In this wise matters went on until our Eckerlings almost proved our undoing, for it gradually became noised about that we were nothing more than merchants, tradespeople using our kloster life as a cloak to give us the appearance of honest, devout people, caring naught for gain; and there was much truth in what our printer at Germantown published, that in a short time the ringing and clinking, tinkling, clanking, and dangling at Zion, Ephrata, Kedar, Peniel, and Saron would equal Rome, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Babylon. The only remedy for this show and excessive love of money lay in the removal of the Eckerlings. This all the rest of the Solitary who loved a simple life knew must come sooner or later, and yet they dreaded the coming. Wherefore they groaned heavily in spirit under the bondage of the Eckerlings for seven long years. Then, and I have not space to relate how all this came about, were the Eckerlings dethroned, and their lording it over us brought to a certain end. On a bright day in August the Solitary Brethren arranged in a circle about a heap of burning brush fed by most willing hands, we consigned to the glowing embers all the books and writings of Onesimus, among them being his polemic against the Moravians; and three days later the Sisterhood of Saron repeated a similar ceremony, upon which occasion two of his German broadsides and a pillar against the Moravians as well as his hymns were consumed by the fire. And to make sure naught of contamination remained with us, on the sixth day the brethren of the Secular Congregation gathered all the writings and mementos of Onesimus and committed them also to the flames. [Illustration: "We consigned to the glowing embers all the books and writings of Onesimus." Page 198.] Not many weeks later the prior and his brother, Jephune, with Timotheus and several other followers, fled about four hundred miles toward the setting of the sun, until beyond all Christian government they reached a stream which runs toward the Mississippi, New River by name, where they were joined soon after by the rest of the Eckerlings.