Chapter II

by Hans Peter Börresen and Lars Skrefsrud was so called because the founders wished it to have the nature of a “home” from which all sorts of improving influences should flow. The Santals are akin to the Kols of the Gossner mission. Terribly oppressed, especially by Hindu money lenders, they rose in 1860 in a bloody rebellion which called public attention to their misery. In 1867 the two ardent Scandinavians set to work among them, and in a short time saw the harvest beginning to ripen. The chief station is at Ebenezer and round about are many smaller and independent stations. Good schools and a mission press from which a monthly paper, “The Friend of the Santal”, is issued, are among the means for education. The thirteen thousand five hundred Christians are so well trained that a great part of the mission work is conducted by them. In Assam the mission provides for its converts who have gone thither to work on the tea plantations.

The mission is supported, as we shall see, not only by the Scandinavians of Europe, but by those of America.

The _Danish Evangelical Lutheran Missionary Society_ has since 1862 stations in Pattambakam in South Arcot. It has twenty-seven men and women at work and a Christian community of over seventeen hundred.

The terrible heat of Southern India is one of the conditions which make especially heroic the service of the Scandinavians who are accustomed to an almost arctic climate. In 1886 a Danish missionary wrote to his friends at home with no expectation that his letter would ever be printed:

[Sidenote: Heroic Service.] “Though only May, it is now ninety-six degrees in the house night and day. Our little son, four years old, will often throw himself despairingly on the floor, exclaiming, ‘O mother, this country is too warm, too warm; can’t we go into the great ship again and sail home to Denmark?’ In the morning we find no application of our Danish hymn, ‘Renewed in strength by nightly rest’. The power of the hot, scorching wind is the same day and night. Yet we are thankful for general health. But we cannot help thinking how, when nature is the most withering upon us, she is opening into her fullest loveliness in Denmark. This very day letters were received from home, and all spoke of the Spring, of the beeches that were ready to leaf, of wood anemones and violets, of gardens filled with Easter lilies, crocuses, hyacinths, and all the other delicate and gracious flowers which are now covering the Danish land. Nor did the letters merely speak of them; for in one there were violets, in another tender beech leaves. We are fresh from seeing all this; how living it all becomes on the receipt of such letters. Involuntarily we exclaim:

‘The Pentecostal feast does nature keep In robes of flowery magnificence.’

Ah! how lovely is Denmark!”

The contributions of Norway to India are given to the Home Mission to the Santals.

[Sidenote: Help in Time of Famine.] _The Evangelical National Missionary Society_ of Sweden works among the Gonds in the Central provinces of India. Beginning in 1877 it has now extended its work to include all natives in its vicinity. It has fifty-three Swedish workers. The most important station is Chindwara, where the senior missionary lives and where there are training schools and two large orphanages founded during the terrible famines of 1896 to 1900. Other institutions established during that trying period are industrial schools for men and women which are now self-supporting. There is also a hospital and very active Zenana work.

[Sidenote: A Missionary Family.] The _Church of Sweden Mission_ in India was begun in 1855 when two Swedish missionaries went into the service of the Leipsic mission in Tamil land. In 1869 they were joined by Dr. C. J. Sandgren, who is still alive and at work surrounded by five of his children as fellow workers. In 1901 several stations of the Leipsic mission were handed over to the independent control of the Swedes and since then the mission has grown rapidly. Madura is the central station and at Tirupater there is a fine hospital. The mission has profited greatly by the mass movements toward Christianity which have taken place in recent years in South India, in which whole villages have asked for baptism, a condition which brings new missionary problems.

It is to this mission that there has passed during the war the work of the Leipsic Society.

AMERICAN SOCIETIES.

[Sidenote: The Patriarch of the American Lutheran Church.] Among the heroes of the American Lutheran Church is _Henry Melchior Muhlenberg_ who was born in Germany in 1711 and died in America in 1787. He was educated at the University of Göttingen from which he went to Halle to teach in the Orphanage and to prepare himself for missionary work in India. Instead he accepted a call to become the pastor of the scattered congregations of Lutherans in Pennsylvania. When he arrived in 1742 he found the people without church buildings or schools and at the mercy of imposters who claimed to be clergymen. At once he began to preach and to organize. Travelling from New York to Georgia, doing pastoral work, forming constitutions for churches and for the first American Synod, he filled forty-five years to the brim with valuable work. Of him Doctor Henry E. Jacobs says: “Depth of religious conviction, extraordinary inwardness of character, apostolic zeal for the spiritual welfare of individuals, absorbing devotion to his calling and all its details, were among his most marked characteristics. These were combined with an intuitive penetration and extended width of view, a statesman-like grasp of every situation in which he was placed, an almost prophetic foresight, coolness and discrimination of judgment, and peculiar gifts for organization and discrimination.”

Under the ministrations of Doctor Muhlenberg the Lutheran Church in America was firmly established. That his heart turned longingly to the first field of labor which he had selected, we know from his own records. In giving an account of the Third Convention of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, he said that when the delegates gathered for an evening meeting at his house he told them of the Mission among the Malabars and among the Jews. Doubtless he was consoled by the hope that there might go from his American Church those who would do what he had wished to do.

[Sidenote: The First Missionary Undertaking.] The missionary consciousness of the new church found its first expression is an unsuccessful effort to evangelize the American Indian. In Georgia a little was accomplished by the pious Salzburgers, but the withdrawal of the Indians from the neighborhood of white settlements and the growing and natural distrust which they felt for the whites soon put an end to missionary work among them.

[Sidenote: A Missionary Institute Discussed.] At the first meeting in 1820 of the General Synod, to which belonged the Synods of Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, the Joint Synod of Ohio, and the Synods of Maryland and Virginia, the founding of a missionary institute like those of the Fatherland was suggested and discussed. Before this time congregations had contributed individually to the work of foreign missions through the American Board, an inter-denominational society.

[Sidenote: The First Missionary Society.] At the meeting of the West Pennsylvania Synod in Mechanicsburg in 1836 there was formed at the recommendation of the General Synod a Central Missionary Society whose object was “to send the Gospel of the Son of God to the destitute portions of the Lutheran Church in the United States of America by means of missions; to assist for a season such congregations as are not able to support the Gospel; and, ultimately to co-operate in sending it to the heathen world.” Later the name of the society was changed to “The Foreign Missionary Society of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States of America.”

[Illustration: A MALAGASY WITCH DOCTOR.]

[Illustration: NATIVE LUTHERAN MINISTERS IN MADAGASCAR.]

[Sidenote: Two Appeals.] There had come meanwhile to the Lutheran Church in America two appeals from the foreign field, one from Missionary Rhenius in India whose career we have described in Chapter II , the other from Gützlaff in China, whom we shall study in