CHAPTER VI
.
LUTHERAN FOREIGN MISSIONS ON THE WESTERN CONTINENT
SOUTH AMERICA.
[Sidenote: The Land.] To a large proportion of the Americans who are interested in missions Asia and Africa are better known than the great continent of South America which lies so much nearer. Of the physical features of South America it is necessary to speak in superlative terms. Here is the largest river in the world, the Amazon, with thirty thousand miles of navigable waterway, here are the densest forests, here is the greatest mountain range. The continent is five thousand miles long and at its broadest point, three thousand miles wide. Its long coast line offers splendid harbors; its interior table lands abundant minerals and metals and a fertile soil.
For many centuries the Indian held South America for his own. Unmolested from without, troubled only by quarrels with his neighbors, he lived and died for the most in slothful ignorance.
[Sidenote: The First Immigrants.] This quiet was interrupted when the Spaniards and Portuguese took possession of the country by right of conquest. Once opened to the world, the continent became the destination of thousands of settlers, not only from Spain and Portugal but from other European nations, many of whom built up large fortunes. The relation between them and the natives is described by R. J. Hunt. “Some of the early colonists were of a friendly disposition, and treated the natives kindly, much in the same way as they did their horses or their dogs; others, with a high sense of honor, were just and considerate to the aboriginees; a fair percentage of them, especially those in the wild, remote districts, freely mingled with the natives and married one or more of their women; but the great majority looked upon the natives with suspicion and distrust if not with abhorrence.
[Sidenote: The Opening of the Country.] “With the influx of immigrants and the natural increase of the descendants of the pioneers came the growth of trade, the extension of agricultural pursuits, and the opening of mines. There came simultaneously the desire for independence and the consequent rise of republics with a demand for progress and a clear determination of territorial bounds. Railways were opened in various directions, the great rivers were supplied with steamers, trade was increased, companies were formed and numerous interests started. For scientific and commercial purposes expeditions up the great waterways and across the trackless plains were organized and carried out with varying success; but even to-day there remain vast regions unknown and unexplored except by the red Indians.”[11]
Footnote 11:
_Missionary Review of the World_, July 1911.
[Illustration: LUTHERAN CHAPEL, MONACILLO, PORTO RICO, WITH TWO MISSIONARIES AND TWO NATIVE WORKERS.]
[Illustration: PORTO RICAN HUT WITH MISS MELLANDER AND THREE MEMBERS OF CHURCH AT PALO SECO.]
[Sidenote: The Darkness of South America.] In spite of the fact that its ten political divisions are republics, and that it has produced men of distinguished rank as scientists and scholars, South America is on the whole a land of dense ignorance, not only among the Indian population but among the mixed or pure descendants of the European settlers. In spiritual things the ignorance is tenfold increased. Of the hundreds of tribes of Indians, many have never heard the Gospel, and to only ten millions of the population has it been presented in any intelligible form. Rome, which has claimed South America for its own has done little to raise the natives from their degraded condition or to enlighten their darkness, and has opposed most bitterly the spread of the pure Gospel among them. The priests declare that the Protestant Bible is an immoral book which will do great harm to him who reads, and make every effort to destroy all the copies which they can find. Nor do they offer their own version. Doctor Robert Speer is reported to have said that visiting seventy of the largest cathedrals in South America, he could find but one Bible, and that a Protestant version, about to be burned. Of the religious condition, Doctor Warneck says, “The Catholicism is of a kind that, according to even Catholic testimonies, is more heathen than Christian. There are many crosses but no word of the Cross; many saints, but no followers of Christ.”
Against the domination of the Catholic Church the most intelligent of the population have rebelled and men especially have ceased to believe in the priests or their teaching. May they upon leaving the old find true guides into new and better things!
[Sidenote: The Population.] The latest statistics give the following as population of South America:
Whites 18,000,000
Indians 17,000,000
Negroes 6,000,000
Mixed White and Indian 30,000,000
Mixed White and Negro 8,000,000
Mixed Negro and Indian 700,000
East Indian, Japanese and 300,000 Chinese
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A total of 80,000,000
Since South America offers vast resources in a sparsely settled country, its population will unquestionably increase rapidly by immigration.
[Sidenote: The Roman Catholic Church in South America.] Recent activity on the part of the Protestants in the interest of the nominal Christians of South America has roused much opposition among Roman Catholics. Among Protestants themselves the question has been debated with an earnest desire to see the right and wrong of this problem. To this question Dr. Robert Speer has given the following reasons for his belief that such mission work is legitimate and necessary. (1) The moral condition of South America warrants and demands the presence of the force of evangelical religion in a country where from one-fourth to one-half of the births are illegitimate and where male chastity is unknown. (2) The Protestant missionary enterprise with its stimulus to education and its appeal to the rational nature of man is required by the intellectual needs of South America. (3) Protestant missions are justified in order to give the Bible to South America. (4) Protestant missions are justified by the character of the Roman Catholic priesthood. (5) The Roman Church has not given the people Christianity. It offers them a dead man, not a living Saviour. (6) The Catholic Church has steadily lost ground; the priests are reviled and derided; religion is abandoned by men to priests and women. (7) Protestant missions may inspire and compel self-cleansing in the South American Catholic Church. (8) Only the Protestant religion, free from superstition, reformed, Scriptural, apostolic, can meet the needs of South America.
The missionary occupation of South America has been small; indeed no country has so low a percentage of missionaries. It is said that in any of the ten countries a missionary could have a city and a dozen of towns for his parish. In some of the countries he could have one or two provinces without touching any other evangelical worker.
As Lutheran missionaries in the person of Ziegenbalg and Plütschau were the first to enter India; as Peter Heiling, a Lutheran, was the first to enter Africa, so the Lutheran missionary Justinian von Welz, of whose stirring appeal to the Church we have told in