# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 09 14_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

15

evangelical city congregation at Stöben on the left bank of the Oder. On Ascension Day 1611 he entered upon his pastoral office there. A week later the old pastor there died, and he promptly moved up into his place. Here he found a well-ordered congregation under a pious landlord zealous in the faith, Herr von Kottmitz, who as a truly Christian magistrate took care for church and school, the keeping of the Lord's Day, and outward discipline in the congregation. Besides, he had zealous preachers of the Word near by, with whom he stood in lively intercourse, especially his old Valerius Herberger, whom he honored as his spiritual father. His preaching, too, was greatly blessed in many hearts, and his church was always full of strangers. The wife whom he had chosen was by her pious mind a great help to him in the faithful administration of his office; she was Dorothea, the daughter of the burgomaster Feige in Staudten. He lived with her exceedingly happily, though childless, and loved her tenderly. Soon, however, his Master took him into the school of the cross. After a short illness his wife died, on the 12th of September, 1617; he had possessed her only five years. A great sadness came over him then; his appearance declined, his countenance grew pale, he believed firmly that he would not survive this great sorrow and would soon rest at the side of his pious wife, as he indeed prays in hymn 281, verse 7: "Grant my body a little room in the grave of pious Christians, that it may have its rest at her side." But the Lord had decreed otherwise. His loving, gracious God drew him to the heart of his Redeemer, where alone the right balm for such wounds is to be found. He wrote consoling Passion sermons, which made him known not only first in his native country, but also in all Germany. For his ever more thorough purifying, however, trouble upon trouble now came upon his head. His second wife, Anna, born Teichmann, with whom he was joined on the 18th of July, 1618, soon had nothing to do for him but the toilsome nursing of the sick. Heermann, it is true, had never in his whole life been able to say that he had had a single really healthy day, but from the year 1623 on this suffering state became an almost uninterrupted illness. He suffered in the windpipe, so that, as he himself says, "while preaching he had to cough more and more, and at last could no longer pronounce a single sentence distinctly, even if he should have saved his life by it." To the many mortifications which he had to bear in Stöben on account of his frankness there soon came the heavy tribulation of the Thirty Years' War, which from the year 1618 to 1648 laid waste Germany. In 1629 Heermann had to flee from Stöben and to live more than 17 weeks as an exile in a safe place. Hardly was he back when the terrible plague broke out in Stöben and in 1631 carried off 550 people alone, among them Heermann's chaplain. Hardly was this distress over when the wild Wallensteinian hordes came marching up and plundered Stöben three times, from September 1632 to October 1634, whereby Heermann each time lost all his ready money, his household goods, cattle and grain. Once the saber of a Croat already hung over his head; another time a whole crowd of soldiers threatened his life with drawn swords. It also lacked little that he would have been drowned in the Oder; for when with many fugitives he wanted to escape in a boat to the other shore, the little craft threatened to sink under the multitude of people who had fled upon it, and scarcely were they in the middle of the stream when the pursuing soldiers reached the left bank and shot at Heermann, so that two bullets whistled past his head. But the Lord gave him heroic courage in such perils and rescued him and his family. In these eleven heavy years of suffering, when he had a heart troubled like David's, from 1623 to 1634, Heermann composed for the most part his lovely sacred hymns, although they appeared collected only after he had ceased to preach, in the year 1636, in his work: "Haus- und Herzensmusik."

In the year 1636 just named his bodily ailments at last became so great that he could no longer preach himself and had to have himself represented by candidates for four years. But when no improvement would yet set in, he withdrew, on the advice of the physician, to Lissa in Great Poland, where he had a little house built outside the town. In October 1638 he moved into this his Patmos, "that he," as he said, "might dwell quietly in his grievous sickness, suffer, pray, and, if God would, close his life unhindered." He moved in in the highest bodily weakness and lay the first nine weeks day and night almost always as in sleep, without use of his mental powers. As soon as he was better, he used his repose for the writing of godly, edifying writings. Nine years longer the Lord gave him time and strength for this, and he wrote a multitude of such writings in Lissa.

A special trial was reserved for our Heermann for the last time of his life. His eldest and dearest child, a son of pious disposition and uncommon gifts of mind, Samuel, was seduced at the Gymnasium at Breslau by the Jesuits to enter the Jesuit school without his father's knowledge, and on the 25th of February, 1640, to accept the Roman Catholic faith. Scarcely had Heermann certain news of this when on the 2nd of March he sent his son "a heartfelt admonition." "As soon as God demands my soul," he says therein, "I will fall down before God's throne and summon the seducers within a year before His judgment, and, shouldst thou not turn back, thee likewise with them; there ye shall answer to God and me. In thy letters thou hast always signed thyself: ""the most obedient son of my lord father unto death."" Shouldst thou break this promise, I would take thy fist before the judgment seat of God, show it there, and ask for vengeance." The signature read: "Johann Heermann, whose soul is troubled unto death." This worked so powerfully that the son on the 6th of March returned again to the evangelical faith and asked his father for forgiveness, which the latter also granted him with the words: "A father's heart remains a father's heart." The son thereupon returned to his father's house; but before he could go on again to his studies, a consumptive fever carried him off on the 6th of February, 1643. Heermann was so deeply shaken by it that he could not accompany his son to his resting place. After the death of this darling of his soul he lived only four years more. He grew ever more ailing, so that he could no longer sit, but had to stand leaning, and at night could hardly lie. At last great weakness constrained him nevertheless to lay himself on the bed. Then he wrote the words on his bed: "Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick." He suffered patiently, in comforted waiting and fervent supplication; his unceasing prayer was: "Lord Jesus, come and unyoke," which V. Herberger also, his fatherly friend, had brought before God. On the morning of Sunday Septuagesima, 1647, the 17th of February, after a catarrh had set in during the night, he fell into a gentle sleep, in which he slumbered away into the joy of his Lord. The Gospel of this Sunday treats of the laborers in the vineyard, who are called to receive their wages. For his funeral text he had chosen 1 Pet. 5, 2-4: Feed the flock of Christ which is committed to you, and look well to it, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away. Johann Heermann's motto was: mihi omnia Jesus, that is: "Jesus is all to me!"

From: Koch's Geschichte des Kirchenliedes und Kirchengesanges.

Remarkable Testimony Concerning the Influence of the Germans upon Conditions Here.

So spoke a short time ago the notorious atheist Heinzen in a speech which he delivered in an assembly of the so-called "freemen" of this place and gave to the press:

"In general the German spirit has for two years put into circulation in the United States things which formerly everywhere would have been held to be worthy of the gallows."

Such praise must now be sung to the unbelieving Germans by their own prophets!