A History of the Moravian Church

by J. E. Hutton

"I know," said one of them, "on what you are relying and how you console yourself, but I warn you it will avail you nothing."

"You know no secrets," said Augusta.

"What secrets?" queried Mystopol.

"Neither divine nor mine. My dear administrators, your visit is quite a surprise! With regard to the recantation, however, let me say at once, I shall not sign it! I have never been guilty of any errors, and have nothing to recant. I made my public confession of faith before the lords and knights of Bohemia twenty-eight years ago. It was shown to the Emperor at Vienna, and no one has ever found anything wrong with it."

"How is it," said Mystopol, "you cannot see your error? You know it says in our confession, 'I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.' You Brethren have fallen away from that Church. You are not true members of the body. You are an ulcer. You are a scab. You have no sacraments. You have written bloodthirsty pamphlets against us. We have a whole box full of your productions."

"We never wrote any tracts," said Augusta, "except to show why we separated from you, but you urged on the Government against us. You likened me to a bastard and to Goliath the Philistine. Your petition read as if it had been written in a brothel."

And now the character of John Augusta shone forth in all its grandeur. The old man was on his mettle.

"Of all Christians known to me," he said, "the Brethren stick closest to Holy Writ. Next to them come the Lutherans; next to the Lutherans the Utraquists; and next to the Utraquists the—-!"

But there in common honesty he had to stop. And then he turned the tables on Mystopol, and came out boldly with his scheme. It was no new idea of his. He had already, in 1547, advocated a National Protestant Church composed of Utraquists and Brethren. Instead of the Brethren joining the Utraquists, it was, said Augusta, the plain duty of the Utraquists to break from the Church of Rome and join the Brethren. For the last forty years the Utraquists had been really Lutherans at heart. He wanted them now to be true to their own convictions. He wanted them to carry out in practice the teaching of most of their preachers. He wanted them to run the risk of offending the Emperor and the Pope. He wanted them to ally themselves with the Brethren; and he believed that if they would only do so nearly every soul in Bohemia would join the new Evangelical movement. De Schweinitz says that Augusta betrayed his Brethren, and that when he called himself a Utraquist he was playing with words. I cannot accept this verdict. He explained clearly and precisely what he meant; he was a Utraquist in the same sense as Luther; and the castle he had built in the air was nothing less than a grand international union of all the Evangelical Christians in Europe.

"My lords," he pleaded in golden words, "let us cease this mutual accusation of each other. Let us cease our destructive quarrelling. Let us join in seeking those higher objects which we both have in common, and let us remember that we are both of one origin, one nation, one blood and one spirit. Think of it, dear lords, and try to find some way to union."