which he was elected, ended in the loss of his hereditary dominions: his paternal palace, which for beauty of structure and situation has rarely been equalled, was destroyed, and at this day it is, perhaps, the most impressive of all modern ruins his family became wanderers, but his grandson succeeded to the British throne, and that succession secured the civil and religious liberties of Britain. Bohemia paid dearly for this final struggle; her best blood was shed by the executioner, and her freedom was extinguished.

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The persecution that followed was deliberately planned and effected. The Protestant clergy were banished, first from Prague, and what till now had been the free cities,-soon from the whole kingdom. After a short interval, the nobles of the same persuasion were subjected to the same sentence, and their estates confiscated. The common people were forbidden to follow, for the law regarded them as belonging to the soil. Among the exiled preachers was John Amos Comenius, once well known in schools by his Janua Linguarum Reserata, notorious in his day for accrediting the dreams of certain crazy enthusiasts, but most to be remembered for the part which he bore in the history of the Moravian church. He being harboured by a noble, continued to visit his congregation at Fulnek, till the nobles were banished; then taking with him a part of his flock, he emigrated through Silesia into Poland. When they reached the mountains on the confines, he looked back upon his country, which he was about to leave for ever; and falling on his knees, his companions kneeling and weeping with him, he prayed that God would not utterly remove his gospel from Bohemia, but still reserve to himself a seed. A hundred years afterwards that prayer was inscribed within the ball of the Bohemian church-steeple at

The inhabitants of this little town still speak of him as the last minister of the Picards, and as a wise and learned man. A hospital has been erected on the scite of the house in which he used to preach, but it is still called Zbor, the Assembly, or the Meeting-House.

Cranz's History of the Brethren, translated by Latrobe, p. 95.

Berlin, when it was regarded as a prophecy that had been accomplished.

At a synod held at Lissa in 1632, Comenius was consecrated Bishop of the dispersed Brethren from Bohemia and Moravia. During the thirty years' war he lived in a state of high excitement and turbulent hope, till disappointment and age brought with them more wisdom, and a more contented reliance upon Providence. He then found a melancholy consolation in recording the history and discipline of a church, which he believed would die with him; and he dedicated this book as his last will and testament, and as a precious legacy to the Church of England, to use it according to their own pleasure, and preserve it as a deposit for the posterity of the Brethren. "You," said he, "have just cause indeed to love her, even when dead, who, whilst yet living, went before you in her good examples of faith and patience. God himself, when he took away and laid waste his people's land, city, temple, because of their unthankfulness for his blessings, He would still have the basis of the altar to be left in its place, upon which, after ages, when they should be returned to themselves and to God, they might build again. If, then, by the grace of God, there have been found in us (as wise men and godly have sometimes thought) any thing true, any thing honourable, any thing just, any thing pure, any thing to be loved, and of good report, and if any virtue and any praise, care must be taken that it may not die with us when we die; and at least that the very

foundations be not buried in the rubbish of present ruins, so that the generations to come should not be able to tell where to find them. And indeed this care is taken, and provision is made on this behalf, by this our trust entrusted in your hands."

Comenius comforted himself by thinking that, in consequence of the events which he had lived to witness, the gospel would pass away from Christendom to other nations, "that so, as it was long ago, our stumbling might be the enriching of the world, and our diminishing the riches of the Gentiles. The consideration," said he, "of this so much-to-be-admired eternal Providence, doth gently allay the grief which I have taken by reason of the ruin of the church of my native country, of the government of which (so long as she kept her station) the laws are here described and set forth in view; even myself, alas! being the very last superintendent of all, am fain, before your eyes, O Churches! to shut the door after me."

He was, however, induced, by the only other surviving Bishop of the Brethren, to assist in consecrating two successors, that the episcopal succession among them might not be broken: one of these was his son-in-law, Peter Figulus Jablonsky, who was consecrated for the Bohemian branch, in spem contra spem, in hope against all expectation, that that branch might be restored.

Before his banishment, Comenius had been minister of the little town of Fulnek, in the margravate of Moravia; there he was long remembered with veneration, and there, and in the surround

ing village, the doctrines which he had so sedulously inculcated were cherished in secret. The Brethren, though compelled to an outward conformity with the Romish establishment, met together privately, preserved a kind of domestic discipline, and when the rinsing of the cup, which for a while had been allowed them, was withheld, they administered the communion among themselves the magistrates knew these things, and sometimes interfered, and punished such infractions of the law as were complained of with fine and imprisonment; but the government had learnt wisdom and moderation from experience, and was averse from any violent persecution, relying upon length of time and worldly conveniences for producing a perfect conformity to the dominant church. From time to time such of the Brethren as could find means of removal fled from Bohemia and Moravia into the Protestant parts of Germany, and in this way a silent but considerable emigration took place, during the latter half of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. One of these emigrants, by name Christian David, and by trade a carpenter, becoming zealous for the faith of his fathers, and the increase of true religion, endeavoured to procure a safe establishment for such of his brethren as might be desirous of following his example, and shaking the dust of their intolerant country from their feet, to settle in a land where they might enjoy their own form of worship. By his means application was made, through two