"These earliest expressions of reforming, revivalistic, anti-statist, and small-group Protestantism were international from the start. All throughout the seventeenth century, books from spiritual reformers as well as news of their innovations circulated from the outposts of Pietism in Russia to the British Isles and beyond. Puritan literature was read with special avidity on the continent. When the Moravians appeared in the 1720s, they had a particularly strong impact on the English-speaking world. Moravian hymns, Moravian dedication to missionary service, Moravian proclamation of justification by faith as a doctrine to live by-all exerted a great influence, indirectly or directly, on evangelical leaders in Britain, Ireland, and America. As these early leaders moved from spiritual renewal to social reform, they invariably took further guidance from what had gone before in Europe. The continental background to modern evangelicalism is relevant for the twenty-first century in one final way. Early defenders of “true religion” sustained a complex relationship to the historical Protestantism of the Reformation. On the one hand, leading priests like Spencer found precedents in Martin Luther and his generation for much of their program, especially the early Reformers’ stress on the priesthood of all believers and their insistence on the personal appropriation of justification by faith. On the other hand, the continental pietists were surprisingly eager to read the work of Roman Catholic mystics, like Madame Guyon and Francois Fenelon, and to disseminate writings of mystical and spiritual writers from the Catholic Middle Ages. That combination of self-conscious reliance on the Reformation and broad openness to some Catholic influences has been rare in evangelical history, but over the last several decides, since the Second Vatican Council, it has one again become common in some circles."