The same influences, springing from a German origin, which thus deeply and directly impressed William Law, and a few other devout men of the same type of thought, acted upon the national mind far more widely, but also far more indirectly, through a different channel.  The Moravian brethren, though dating in the first instance from the time of Huss, owed their resuscitation to that wave of mystic pietism which passed through Germany in the seventeenth century,[583] showing its early power in the writings of Behmen, and reaching its full tide in the new vigour of spiritual life inspired into the Lutheran Church by the activity of Arndt and Spener.  Their work was carried on by Francke, ’the S. Vincent de Paul of Germany.’  Educated by him, and trained up in the teaching of Spener’s School at Halle, Count Zinzendorf imbibed those principles which he carried out with such remarkable success in his Moravian settlement at Herrnhut.  There he organised a community to which their severest critics have never refused a high amount of admiration; a society which set itself with simple zeal to lead a Christian life after the primitive model—­frugal, quiet, industrious, shunning temptation and avoiding controversy,—­a band of brethren who held out the hand of fellowship to all in every communion who, without giving up a single distinctive tenet, would unite with them in a union of godly living—­which sent out labourers into Christian countries to convert but not to proselytise—­whose missionaries were to be found among the remotest heathen savages.  That they should fall short of their ideal was but human weakness; and no doubt they had their special failings.  They might be apt, in the fervency of their zeal, to speak too disdainfully of all gifts of learning;[584] they might risk alternations of distressing doubt by too presumptuous expectations of visible supernatural help;[585] they might think too lightly of all outward aids to religion.[586] Such errors might, and sometimes did, prove very dangerous.  But one who knew them well, and to whom, as his mind expanded, their too parental discipline, their timid fears of reasoning, their painful straining for experiences, had become intolerable, could yet say of them, ’There is not throughout Christendom, in our day, a form of public worship which expresses more thoroughly the spirit of true Christian piety, than does that of the Herrnhut brotherhood....  It is the truest Christian community, I believe, which exists in the outward world.’[587]

The first Diaspora, or missionary colony, established by the Moravians in England was in 1728, at the instance of a lady in that centre of intellectual and religious activity, the Court of Queen Caroline.  They did not, however, attract much attention.  Winston, ever inquisitive and unsettled, wanted to know more about them, and began to read some of their sermons, but ’found so much weakness and enthusiasm mixed with a great degree of seriousness,’ that he