a religious sect, sprung up among the Protestants of Germany, seeming to be a kind of mean between the Quakers of England and the Quietists of the Romish church. They despise all sorts of ecclesiastical polity, all school theology, and all forms and ceremonies, and gave themselves up to contemplation and the mystic theology. Many gross errors are charged on the Pietists, in a book entitled Manipulus Observationum Antipietisticarum; but they have much of the air of polemical exaggeration, and are certainly not at all just. Indeed there are Pietists of various kinds: Some running into gross illusions, and carrying their errors to the overturning of a great part of the Christian doctrine, while others are only visionaries; and others are very honest and good, though perhaps misguided, people. They have been disgusted with the coldness and formality of other churches, and have thence become charmed with the fervent piety of the Pietists, and attached to their party, without giving into the grossest of their errors. See Mosheim's Ecc. History, vol. iv. p. 454.

Pietists, otherwise called the Brethren and Sisters of the Pious and Christian Schools, a society formed in the year 1678 by Nicholas Barre, and obliged by their engagements to devote themselves to the education of poor children of both sexes.