The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1922, Page 21

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The Lutheran Pioneer.

21

' Alabama Notes.

Covered with mud from his feet to his head,
all but soaked to the skin, and shivering in the
steady gale which blew down from the cold north,
the pastor arrived at the graveyard to lay to rest

* the mortal remains of one of his flock. She was
an old, old grandmother who, as a young woman,
had flinched and squirmed in pain beneath the
merciless sting of her master’s whip as its lashes
hissed and coiled about her naked shoulders. As
a young woman she had stolen away to the swamps
and cane-brakes and, upon bended knees behind a

Rev. R. O. L. Lynn,
Our Alabama Correspondent.

fallen log or.a protecting bush, had pitifully begged
the Great Master of all for a speedy deliverance
from physical bondage; had asked to be as free as
the birds that flitted from tree to tree, and as the
little red and gray squirrels that scampered and
chattered in the boughs above her. With her hus-
band, old mother, and others of kindred misery her
soul had reached outward and upward, grasping
for the common heritage of all men. Her voice
had reached out into the stillness of the night and
was wafted aloft as it joined the sighs and groans
of four million others; her voice had given ex-
pression to the longing of her soul as she joined
in the chorus of that rolling, groaning, crying
jeremiad : —

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ fo’ to carry me home.

With four million others she had rejoiced when
the shackles of bondage dropped from her, and she
stepped forth a free woman. But all was not well
with her yet. For years after her physical emanci-
pation she was the slave of a far more cruel master
than ever the most degenerated Simon Legree could
be, for she was.in the clutches of spiritual igno-
rance. Jor over twoscore years she was held fast
in the bonds of superstition and emotionalism, and
her soul was being gradually strangled to death as
these bonds were drawn tight and ever tighter. As
in the days of her physical bondage she now sought
spiritual deliverance, but in her quest she became
lost in the tangled maze of dreams, visions, and
good works. And so, in her blindness, she wan-
dered in the shadow of death.

Over half a century after she had first tasted
the sweetness of bodily freedom she, for the first
time, rejoiced in the freedom of spiritual liberty.
This freedom was given her because a true deliverer
had come, the champion of the spiritually oppressed,
the light of all who are groping in darkness. This
deliverer, this champion, this light was the true
Gospel of Jesus Christ which the Lutheran Church
has confessed, taught, and preached for the last
four hundred years, and the Missouri Synod: for
the last seventy-five years. When this Gospel came,
the old grandmother embraced it with fervent zeal,
and clung to it with an unshaken faith through
the great crisis when the monster, that one who lays
the king’s scepter by the side of the shepherd’s
crook, came to carry her away. A few days be-
fore the summons came, she received Holy Com-
munion, and thus had her faith strengthened for
that long voyage from which none ever return.
She told her pastor that her only hope was in Him
who had died upon the cross for the sins of all man-
kind. And so at last, at the journey’s end, she was
free indeed, for “if the Son shall make you free, ye
shall be free indeed.”

Covered with mud, all but soaked to the skin,
and shivering in the steady gale which came down
from the north, the pastor, standing in a downpour
of rain, committed the scarred and emaciated body
to the cold and silent, but not hopeless chamber of
death to await the call of the trump of the Great
Captain when it shall sound the last assembly for
every true soldier of the Cross. As the rough board
box, the unstained handiwork of a neighbor, was
lowered into the grave, which was fast filling with
water, and as spadeful after spadeful of dripping
mud was cast into the grave, not a tear was shed,