secular. The entire community, however, vanished after the death of
its founder.

When Beissel's Ephrata was in its heyday, the Moravians, under the
patronage of Count Zinzendorf of Saxony, established in 1741 a
community on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, named Bethlehem in
token of their humility. The colony provided living and working
quarters for both the married and unmarried members. After about
twenty years of experimenting, the communistic regimen was abandoned.
Bethlehem, however, continued to thrive, and its schools and its music
became widely known.

The story of the Harmonists, one of the most successful of all the
communistic colonies is even more interesting. The founder, Johann
Georg Rapp, had been a weaver and vine gardener in the little village
of Iptingen in Württemberg. He drew upon himself and his followers the
displeasure of the Church by teaching that religion was a personal
matter between the individual and his God; that the Bible, not the
pronouncements of the clergy, should be the guide to the true faith,
and that the ordinances of the Church were not necessarily the
ordinances of God. The petty persecutions which these doctrines
brought upon him and his fellow separatists turned them towards
liberal America. In 1803 Rapp and some of his companions crossed the
sea and selected as a site for their colony five thousand acres of
land in Butler County, Pennsylvania. There they built the new town of
Harmony, to which came about six hundred persons, all told. On
February 15, 1805 they organized the Harmony Society and signed a
solemn agreement to merge all their possessions in one common lot.[16]
Among them were a few persons of education and property, but most of
them were sturdy, thrifty mechanics and peasants, who, under the