Old and New London, Volume I: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its PlacesThornbury, Walter
History
Old and New London, Volume I: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places
Thornbury, Walter
London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- History
"The chapel of the United Brethren, or Moravians, 32, Fetter Lane," says
Smith, in his "Streets of London," "was the meeting-house of the
celebrated Thomas Bradbury. During the riots which occurred on the trial
of Dr. Sacheveral, this chapel was assaulted by the mob and dismantled,
the preacher himself escaping with some difficulty. The other
meeting-houses that suffered on this occasion were those of Daniel
Burgess, in New Court, Carey Street; Mr. Earl's, in Hanover Street, Long
Acre; Mr. Taylor's, Leather Lane; Mr. Wright's, Great Carter Lane; and
Mr. Hamilton's, in St. John's Square, Clerkenwell. With the benches and
pulpits of several of these, the mob, after conducting Dr. Sacheveral in
triumph to his lodgings in the Temple, made a bonfire in the midst of
Lincoln's Inn Fields, around which they danced with shouts of 'High
Church and Sacheveral,' swearing, if they found Daniel Burgess, that
they would roast him in his own pulpit in the midst of the pile."
This Moravian chapel was one of the original eight conventicles where
Divine worship was permitted. Baxter preached here in 1672, and Wesley
and Whitefield also struck great blows at the devil in this pulpit,
where Zinzendorf's followers afterwards prayed and sang their fervent
hymns.
Count Zinzendorf, the poet, theologian, pastor, missionary, and
statesman, who first gave the Moravian body a vital organisation, and
who preached in Fetter Lane to the most tolerant class of all
Protestants, was born in Dresden in 1700. His ancestors, originally from
Austria, had been Crusaders and Counts of Zinzendorf. One of the
Zinzendorfs had been among the earliest converts to Lutheranism, and
became a voluntary exile for the faith. The count's father was one of
the Pietists, a sect protected by the first king of Prussia, the father
of Frederick the Great. The founder of the Pietists laid special stress
on the doctrine of conversion by a sudden transformation of the heart
and will. It was a young Moravian missionary to Georgia who first
induced Wesley to embrace the vital doctrine of justification by faith.
For a long time there was a close kinsmanship maintained between
Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the Moravians; but eventually Wesley
pronounced Zinzendorf as verging on Antinomianism, while Zinzendorf
objected to Wesley's doctrine of sinless perfection. In 1722 Zinzendorf
gave an asylum to two families of persecuted Moravian brothers, and
built houses for them on a spot he called Hernhut ("watched of the
Lord"), a marshy tract in Saxony, near the main road to Zittau. These
simple and pious men were Taborites, a section of the old Hussites, who
had renounced obedience to the Pope and embraced the Vaudois doctrines.
This was the first formation of the Moravian sect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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