# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 03 06_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

110

had. There was no money in the treasuries, and what one might promise today one often could not, with the best will, keep tomorrow.— Now it is indeed incumbent on you Lutherans here in this country to be a little more diligent than hitherto, and on your part also, by gifts of love, so far as lies in you, to further the work begun, and blessed of God beyond all asking and understanding. And since I have now once been requested from several quarters to give counsel for mission-hours, and by diligent communications about our mission to furnish material for them, I will also speak my thoughts freely and openly. —

That in our latter sorrowful days the holy cause of the mission must be carried on by so-called mission-hours, if not at last even by special societies, and that the aim is then for the most part only to excite, by a dreadful description of the often more bodily than spiritual need of the heathen, a whimpering feeling of pity and in this way to extort gifts — this may please whom it will — it is not churchly, but rather a lamentable abuse. The jubilant host of the redeemed in the first blessed centuries of Christendom, and afterward about the gracious time of the Reformation, had no need of such things. They were so intimately grown together with the kingdom of God, bore its weal and woe so livingly upon the soul, that they would doubtless have positively scorned such artificial stimulants to zealous service of the Church and to abundant proof of love. Well then, let the good old time grow young again among us; let us with the ever young, mighty Word of truth so livingly paint before the soul of our hearers their deep distress of sin that they are thoroughly terrified thereby, — but then let us also set Christ the Crucified so lovingly before their eyes that their hearts also rejoice and they praise His holy name, and as His redeemed now become also diligent in good works, then they will be able on the one hand to gauge easily from their own distress of sin that of the blind heathen, and on the other hand, at every collection for heathen missions, to bring with them the willingness which alone makes the gift acceptable in God’s eyes, so that HE blesses it not only in the recipient, but especially also in the giver himself. — But if there are to be mission-hours at all, then let one read, methinks, for instance the holy Acts of the Apostles, this true book of the Church and of the mission, wherein the Holy Ghost teaches us how the Church has been planted, namely through the gracious Gospel, through the preaching of faith, which gives the Spirit, and let one show how, without all our merit and worthiness, the kingdom of all grace has come to us also through Word and Sacrament, and how we have from God not only the call, but also the holy duty of love, to carry the Word of the cross further to those who still sit outside in darkness and in the shadow of death. In so doing one can then, without that sugary ornament of speech of most mission reports, in the simple manner which the Acts of the Apostles teaches, certainly relate how and where the mighty God even today still shows Himself powerfully by His Word upon the souls of the heathen. — But should no churchly sense at all have yet awakened in a congregation, let one rather wait, and make no work-righteousness out of the mission, lest they at last imagine themselves to be something wonderful because they have given so and so much to the mission, instead of thanking God, as is fitting, that they also could and were permitted to do something toward the spreading of His kingdom.

But the LORD, who turneth the hearts as the rivers of water, give us all right faith, burning love and much fruit.  A. C.

What Shall Be Preached to the Heathen?

“Brethren,” spoke one of the first Indians who became believers, by name Tschup, in an assembly, “Brethren, I was a heathen and have grown old among the heathen, and therefore know well how it is with the heathen. A preacher once came to us who wished to teach us, and began to prove to us that there is a God. Then we said: Why, do you think we do not know that? Go back again whence you came. Another time a preacher came and wished to teach us; you must not steal, said he, not drink, not lie, etc. We answered him: You fool! Do you think we do not know that? Learn that first yourself, and teach the people to whom you belong not to do it. For who drinks, steals, lies more than your own people? So we sent him away. After some time Christian Heinrich (missionary of the Brethren’s congregation in the first half of the last century) came to me in my hut and sat down beside me. The substance of his speech was about this: I come to you in the name of the Lord of heaven and earth; He lets you know that He would gladly save you and pluck you out of the misery in which you lie. For this end He became man, gave His life for men, and shed His blood for them, etc. Thereupon he lay down in my hut on a board and fell asleep; for he was weary from the journey. Then I thought: Why, what a man is this! He lies there and sleeps so soundly. I could kill him on the spot and throw him into the forest — who would ask after it? But he is without care. — I could not get rid of his words again. They kept coming back to me, and when I fell asleep, I dreamed of the blood which Christ shed for us. Then I thought: this is something different, and interpreted to the other Indians the words which Christian Heinrich spoke further to us. Thus the awakening among us began by God’s grace. Therefore I say to you: Brethren! preach to the heathen Christ and His death, if you would work blessing among them.”

(Ev.-luth. Missionsblatt von Karl Graul.)

The Bird-Cry.

The rich merchant Sondersleben in Frankfurt on the Main kept the testimonies and commandments of the LORD his God like one to whom they are written not merely in the dusty Bible on the book-shelf, but deep in the heart, and the hardest thing in the law he did not leave behind. On Sundays and holy days, for example, not so much as a letter was opened in his counting-house — as the writing-room is called among merchants. It would have been of no avail either. For the iron-bound shutters remained closed, and the mice which there went after the wafer-crumbs by the seal-stick, or the crumbs from the apprentice’s pocket, had no more light than the mole in its underground hunting, or Samson in the prison of the Philistines at Gaza when he ate his bread.

Only the commandment: “Ye shall not observe the cry of birds” he did not keep, and one might say of him, as of old of King Manasseh in Jerusalem: “He observed the cry of birds.”

Not that he shook his purse of gold when he heard the cuckoo call for the first time in spring, or that he took it for an ill sign when a screeching magpie flew across his path, or that he thought of his last little hour when the death-bird made itself heard in the neighborhood, or that he took special heed that day when a hen had crowed in the morning before his house. The cuckoo, the magpie and the screech-owl he let cry as long as they would. He heeded them no more than a buzzing fly at his window.

But when in late autumn the first snow-geese flew high over the Main valley and announced the winter, the rich merchant heeded their cry, as the soldier in the camp heeds the call of the trumpeter, and set about doing all manner of things of which he did not think in spring and in summer.

For he had various warehouses, one always larger than the other. In the one storehouse lay sandalwood and indigo and purple so much that one could have dyed the whole river blue or red with it; so that it would have flowed out of the Main into the Rhine as from the dye-house of a fancy-dyer into the street. The other storehouse lay full of sugar-loaves and chests from bottom to top, and the merchant would not have been in embarrassment if all the Frankfurters, from the burgomaster down to the cobbler, had announced themselves for a cup of coffee. And in the third, under the ground, lay many tuns of ancient wine one behind the other, and so large that one might well think of the mighty vat of the prophet Jeremiah, of which it is written: “Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into captivity;