A Tale of the Kloster by Brother Jabez

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[Illustration: "'Thou queen of the Roses of Saron, art thou holding court in thy temple of beauty?'" Page 216.]

A Tale

OF THE

KLOSTER

A Romance of the German Mystics of the Cocalico

_By_ BROTHER JABEZ _Illustrations by_ FRANK MCKERNAN

_Oh, blessed solitary life, Where all creation silence keeps! Who thus himself to God can yield That he ne'er from him strays, Hath to the highest goal attained, And can without vexation live. Faith, toleration, love, and hope, These all have come to his support._

--JOHANN CONRAD BEISSEL. Translation from the German by Julius Friedrich Sachse, Litt. D.

PHILADELPHIA Griffith & Rowland Press 1904

COPYRIGHTED 1904 BY

ULYSSES S. KOONS

Published December, 1904

From the Press of the American Baptist Publication Society

TO THE MEMORY OF

My Mother

THIS STORY OF THE LITTLE BAND OF BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE KLOSTER IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED

INTRODUCTION

A great New England historian has said that "The colony of Pennsylvania was not only more heterogeneous in population than any of the others, but it actually was the principal center of distribution of the non-English population from the seaboard to the Allegheny Mountains. All of the population of the Carolinas, as well as in Virginia and Maryland, entered the country by way of Pennsylvania, and this migration was so great, both in its physical dimensions and in the political and social effects which it wrought, that Pennsylvania acquires a special interest as the temporary tarrying place and distributing center for so much that we now call characteristically American."[1]

[1] "Dutch and Quaker Settlements." John Fiske.

It is undoubtedly true that into none of the other colonies did there flow such a tide of German immigration, bringing with it many a hardy Swiss and French Huguenot refugee from the Palatinate, along the lower Rhine.

Up to the Revolution there were more Germans in Pennsylvania than in all the other colonies together. Benjamin Franklin, it is well known, feared that the State might become a German province. Among the causes of this resistless tide of immigration were: Religious zeal, fostered by the teachings of William Penn and George Fox and their followers, and Penn's far-sighted pledge of tolerance as to liberty of worship, sectarian ambition, escape from religious persecution, and bad government.

Especially were the first-comers inspired by religious zeal, and it was to this that such old settlements as Bethlehem and Germantown and Ephrata owe their founding. Later, when the tide rose to a thousand German immigrants a month, a great majority came with the simple desire to earn a livelihood in peace and safety--a desire played upon by the glib-tongued, unscrupulous land agents of that day so successfully, that shipload after shipload of poverty-stricken German peasantry, enduring uncomplainingly the sufferings and hardships of hunger, thirst, and foetid air of the crowded hold and consequent ship-fever, poured into the port of Philadelphia and immediately took the oath of allegiance.

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