# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 07 09_S177
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pure shall to eternity endure."

Published by the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States.

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 6.  St. Louis, Mo., July 9, 1850.  No. 23.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers living at a distance, who are to pay in advance and bear the postage. — In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 cents. Only those letters which contain communications for the paper are to be sent to the editor; all others, however, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent here under the address: Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, One of the Two First Missionaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tranquebar*).

*) A Danish possession in the East Indies.

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was born on the 24th of June, 1683, at Pulsnitz in Upper Lusatia, where his father was a merchant. Early, however, was this soul, called as a firstfruit for its reward, to experience and learn what it means: Thou art my hope, O Lord God, thou art my trust from my youth. By thee have I been holden up from the womb (Psalm 71, vv. 5 and 6). For the first thing that the blessed man could remember from his earliest childhood was the death of both his parents, so that one may well say of him that he had learned to weep sooner than to laugh. The little town had caught fire, the flames were already leaping together over the parental house; but the father lay grievously sick upon his bed. Then the bearers, who had come to rescue the household goods, laid the mortally sick man in the coffin which, according to the pious custom of that time, he had had made for himself in his days of health as a remembrance of his death, and carried him out upon the open market-place. And when the terror of the conflagration was almost past, the father died. Now when the mother also had taken to her bed unto death and was already dying, she had all her children, and among them the youngest-born, Bartholomäus, who at that time could scarcely understand human speech, come to her bedside and said to them: "Dear children! I have gathered a great treasure for you; a very great treasure have I gathered for you." The eldest daughter then asked: "Dear mother! where have you the treasure?" Then the dying mother answered: "Seek in the Bible, my dear children! there you will find it; for I have wetted every leaf with my tears." When now the good mother had died and been buried, the eldest daughter took upon herself, according to her ability, the discipline and care of the younger brothers and sisters, and she also kept her youngest-born brother Bartholomäus diligently to school and to the reading of the divine Word. Though this little orphan was not aroused outwardly to joy over the birth of his Lord by gifts such as well-to-do parents give their children at the Christmas festival, yet God made good this lack to him by inward gifts. For early, and as soon as he began to think, he bore in his heart thoughts and joys of heaven, and the Spirit of grace took the mother's place with him, in that He always reminded him of his transgression, and rebuked him for it, wherever he had done amiss. God had also, through the events of his childhood, bestowed upon him early a serious remembrance of death and eternity, so that every time someone in the little town had died again, he asked in his heart: "Where may this soul have gone now, and what may its fate be?"

When he had scarcely grown up to boyhood, he resolved, with God's help, to remain at his studies. At this time he often went out into the field or upon the neighboring hills, there fell upon his knees in solitude and asked God for true wisdom. And it was this wisdom, leading and chastening like a mother, that preserved him at the school in Camenz, whither his relatives had first brought him, from the dangers of sinful temptations; it was she who, when in his sixteenth year he attended the Gymnasium at Görlitz and there zealously devoted himself to music, led him into acquaintance and brotherly union with a pious young man, who taught him that music, to be sure, is a glorious art, but that it can be rightly practiced by no one except one who stands in spiritual harmony with God and with himself. The natural man, as he is constituted since the fall into sin, has strayed far out of this harmony; Jesus, the Redeemer, alone can bring the soul back into divine concord. In this Bartholomäus came to love his pious schoolmate very much, and willingly accepted him as a dear companion and more experienced guide on the way of life. That schoolmate, however, into whose heart the faithful God had also put a truly motherly tender love for the forsaken and orphaned boy, prayed daily with him, conversed with him out of God's Word, and led him thereby "to the book of nature." When Bartholomäus now turned to God with sincere zeal, he had to endure even then the bitter scorn of his schoolmates. His pious friend feared that the boy might be led astray by this, and therefore took him with him on a journey, on which Bartholomäus received so much inward joyfulness and strengthening that, now that his friend had left the school, he went forward confidently in solitude on the good way he had begun. In his poverty and forsakenness, prayer and the dear Bible gave him more joy and refreshment than all their goods can give to others who have "corn and wine in abundance." Often he now thought of the words of his dying mother, and also exhorted his sisters in all his letters that they should strive with him to seek the treasures found in the Word of God. — It was these very treasures of the knowledge of revealed truth that now raised him up and refreshed him, when God first led him into a school of inward sufferings and melancholy, in which every feeling of joyfulness was withdrawn from him, and nothing remained to him but the firm holding fast of the understanding to the Word, and when afterward, upon the death of one of his sisters, a severe and lingering sickness of the body was also laid upon him, the effects of which from that time on never wholly left him. For when, after his recovery, he had come to Berlin, where the friend of the blessed August Hermann Franke, Baron Canstein, supported him with a stipend, and when he had scarcely begun here,