Again, upon the death of Hartman in 1691, Bishop Zugehoer continued the succession by consecrating Joachim Gulichius, on the 26th of June, 1692, at Lissa; and Bishop Gulichius transferred it, at the same place, after the death of Zugehoer, to John Jacobides and Daniel Ernst Jablonsky, (the grandson of Comenius and Court-Preacher at Berlin), on the 10th of March, 1699. The former died in 1709, whereupon Bishop Danie Ernst Jablonsky consecrated Solomon Opitz, the 11th of July, 1712, at Zulchow, on the Polish confines of Prussia, and David Cassius and Christian Sitkovius, the 4th of November, of the same year, at Thorn.[1]
In this way the succession was carefully and piously preserved even in that period in which the Moravian Church remained a “hidden seed.” These bishops did not make use of their title except when they met the remnant of their Brethren at occasional Synods, held here and there, for the confirmation of their hopes and the amelioration of their sufferings. They were ministers in the Reformed Church, but with the consent of the same, and of their respective sovereigns, received consecration as Bishops of the Unitas Fratrum in order that the succession might not die out. Hence the difficulty disappears which Perceval tries to create by assuming that Jablonsky’s episcopal character could neither have been known nor recognized even in his own time, because candidates for the ministry went from Prussia to England in order to be episcopally ordained, and because there was an active correspondence between the courts of Berlin and St. James’s with the view to obtaining episcopal consecration (Christian Miscellany p. 6). Not that he might officiate as a bishop in the National Establishment of Prussia, nor that he might make it an episcopal church, had he been admitted into the Moravian Episcopate. To do either would have been entirely contrary to the purpose for which it was maintained. Let us hear his own account of the case. In a letter to Count Zinzendorf, dated the 13th of August, 1729, he writes:
- ↑ The above exposition of the succession since the times of Comenius, is given by Jablonsky in his letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Acta Fratrum in Anglia, p. 114 and 116.
