The summer and autumn of 1678, four years before his coming to Pennsylvania, had been spent by him, in company with George Fox, Robert Barclay, and other eminent Friends, in a mission tour through Holland (where he preached in his mother's own language) and Germany.

The fruit of this preaching and of previous missions appeared in an unexpected form.

One of the first important accessions to the colony was the company of Mennonites led by Pastorius, the "Pennsylvania Pilgrim," who founded Germantown, now a beautiful suburb of Philadelphia.

Group after group of picturesque devotees that had been driven into seclusion and eccentricity by long and cruel persecution--the Tunkers, the Schwenkfelders, the Amish--kept coming and bringing with them their traditions, their customs, their sacred books, their timid and pathetic disposition to hide by themselves, sometimes in quasi-monastic communities like that at Ephrata, sometimes in actual hermitage, as in the ravines of the Wissahickon.

But the most important contribution of this kind came from the suffering villages of the Rhenish Palatinate ravaged with fire and sword by the French armies in 1688.