When this first house was newly erected, Zinzendorf visited it, and on Christmas Eve he went with others into the stable and sang,—
“Nicht aus Jerusalem, sondern Bethlehem
Aus dem kommt, was mir frommt.”
or, in prose,
“That which is profitable to me comes not from Jerusalem, but from Bethlehem,”—
and thus the new-born town was named Bethlehem.
“The material treasures of the Lehigh valley,” says a Moravian bishop, “the national rage of hastening to be rich, will, I fear, too much overgrow the spiritual interests of the people.”
Since Zinzendorf entered the log cabin of Bethlehem one hundred and thirty years have passed by, and four or five generations of mortal men. Other changes too have befallen the Moravians. For twenty years they lived in an economie, or associated like one family. That strict rule, which afterwards kept the unmarried in brother- and sister-houses, has since been annulled, and no vestige of it remains here but in the custom of sitting in church, the brethren on one side, and the sisters on the other. And this is not universal: families sit together.
In like manner has disappeared here the custom of appealing to the lot, which formerly prevailed even in matters so solemn as marriage.[90]