Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER II. The Unitas Fratrum Or Moravian Church. A.D. 1457-1735- The founders of Bethlehem represented a Church variously known as the Brethren's Church, the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren, the Church of the United Brethren and the Moravian Church.1 It arose in the fifteenth century in the twin countries of Bohemia and Moravia, lying mountain-encircled in the heart of Europe, small in area but long the theatre of great events. For more than seven hundred years their history had been one of successive struggles for freedom and for the preservation of their primitive Christianity in character and form. What their first evangelists, Cyrill and Methodius of the Greek Church gave them in the ninth century; what Rome deprived them of in the eleventh century, the Bohemian Reformation came so near restoring at the opening of the fifteenth century that the Papal authorities resorted to the desperate measure of burning the intrepid leader John Hus at the stake July 6, 1415, to intimidate the uprising hosts. The subsequent contentions were partly political, partly religious. The Four Articles of Prague (1421) which declared for unhindered worship and preaching in the vernacular; the communion cup to the laiety; secular power taken from the clergy; discipline impartially maintained among all ranks and classes, became the general platform of the Hussite patriots. Two main parties arose. 1 The original Bohemian name was textit{Jednota Bratnha. The word textit{Jedn-ota means association of any kind. It was chosen instead of textit{Cirhev (church) in deference to the National Church, as textit{Unitas was later used as a Latin equivalent of Jednota — both meaning what is meant by Church in the restricted sense, as applied to single church divisions or denominations in America. Unitas pa...