The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1915, Page 67

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The Lutheran Pioneer.

but gain a blessed trust in the merits of Him who
has redeemed, purchased, and won you from death,
from sin, and from the power of the devil; you
will lose the chains of the hellish tyrant, but gain
the glorious liberty of a child of God; you will
lose the fear of hell, but gain the sure hope of
heaven; you will lose the crushing load of God’s
wrath, but gain the blessed experience of His abid-
ing love; you will lose the curse of a transgressed
Law, but gain the blessings of a reconciled and
forgiving God.

Lose! Losses! Sure you will lose by becoming
a Christian; certainly, you will sustain losses by
accepting Christ. But every loss will .be an un-
speakably great gain. Blessed is the man that sus-
tains these losses, and experiences these gains!

F. J. L.

The Wonderful Work of a German
Missionary in Africa.

Without a doubt, West Africa, extending four
thousand miles along the Atlantic coast, from Sene-
gambia on the north to Angola on the south, and
including such divisions as Sierra Leone, Liberia,
and the Ivory, the Gold, and the Slave Coasts, has
been and still is, for various reasons, one of the
most difficult mission-fields in the world. It is

the home of sin, shame, and sorrow to an appalling -

degree. For hundreds of years it was the sad scene
of the wicked slave-trade, which is perhaps the most
awful example in the history of man’s- cruelty. to
man. Few animals prey on their own kind; yet
it is a sad fact in human history that one human
being should sell another; that not only heathen
and Mohammedans, but Christians no less should
-haye been engaged in the most shameful traffic the
world has ever seen, that of buying and selling,
or of kidnaping and then selling their own flesh
and blood. And nowhere was this sinful traffic in
human flesh so extensively carried on as along the
coast of West Africa. The natives were already most
degraded by many horrible vices, but the atrocities
of the slave-trade degraded them still more.

It is estimated that during a period of four
hundred years no less than forty million human
beings were captured along this coast to be sent
across the seas and sold into slavery, though. very
‘probably most of these millions met an awful
death during the horrible “middle passage,” in
which oftentimes four hundred poor wretches’ were

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crammed into the hold of a ship thirty-five feet
long, twenty feet wide, and ten feet high!

But after long years the appeals of men like
Wilberforce aroused the conscience of Europe.
Honest and human laws were made prohibiting
the traffic in slaves, and finally British cruisers
spoiled the inhuman trade, and drove it off the seas.

As early as 1787, Sierra Leone (English, Moun-
tain of Lions), a portion of the northern coast of
West Africa, had been bought by an English com-
pany as an asylum for a number of American slaves
who had been freed by British troops in the southern
American colonies during the American Revolution.
Later, in 1808, Sierra Leone passed into the pos-
session of the British government and became a
depot for slayes rescued from slavers by British -
cruisers. No less than 2,000 were added annually
to the population in this way for many years. In
the course of a few years thousands of poor victims
thus were set down here, and left in a condition
most appalling. All who had escaped death in the
holds of slave-ships from disease, suffocation, or
thirst, or had not been thrown overboard to stop
pursuit, or had survived in some way the horrors
and sufferings of the terrible “middle passage,”
were dumped down here, until, in 1846, 50,000
freed slaves, representing two hundred different
African nations and languages, were found here
to form a combination of babel and hell.

It was to this most unpromising field that the
English Church Missionary Society sent a number
of German missionaries in 1804, among them Ren-
ner, Butscher, Nylaender, and Hartwig. Naturally,
the mission at first made very slow progress. For
years it seeméd as though nothing could be accom-
plished, but at length a marked change-took place.
This change was due, more than to any other man,
to Wilhelm Jansen (anglicized to William John-
son), a former humble factory laborer in Hannover,
who had been prepared for his missionary work in
the school of Pastor Jaenicke in Berlin. He chose
Sierra Leone as the most difficult and dangerous
field, and his triumphs in this unpromising field
were truly marvelous.

When Jansen, in 1816, arrived at Hogbrook,
in Sierra Leone, he found there 1,500 half-starved,
diseased, and dirty Africans, dying at the rate of
200 a month, and seemingly unresponsive to human
kindness. So cruel had been their treatment at the
hands of their white captors that even acts of kind-
ness at the hand of a white man were accepted with
doubt and fear. He found them unwilling to listen