MORAVIAN BRETHREN, The, are a society of Christians whose history can be traced back to the year 1457 and their origin found among the religious movements in Bohemia which followed the martyrdom of John Huss by the council of Constance. The beginnings of the Bohemian Brethren (for that was their earlier name) are somewhat obscure. The followers of Huss broke up into two factions, one of which, the Calixtines, was willing to acknowledge allegiance to Rome, provided the “compacts” of the council of Basel permitting the Lord’s Supper sub utraque specie were maintained, and in the end it became the national church of Bohemia; the other, the Taborites, refused all terms of reconciliation, and appealed to arms. Separate from both these were many pious people who were content to worship God in simple fashion, in quiet meetings for prayer and Scripture-reading, like the Gottesfreunde of Germany, and who called themselves Brethren. Bohemian historians have conclusively shown that the Brethren represent the religious kernel of the Hussite movement, and do not come either from the German Waldenses or from the Taborites. Before 1457 many of these quiet Christians were known as the Brethren of Chelcic, and were the followers of Peter Chelcicky, a Bohemian, whose religious influence, strongly Puritan in its character, seems to have been inferior only to that of Huss. In that year the Calixtine leader, Rokyzana, wishing to protect them, permitted his nephew Gregory to gather them together at Kunewald near Senftenberg, and form them into a community. This meeting was really the foundation of the Brethren or Unitas Fratrum, and its founder Gregory announced that he and his companions received and taught the rejection of oaths, of the military profession, of all official rank, ...

or UNITED BRETHREN. The name of Moravians, or Moravian Brethren, was in England given to the members of a foreign Protestant church, calling itself the _Unitas Fratrum_, or United Brethren. This church formerly consisted of three branches, the Bohemian, Moravian, and Polish. After its renovation in the year 1722, some of its members came to England in 1728, who being of the Moravian branch, became known by that appellation; and all those who joined them, and adopted their doctrines and discipline, have ever since been called Moravians. Strictly speaking, however, that name is not applicable to them, nor generally admitted, either by themselves, or in any public documents, in which they are called by their proper names, the _Unitas Fratrum_, or United Brethren. The few remaining members of the ancient church of the United Brethren in Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland, being much persecuted by the popish clergy, many of them left all their possessions, and fled with their families into Silesia and Saxony. In Saxony they found protection from a Saxon nobleman, Nicholas Lewis, count of Zinzendorff, who gave them some waste land on one of his estates, on which, in 1722, they built a village at the foot of a hill, called the Hut-Berg, or Watch-Hill. This occasioned them to call their settlement _Herrnhut_, the watch of the Lord.” Hence their enemies designated them in derision by the name of Herrnhuters, which is altogether improper, but by it they are known in some countries abroad. By their own account, the community derive their origin from the ancient Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, who existed as a distinct people ever since the year 1457, when, separating from those who took up arms in defence of their protestations against popish errors, they formed a plan for church ...