CHAPTER I.
Introduction.
Up to this time, the American field of Schwenkf elder hymnology appears to have been permitted to lie unworked and even uncleared; so that the present investigation has demanded pioneer effort. The explanation of this fact can readily be furnished. Until recent years, the sources which have made the present treatise possible were in the private possession of numerous individuals and of households of the sect, and hence were, for the most part, both inaccessible and unknown to the investigator. However, patient searching has brought to light much material relating to the production, transcribing, compiling and editing of hymns of Schwenkfelder authorship—the activity of the Schwenkfelders in the writing and collecting of hymns having extended from the first half of the sixteenth to the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of more than three hundred years. This material consists chiefly of manuscript sources hitherto unpublished, and is therefore of prime importance for a documentary account of the hymnology of the sect. The most important of the historical manuscripts exploited in the preparation of this work will be found printed with the text—care having been exercised to permit no deviation from the orthography employed by the chronicler. These citations are in most cases given in English translation also. The specimen hymns printed or reprinted are provided with footnotes explaining dialectal and obsolete forms. The illustrations will be found to include photographic reproductions indicating those manuscript compilations which served as sources for the first hymn-book of the sect printed in America.
The few brief notices which have thus far appeared, of the activity of the Schwenkfelders in the writing and compiling of hymns, have not been overlooked. In 1882, there appeared in the Reformed Quarterly Review an article entitled "Early German Hymnology of Pennsylvania," which contains an account of the
