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But it is with the human mind when God enables it to grasp some truth as it is with children or with savages when some one gives to them a compass or a watch. They are absorbed in it; they put it to all sorts of uses. They never rest till they have spoiled it. The human mind when in possession of some new truth is not content till it has turned it into an error. Every tendency, every school, every Church in this way parodies itself. In this way the pietiests exaggerated or rather falsified and denaturalised piety itself, just as the orthodox had exaggerated orthodoxy, and as we shall see the disciples of Zinzendorf transform into puerility that Christian simplicity which had been their most precious treasure.

The asceticism of Spener soon became in most of his disciples, a spirit of minute and pharisaic legalism. Starting from the plausible principle that there are no indifferent works, they came to magnify the importance of the most insignificant actions, to regulate everything, and to make the Christian life consist in the performance of certain acts of devotion, and in the renunciation of certain so-called worldly pleasures. The little devotional meetings, which Spener wished to be “little Churches within the Church,” came to regard themselves as the only Church, outside which there was no salvation. Hence a most intolerant spiritual pride which compensated the little for their lack of worldly position, and which in the great, became an aliment to their exclusiveness.
We shall see these aberrations of pietism manifesting themselves in deadly opposition to Zinzendorf and his work. At the moment of his birth, however, the revival was still in its pristine purity.
From, “Count Zinzendorf” by Felix Bovet, available from Harvey Christian Publishers Inc.

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