It is truly lamentable to think of the large numbers of the rising generation who know not their right hand from their left; and, unless help be promptly afforded, the danger is great that, in consequence of the great lack of churches and schools, the most of them will be led into the ways of destructive error." This urgent appeal bore fruit like the apples of Sodom.

It resulted in a painful and pitiable correspondence with the chiefs of the mother church, these haggling for months and years over stipulations of salary, and refusing to send a minister until the salary should be pledged in cash; and their correspondents pleading their poverty and need.[188:2] The few and feeble churches of the Reformed confession were equally needy and ill befriended.
It seems to us, as we read the story after the lapse of a hundred and fifty years, as if the man expressly designed and equipped by the providence of God for this exigency in the progress of his kingdom had arrived when Zinzendorf, the Moravian, made his appearance at Philadelphia, December 10, 1741.

The American church, in all its history, can point to no fairer representative of the charity that "seeketh not her own" than this Saxon nobleman, who, for the true love that he bore to Christ and all Christ's brethren, was willing to give up his home, his ancestral estates, his fortune, his title of nobility, his patrician family name, his office of bishop in the ancient Moravian church, and even (last infirmity of zealous spirits) his interest in promoting specially that order of consecrated men and women in the church catholic which he had done and sacrificed so much to save from extinction, and to which his "cares and toils were given." He hastened first up the Lehigh Valley to spend Christmas at Bethlehem, where the foundations had already been laid on which have been built up the half-monastic institutions of charity and education and missions which have done and are still doing so much to bless the world in both its hemispheres.

It was in commemoration of this Christmas visit of Bishop Zinzendorf that the mother house of the Moravian communities in America received its name of Bethlehem.

Returning to Philadelphia, he took this city as the base of his unselfish and unpartisan labors in behalf of the great and multiplying population from his fatherland, which through its sectarian divisions had become so helpless and spiritually needy.
Already for twenty years there had been a few scattering churches of the Reformed confession, and for half that time a few Lutheran congregations had been gathered or had gathered themselves.