The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1932, Page 79

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

17

homes for the aged and for feeble-minded children
at Mitau, Latvia. When the Red soldiers made
their ruthless entrance, they wrecked this institution
of mercy and took the head deaconess, stood her
against a tree, and shot her to death. They then
told the other deaconesses to get out of the country,
or the same thing would happen to them. — A few
years ago a Lutheran pastor went as a traveling
missionary to Siberia, where there are 100,000 Lu-
therans. For three years he worked there, going
from congregation to congregation, baptizing the
children, instructing and confirming the young
people, visiting the sick, and administering the
Lord’s Supper. Then in the village of Tava, as
he came down the street after visiting a sick family,
he was shot dead.”

Mission-Work Is Not in Vain. — On a certain
Sunday two members of the Ovambo tribe in
Southern Africa brought their missionary a letter
that had been partly torn and partly cut open.
The stains on the envelope showed that it had
passed through many hands. An old German
mother had addressed it in German letters to her
‘daughter, who lived on the Whale Bay. The rule
is that all letters must be addressed in Latin script.
As it was, the post-office employee had been unable
to read it. Thinking that it might be intended for
a native, he brought it to the wharf. There it was
opened and passed from hand to hand, together with
a £5 ($20). bill. But none of the natives could
read the German letter. Finally they brought it
to their missionary. The bill was still enclosed.
When the missionary delivered the letter and told
the story of its adventures, the addressee was
amazed. She had not thought that the natives were
so honest. No, mission-work is not in vain, no
matter what some of its white critics may say.

Berichte der Rhein. Missionsgesellschaft.

An Unfinished Portrait.
I.

There arrived in Jamestown, 1619, “a Dutch
man of warre, that sold us twenty Negars.” This
is the record that John Smith left in his Generale
Historie. This is the record of the beginning of
a great American industry that blotted our virgin
shores for two and a half centuries; this is the
record of the beginning of the greatest traffic in
human souls the modern world has ever known.
These twenty “Negars” purchased from the “Dutch
man of warre” symbolized the planting of an ancient
traffic and a still more ancient race upon the rugged

and uncultivated shores of a new world. They were
destined, too, to become the forerunners of hundreds
and thousands of other unfortunate human beings
who like themselves were caught in the nets of the
worshipers of the great god Mammon and were cast
upon strange shores, among strange people, who
worshiped what was to them a strange God and
preached a strange doctrine and whose practises in
dealing with other human beings were in strange
contradiction to the doctrines of love and mercy
which they proclaimed.

The twenty “Negars” purchased from the
“Dutch man of warre” symbolized the beginning
of a New World industry, which at first sought to
justify its existence on Scriptural grounds and used
the last command of the Savior of all mankind as
a cloak to stifle the groans of the dying and to con-
vert wretched human beings into soulless chattel.
In the name of the Crucified this mosaic of com-
plex “unredeemed” humanity was wrenched from
Guinea, the Ivory, Slave, and Gold coasts; from
the present French West Africa; from the vast
stretches of the Niger Valley; from Kamerun, the
Congo, and Benguela. Among this horde, torn from
their jungle homes and made to feel the fetters of
Christian hands, were Arabs and Moors from the
Mediterranean coasts on the North, the straight-
limbed, warlike Bantus from the equatorial regions,
and the small yellow Hottentots from the deep
South. There were tribes from the Senegal on the
North and tribes from the southern limits of Angola
and tribes from a thousand miles or more inland.
There were Mohammedans and voodoo worshipers;
there were representatives from well-established
governments of a high social order as well as rep-
resentatives of primitive savagery at its worst.
They came from kingdoms “with highly developed
arts and with vast meadows, which feed large herds
of great and small cattle and poultry numerous.”
From this great diversity of peoples and regions
a never-ending stream of wretched humanity was
poured down to the “factories” on the coast to be
shipped like cattle to the New World, there to learn
to speak English, to take up the Christian religion,
to fall into the labor pattern demanded by American
needs and customs, and to fit themselves as best
they could into all the mores of the New World.

II.

Very, very carefully the old sea-captain closed
his Bible and placed it upon the table in his cabin. ©
His fingers lingered upon the covers of the Sacred
Volume as if they loved every salt-tinged page of