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the sole exception of his own Lutheran inheritance, the Augsburg Confession of 1530. What he added was an idiosyncratic and intense communal piety, in which he placed extreme stress on his own selection from very traditional themes. He took up the language of mystical marriage familiar to many medieval spiritual writers, and made this one of the principal themes of Moravian worship, the eroticism of the vocabulary forming a sometimes unstable combination with a rigorously policed set of everyday relations between the sexes. He spoke of the Holy Spirit as Mother, as Syrian Christians had done long before (see pp. 182-3). He almost fetishized Luther's emphasis on Christ's sufferings for humankind, producing an obsession with Christ's blood and wounds - 'so moist, so gory', as Zinzendorf's Litany of the Wounds described them, with a relish which may have little appeal now.
    In 1749, after the Count himself had encouraged emotions in some Moravian communities to boil too high, in what was later euphemistically termed the 'Sifting Time', he now felt compelled to rein them in. He banned his people from celebrating Christ's 'little side-hole' ( Seitenholchen ). This was the toe-curling designation which he and they had given to the spear wound suffered by Christ on the Cross, a wound which represented for Zinzendorf 'the Mother of our souls, as the earth is the mother of the body'. The Count's embarrassment at the consequences of his devotional imagery led to a not untypical outburst which, in his struggle to regain control, blended his usual mystical language (much of it baffling to outsiders) with a choleric threat to bring the whole Moravian edifice crashing down. Having signed off a long and testy letter from London 'Your brother, Ludwig', he continued menacingly in a postscript:
If you do not follow me, I will not only lay down my office completely in all Gemeinen [Moravian communities] and at the same time make a new departure to the heart of Jesus, but I also want to assure you in advance that the Elder-Office of the Savior will also cease. I know behind what I stand, and I cannot help myself. 51
    The crisis passed, and as Moravians travelled to missionary work in new settings, their bloodthirsty language struck unexpected chords with some of the peoples they met, particularly indigenous peoples in North America, and that brought Moravian missions great success. For one of the most significant characteristics of this ebullient yet tightly structured movement was its hunger to undertake missions overseas to non-Christians. People who had already exiled themselves once to join the Moravian family zestfully threw themselves into fresh exile to spread the excitement which they had experienced in their own new lives. This was the first Protestant Church to commit itself to the task with such consistency, just at the moment when Protestant powers were creating overseas empires which might aid the work. Pietist Lutheranism did offer one outstanding precedent. In 1706, when Count Zinzendorf was still only six years old, August Francke had encouraged a former student of Halle, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, to travel to India and begin mission among Hindus.
    Ziegenbalg was the first Protestant missionary in the subcontinent. He took advantage of the kingdom of Denmark's modest but significant foothold at Tranquebar, the only European outpost in Asia offering a potential direct bridgehead for Pietism, to provide a base for his mission. He adopted strategies which were often subsequently ignored: like the Jesuit de Nobili before him (see p. 705), he showed a deep respect for Hindu traditions and tried to avoid presenting Christianity in woodenly Western terms. His resolution to discuss his faith thoughtfully with Muslims and Hindus took precedence for him over seeking rapid conversions. Ziegenbalg's work aroused the interest of Anglicans: it helped that Queen Anne of England's husband, Prince George, was Danish, and that the Prince's chaplain