As I watched them they were going to the modest meeting-house at the edge of the village. I did not follow them, for my way led straight down the main street which ends in the turnpike, over which a toll-gate still hangs. The gatekeeper sits in a little hut among his cronies, smoking the native weed and talking politics—and he who is acquainted with the quality of either ought to know that they are strangely alike.
“The cloisters are across the meadow,” the toll-keeper informed me. And, pointing to one of his companions, a man of uncertain age and a rather doubtful degree of cleanliness, he said: “And he lives in one of them.”
“I am not a member,” the man volunteered, apologetically. “My wife is.”
This alone proved him a modern and commonplace. I left him disgustedly, and, stepping over the stile, walked through the snow-covered meadow and along the shores of the Cocalico towards a group of rather ill-shaped, weather-beaten buildings which suggested a deserted farm more than a cloister. The momentary disappointment vanishes, however, as soon as one has a clear view of the peaked-roof buildings in which no outer beauty is visible, but which, with their low doors, narrow cells, and roped stairway, recall to him who knows, the “Chronicon Ephratense,” the groping of this Brotherhood after the blessed life here below, seeking communion with God in self-denial, in good works and pious songs. These Brothers fell into all the errors of Christendom and practiced many of its virtues in a single generation. Conrad Beisel, a German mystic, came here to live as an anchorite. His pious life drew others to him, and they progressed to monasticism.
When women found them, they all became celibates. They were close to every heresy which threatened the early Church, and were not far from worshipping Conrad Beisel as a reincarnation of Christ; while in the mystic Sophia they came close to the adoration of the Virgin. They practiced communism successfully for over half a century, and branded property as sin long before Proudhon declared it to be theft. They printed Bibles, wrote ecstatic hymns, developed to a remarkable degree the art of illuminating letters, and organized a Sunday-school in which they used some of the so-called modern methods, such as promotion cards, long before the thought came into the mind of Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday-school of to-day. They were chaste, frugal, and non-resistant. One of them, Peter Miller, the successor of Conrad Beisel, went to George Washington to plead for the remittance of the death penalty of a man, Michael Wildman, accused of treason. The General told Peter Miller that the severest penalty must be dealt out at a time like that.
“If it were not so, I would gladly release your friend.”
“Friend!” replied Miller; “he is the only enemy I have.”
This, it is said, made such an impression on General Washington that the pardon was granted.
I lingered in the “Saal,” the place of worship. Simple and small it is, with plain pine pews, the beamed ceiling hanging far into the room. The walls are covered by charts on which, in exquisite ornamental lettering, Scripture verses and some of the mystic poetry of the Brothers are written. There are also allegorical pictures, naively drawn by the pen, suggesting the thought that in time a new school of religious art might have been developed here.
Scarcely half a dozen worshippers, I was told by the cronies at the toll-gate, gather here on Saturday; for the sect is that of the Seventh Day Dunkards, or German Baptists, and it cannot be very long before this sanctuary will be empty and forsaken and its ruin complete.