It was in 1778 that the Single Sisters gave to Pulaski that banner of crimson, silk which is commemorated in Longfellow's well-known "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns at Bethlehem." The poem, however, written in the author's early youth, and preserved for its rare beauty of language and fine choice of subject, rather than for its historical accuracy, has done much to perpetuate a wrong idea of the Moravian spirit and ritual. Mr. Longfellow writes in his first stanza
When the dying flame of day Through the chancel shot its ray, Far the glimmering tapers shed Faint light on the cowled head, And the censer burning swung, When before the altar hung That proud banner, which, with care, Had been consecrated there; And the nuns' sweet hymn was heard the while, Sung low in the dim, mysterious aisle.
But the Moravians know nothing of chancels, tapers, cowled heads, censers, altars or nuns. Their faith has always been the simplest Protestantism, their churches are precisely such as Methodists or Baptists use, and their ritual is plainer than that of the most "evangelical" Episcopal parish. Their "single sisters' houses," "widows' houses" and "single brethren's houses"--the last long disused--are simply arrangements for social convenience or co-operative housekeeping. Mr. Longfellow's poetic description applies to the Moravian ceremonial no more accurately than to a Congregational prayer-meeting or a Methodist "love-feast."
[Illustration: THE MORAVIAN CEMETERY, BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA.]
Beside the deep and silent waters of the James River in Virginia, undisturbed by any sound save the flight of birds and the rustle of leaves, stands all that is left of the first church building erected by Englishmen in America. A good part of the tower remains, the arched doorways being still intact, and it seems a pitiable misfortune that the honestly-laid bricks of the venerable building could not have come down to our day. But, as it is, this ancient square block of brick forms our one pre-eminent American ruin. Nothing could be a more solemn monument of the past than the lonely tower, surrounded by thick branches and underbrush and looking down upon the few crumbling gravestones still left at its base. Jamestown, long abandoned as a village, has now become an island, the action of the waters having at last denied it the remaining solace of connection with the mainland of the Old Dominion, of whose broad acres it was once the chief town and the seat of government--the forerunner of all that came to America at the hands of English settlers.