sustain her, yea and even cause her again to extend and spread. My parents were born in this Church; my father begot me in his exile. In this same Church I was brought up, and my love to her I imbibed with my mother’s milk. It has, indeed, pleased the Lord to separate me from her in the body, but their Majesties, the late King, who rests in God, and the reigning King, have most graciously thought proper to allow me to take part in the administration of ber bishoprick.”[1]
A subsequent letter, dated October 31st, of the same year, adds:
By the most gracious permission of our plotis Prince, then known as the Elector Frederick III, but since 1707 as King Frederick 1, I received episcopal consecration in the year 1699, on the 10th of March at a Synod held at Lissa, in Great Poland. On account of my absence from that country, there were two Bishops there, the one, David Cassius, at Lissa, the other at Zychlin; but as the latter died last year, we speak of soon consecrating another in his place, that the succession may continue to be perpetuated. About twelve years ago, it happened in England that certain enemies of all evangelical churches on the Continent took occasion to assert and, even to publish through the press that the Bohemian Brethren had never had, and had not then, lawful bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Wake, thereupon wrote to me and asked for information upon this subject. I replied by giving him the circumstantial succession, with which he declared himself to be perfectly satisfied. Neither I, nor the Bishops in Poland, however, make use of the episcopal title, because we think proper to avoid the offensiveness of it, it being unusual among German Protestants, and calculated to be a stumbling block rather than to promote edification.”[2]
THE TRANSFER OF THE EPISCOPATE TO THE PRESENT MORAVIAN CHURCH.
In the year 1722, the prayers and hopes of the aged Comenius were at last fulfilled, although in a way different from what he had anticipated. At Herrnhut, on an estate of Count Zinzendorf, in Saxony, the ancient Church of Bohemian and Moravian confessors was renewed. That this was a legitimate renewal, that the Moravian immigrants who had there found a refuge were the spiritual descendants of his own spiritual fathers; Jablonsky joyfully acknowledged.[3] Hence when the Brethren laid before him a formal request to transfer to them the venerable succession, preserved amidst perils, persecutions and exile, he willingly consented, and, at Berlin, on the 13th of March, in the year 1735,
