p. 142 | SEVENTH-DAY DUNKERS

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 18, 1868

SEVENTH-DAY DUNKERS.

PENNSYLVANIA was for a long time the birthplace and home of some very curious religious sects and organizations, the fruit chiefly of the German mind, but which refused to take root and grow in the American social life. A most curious and interesting chapter in history is the “History of the Extinct Sects in Pennsylvania.”

The community of Seventh-day Dunkers existed at Ephrata in the last century, of whom a remnant may still be found, perhaps on Antietam Creek, in Franklin Co. They were founded by Conrad Beissel, who seceded from the general body of Dunkers on the question of the Sabbath, Beissel, like some of the Baptists, insisting on celebrating the divinely-appointed seventh day.

Retiring from the Dunkers on Cule Creek, he went secretly to a hermitage on the Cocalico, and as disciples gathered around, they founded, in 1733, a new community at Ephrata, which soon became an irregularly-enclosed village. Strangely enough, they adopted as their dress, the gray habit of the Capuchin friars and nuns, hood and all. They were thus, to outward appearance, religious, but though they assumed the monastic dress and some of the system of life, celibacy, though deemed a virtue, was not insisted upon or secured by vow. A brother and sister could marry and leave the cloister to settle near. The community, in 1740, comprised thirty-six single brothers in the cloister, thirty-five single sisters, and some three hundred members living near.—Frank Leslie’s Pleasant Hours.