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or, under any pretext, leave the country, and severe penalties were denounced against any person who should assist a Schwenkfelder to escape by purchasing his property, or otherwise.

The deputies made a final appeal to the Emperor for mercy on the 28th of July, 1725. That appeal was answered by the publication--in September--of the following decree:

"DEAR FAITHFUL: We received your obedient report of March 20th, of this year, by which you have informed us of the condition of the ecclesiastical mission appointed for the conversion of those Schwenkfelder Sectariorum sojourning at several places in our Duchy of Silesia. As we now most graciously desire a better progress of the mission, we therefore provide:

"Primo, most graciously to wit: That the mission henceforth exercise all their power to accomplish the work of conversion with profit and good effect. And likewise

"Secundo, that all watchful oversight of the mock preachers and Seductores from the authority of the country, and especially from those missionaries, be kept as heretofore commanded, and in case of any trespass at once to arrest the guilty and to punish them in terrorem alior, and to report to us aggravating occurrences if thought proper, and also we desire that the same may be understood concerning those Schwenkfelder inhabitants and housekeepers who permit Schwenkfelder conventicula in their houses, or who are leaders or instigators to persistence in those heretical errors. In such a manner that they shall be arrested as soon as the same shall be sufficiently apparent, brought here and their names entered. So it shall

"Tertio, not only be a settled matter that the Schwenkfelder books of instruction shall be hunted up and taken away, as also no less

"Quarto, that the children of the Schwenkfelders shall be brought to preaching and catechizing, and also the adulti Sectarii themselves shall be held to the presence and hearing thereof, and those who without good cause absent themselves, shall at the first occurrence be charged with a money fine in proportion to their circumstances; for the second time it shall be doubled; upon further renitens to the contrary they shall be punished according to the nature of the case with arrest or opere publico: and further the Schwenkfelder congregations in their submissive requests to be tolerated in their confession of faith in future, are once for all refused, and they shall never hereafter venture to present any new