The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1894, Page 30

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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.’’ <As soon as they embrace
the new faith they fly from their vil-
lages and towns, destroy their identity
as much as possible, and henceforth live
as savages. ‘‘The Christs’’ are another
curious sect. They worship each other.
The chief ceremonies are a crazy species
of dancing, yelling as loudly as possible,
and pounding stones with sticks.

The ‘‘Skoptsys’’ believe in selfmutila-
tion, but will not submit to amputation,
even though it would save life. Like the
“‘Christs,’’ they dance and yell for hours
without intermission. Still another of
these deluded sects is the ‘‘Dumb Boys.”’
Why they are called dumb boys no one
seems to know, but it is a curious fact
that the sect is composed of both sexes,
old men being in the majority. It is
claimed that some of these aged pa-
triarchs have not spoken in fifty years,

although perfectly able to do so, did they so
desire.

The ‘‘Suicides’’ are a sect led by M. Soucke-
liffe, who preaches self-destruction as an abso-
lute necessity to salvation. He is very elo-
quent, and it is said that he leaves a church
with a dozen suicides’ remains strewn about
the floor. Then the leader must be unsaved
as he does not commit suicide.

Our Troubles.

When we have troubles we ought to take
them to Christ. ‘‘Casting all our care upon
Him,’’ we are only doing what He wishes us
to to; and there need be no fear that we will
burden Him too heavily. He who bears up
the world, who bore our sins in His own body
on the tree, can sustain any load we may heap
upon Him.