an offer of free transportation to Pennsylvania, where they arrived in safety
on the 22nd of September.

Spangenberg had wished to serve as their pastor in Georgia,
thinking it would give him opportunity to carry out his cherished wish
to bear the gospel message to the heathen, and he felt himself
still in a measure bound to them, despite their change of purpose,
and at a somewhat later time did visit them in their new home. There was
some idea of then taking them to Georgia, but it did not materialize,
and they remained permanently in Pennsylvania, settling in the counties
of Montgomery, Berks and Lehigh. Their descendents there preserve the customs
of their fathers, and are the only representatives of the Schwenkfelder form
of doctrine, the sect having become extinct in Europe.


Preliminary Steps.

While the exile of the Schwenkfelders was the immediate cause
which led Zinzendorf to open negotiations with the Trustees
of the Colony of Georgia, the impulse which prompted him involved far more
than mere assistance to them. Foreign Missions, in the modern sense
of the word, were almost unknown in Zinzendorf's boyhood,
yet from his earliest days his thoughts turned often to those who lay
beyond the reach of gospel light. In 1730, while on a visit to Copenhagen,
he heard that the Lutheran Missionary Hans Egede, who for years
had been laboring single handed to convert the Eskimos of Greenland,
was sorely in need of help; and Anthony, the negro body-servant
of a Count Laurwig, gave him a most pathetic description
of the condition of the negro slaves in the Danish West Indies.