What the origin of the Hernhuters really is, seems to be a point as yet scarcely determined. Mosheim, in his _Ecclesiastical History_, speaks vaguely of them; and Dr. Maclaine, his English translator, has attributed to them practices and opinions which are quite contrary to fact. Confounding them with the Picards, whom John Ziska, the famous Hussite general, well-nigh exterminated, the latter speaks of them as practising all the absurd impurities of the Pre-Adamites, and he appeals for support to Stinstra's pastoral letter,--one of the most uncandid as well as impertinent productions that ever came from the pen even of an Anabaptist. For my own part, I see no reason to doubt that they are what they profess to be, the descendants of the Bohemian or Moravian brethren, whom the bigotry of the house of Austria drove from their homes, and of whom remnants are yet to be found, both in Poland and Hungary. Their church is episcopal in its constitution; their tenets agree with the Augsburg Confession of Faith; their ritual is plain and bare, almost like that of the Presbyterian church of Scotland; and their attention to psalmody very great. It has been much the practice of the surrounding townships, as well in Bohemia as in Silesia and Saxony, to speak slightingly of them. But a brief sojourn among them, sufficed to convince me that they were at least as honest as any of those by whom their honesty had been called in question. The word Hernhut signifies "a seeker of the Lord;" and it was their excessive earnestness in the service of religion, that, according to one account, earned for them and their settlement the names which they still retain. Another tradition says, that Hut was the name of the individual by whom the first of the colony was led to this particular spot; and that as from him, Herr Hut, or Gentleman Hut, their village derived its appellation, so the inhabitants of the village came to be known as Hernhuters. Between these conflicting statements, (and both were communicated to me on the spot,) I do not pretend to decide. I only know that to Count Zinzendorf,--of well-established notoriety,--the fathers were in 1722 indebted for their settlement on the spot of ground which their sons still occupy; and that, grateful for the kindnesses which their sect received both from him and his children, they have ever held the name in the highest possible respect.