lo                               ]ohn Joseph Stoudt

man was apprenticed to a baker in Eberbach, going on his jour¬
neyman travels to Strassburg, Mannheim and Heidelberg. At each
place he came in touch with unorthodox religious groups—
Philadelphians, pietists, mystics—and in 1716, in his twenty-fifth
year, he experienced profound conversion, finding acceptance in
the Heidelberg circle of pietists, among whom were several uni¬
versity professors. His espousal of pietism brought him in conflict
with his fellow bakers as well as with the ecclesiastical authori¬
ties; his fellow bakers resented this long-nosed busybody prying
into their affairs and criticizing their peccadillos; churchmen
were alarmed by the threat of separatism. Soon he was in conflict
with civil and religious authorities and was haled before civil and
religious courts—where he was found guilty of an unknown
charge and banished from his homeland.

Sick with tuberculosis and deeply troubled, Beissel came, ped-
dlar's pack on his back, to the land of the exiled pietists in tolerant
Wittgenstein, then rendezvous for the persecuted. Ill, ragged, and
hungry he thus reached Schwartzenau where there still was an
afterglow of an earlier awakening; here a fellow baker named
Schatz introduced him to Johann Friedrich Rock (1648-1749)
and to Eberhard Ludwig Gruber (1665-1728), leaders of the
congregation of True Inspiration, a movement deriving from the
prophets of the southern French deserts. Here too he was cured
of his illness by Dr. Carl.

In 1720, in company with Georg Stieffel, Jacob Stuntz, Simon
Konig and Heinrich von Bebber he sailed for America, landing
in Boston in September and proceeding to Philadelphia. His goal
was Germantown. Here he remained for a year, living with the
sectarian leader Peter Becker, learning a new trade—weaving.
His spirit, though, was not yet at peace and he longed for fuller
solitude, convinced that civilization was corrupt. So, with his
travelling companions, he plunged deeper into the Pennsylvania
wilderness, going fifty miles farther up into the Conestoga region,
hoping to five there as one of the quiet in the land, free from
contentious religious opinions, close to the forest and his God.