# The Lutheran Pioneer_St. Louis_1894_S30 # Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration) Indians. He was adopted into the tribe has The Lutheran Pioneer. David Zeisberger. Dayid Zeisberger was a Moravian missionary among the Indians in the past century. He was born in the year 1721 in an obscure little hamlet among the Carpathian mountains. When his parents went to America, little David ~ was left in Germany to be educated in the Moravian church. But he, with one of his schoolmates, soon followed his parents over the ocean, eager to do something for the poor Indians, of whom his parents -had spoken in their letters to him. In the backwoods of Georgia Zeisberger He set himself found his father and mother. to plow, to trap bears, and hunt panthers; but scarcely had the winter opened when the Morayian settlement was broken up by raids of the Spanish soldiers from Flor- ida. The members of the Zeisberger family were carried as laborers up into Pennsylvania. They settled with other Moravians at the headwaters of the Del- aware. This place was at that time a wilderness. The unbroken forest walled in the settlers, and the silence was op- pressive. Outside of their tents the world sank suddenly into a gloomy wilderness, where dwelled the beasts of prey and the Indian savages, who peered at them from the underbrush or fled with hoarse cries. But these Indians had a singular power over young David. They were to him lost creatures of God, knowing not their Father and their Saviour. He longed to preach to them the Gospel of salvation and to lead them in the way of life. For this purpose he resolved to make himself thoroughly acquainted with their habits. He went to the lodge of the great chief of the Mohawks, and there lived and worked to learn thor- oughly the habits and language of the of, the Onondagas and lived with the Indians as an Indian. This was the beginning of a remarkable history of mission work, which extended over sixty two years. Zeisberger was always, as a beardless boy or a tottering old man, travel- ling among the fiercest tribes of the Western continent. He made his way through thick forests, through morasses in which he sank to - his neck; he was dragged to jail as a French spy and as a rebel emissary; he was tortured by the wild tribes and barely escaped with his life; but he was through all the same quiet _ Christian missionary who never was heard to complain and who seldom spoke except when he taught the way of salvation. So silent was _ he in the settlements that’ whole days would “Yet his” passionate bursts of fiery aisquence _ had a singular power over his dusky hearers. the corpses. Again and again he faced a mob of drunken howling savages and quieted them. He spoke the dialects of the principal tribes, he controlled the grand council of the Dela- wares, and held the rank of chief among the six nations. He left grammars and dictionaries of all the principal Indian languages with hymnals, the Gospels, collections of sermons in the Iroquois and Lenni Lenape tribes. No other single man, says a -missionary writer, ever did as much to civilize the red man in America as Zeisberger. He traveled throughout the United States and Canada, and established forty Christian villages among the Indians. In these villages he taught them the Gospel and also set them to work as farmers and mechanics. If the work begun by this Zeisberge,r. quiet little German had been carried out, there would not be an uncivilized Indian on the continent. : In the history of colonial days, set over against the massacres and battles of white men with the Indians, there is the figure of this silent Christian missionary, going in and out of the wilderness at his mission work. Zeisberger died at an extreme old age in an Indian village, Nov. 17th, 1808. On his dying bed he said: ‘‘I now go to rest from labor and to be at home with the Lord. My Saviour will take me to Himself. I trust in His blood, which cleanses me from all my sins. I know that I am His and that He with His merits is -|mine.’’? His last words were: ‘The Saviour is near; perhaps He will come and take me home.’’ When the hour of his death drew nigh, the bell tolled and the Lenape Indians gathered around his bed. They sang the hymns in their own tongue, which he had written for them. When his soul had left his body to be with Jesus, ‘‘then the red men fell upon their knees and.wept aloud, for they knew that their best friend was gone.’’ How little are we doing in the mission field and how easily are we discouraged! The ex- ample of that brave and self-denying and patient missionary, David Zeisberger, should move us to greater zeal and to greater patience in our mission work. ———©o +eo<™e- <-> Queer Religious Sects. M. Tsakni, a Russian writer, has published an interesting work entitled, ‘‘Queer Religious Sects of Russia,’’ from which it appears that there are not less than 15,000,000 fol- lowers of insane and cranky notions in the empire of the Czar. These commu- nities of devout and deluded beings are constantly being enlarged, in spite of all efforts made to the contrary by the government. One of these sects is known as the ‘‘Runaways.’’