The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1928, Sheet 36

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

Praise.

The Lord Himself directed us
Into His chosen path;

He that of old elected us
Delivered us from wrath.

He is at all times near

To counsel and to save,

So that at no time we need fear,
Whatever ills we brave.

The Lord hath done for us great
things;

We are so glad thereof

And safely rest beneath His wings,

His power, and His love.

Bestir thyself, my soul!

Sing praises, work for God,

And tread afresh to reach the goal

The path which Jesus trod.
. . H. Osteruvs.

Wonders of Transforming Grace.

Hogbrook, Sierra Leone.

West Africa, extending four thousand miles
along the Atlantic coast, from Senegambia on the
north to Angola on the south, and including such
divisions as Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory and
Gold Coasts, Nigeria, Kamerun, French Equatorial
Africa, and Angola, without a doubt has been, and
still is, for various reasons, one of the most difficult
mission-fields in the world. It is the home of sin,
sorrow, and shame 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 history of man’s cruelty to man. Few animals
prey on their own kind; yet it is a sad fact recorded
in human history that man has sold man into
slavery; that not only heathen and Mohammedans,
but Christians no less, should have 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 car-
ried on as along the coast of West Africa. The
natives were already most degraded by many hor-
rible 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 the 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
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 com-
pletely destroyed 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 slaves rescued from slavers by British
cruisers. No less than 2,000 were annually added’
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 other way the
horrors and agonies of the “middle passage,” were
dumped down here, until, in 1846, fifty thousand
freed slaves, representing two hundred different
African tribes 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
Renner, Butscher, Nylaender, and Hartwig. Nat-
urally, at first the mission made very slow progress.
For years it seemed as though nothing could be ac-
complished; but at last a marked change took place.
This change was due, more than to any other cause,
to Wilhelm Jansen (anglicized to William John-
son), a former humble factory worker in Hanover,
who had been prepared for his missionary labors in
the school of Pastor Jaenicke in Berlin. He chose
Sierra Leone as the most difficult and dangerous
field, and his triumphs there were truly marvelous.

When Jansen, in 1816, arrived in Hogbrook, in
Sierra Leone, he found there 1,500 half-starved,
diseased, and dirty Africans, dying at the rate of
two hundred a month, and seemingly unresponsive
to any act of human kindness. So cruel had been
their treatment at the hands of their white captors
that even acts of kindness at the hand of a white
man were accepted with doubt and fear. He found
them unwilling to listen to his message because he
was a white man. Some told him that they would
rather go to hell than to heaven if they could thus

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