which they should supply the want of ministers which they already began to feel. After long consultations, about seventy of the most influential of the Brethren from Bohemia and Moravia met, in the year 1467, and chose by lot three men, Matthias Kunwald, Thomas Prelautsch und Elias Krenov, who were recognized as se apart by God for the ministry of the Brethren. And as a body of Waldenses bad settled on the Moravian Austrian frontier, of whom the Brethren knew that they had legitimate Bishops, descended from the Apostles in an unbroken succession, they caused those three elected candidates (this is evidently an inaccuracy, it should be, three previously ordained priests) to be consecrated Bishops with the imposition of hands, by the Waldensian Bishop Stephen, who was afterward burned at Vienna.”
8. Zeschwitz, a Doctor of the University of Erlangen, of Moravian parentage, but himself a bigoted Lutheran, in his recent work, which we have repeatedly cited, which is wholly devoted to the relation subsisting between the Waldenses and the Bohemian Brethren, and which contains, as was to be expected, not a few unfavorable opinions concerning the latter, says, speaking of the consecration of the first Moravian Bishops by Stephen:
“It is a fact that does not admit of a doubt, and has lately been established in so surprising a manner, by a writer of Herrnhut, that nothing remains to be said upon it.”[1]
9. The Brethren’s earliest enemies and persecutors, whose tacit acknowledgment of the validity of their episcopacy is a most remarkable evidence. Never did these bitter controversialists and bloody men call it into question. Rokycana denounced the institution of a separate ministry, and heaped woes upon the heads of the Brethren, not because he could say that they pretended to have lawful bishops, but because they had consecrated unlearned laymen, and inducted them into ao holy an office.[2] If he had known that the claims of the Waldensian episcopacy were invalid, as he would have known in case they had been invalid, is it credible that he would have remained silent upon this subject?
Omitting the numerous Moravian writers of modern times, whose evidence might be added, and summing up merely these nine points of testimony, we find: that the most ancient historian of the Brethren, appointed to collect materials for their history; the Reformed author in point of time next after him, and fully conver-
