CHAPTER IV.
FLIEDNER, THE RESTORER OF THE OFFICE OF DEACONESS.
The first years of the present century were sad years for Germany. There was a life-and-death struggle with an all-powerful conqueror to preserve existence as a nation. The Germans still call this “the war for freedom.” Immediately thereafter followed a period of religious awakening, and this proved to be the hour when the diaconate of woman rose again to life and power. When the fullness of time arrives for a cause or a movement to take its place among the forces of society, many hearts become impressed with its importance. So, between the years 1820 and 1835, there were four several attempts to awaken the Christian Church to an enlightened conscience in this matter, the last of which obtained a wide and an enduring success. The first was made by Johann Adolph Franz Klönne, pastor of the church at Bislich, near Wesel. Stirred to admiration by the activity that the women’s societies had shown in the Napoleonic051/47 wars, he lamented the fact that the associations had dissolved, and complained that they had not taken a permanent form, in which the members might have performed the duties for the Church that deaconesses had done in the early years of Christianity. In 1820 he published a pamphlet entitled The Revival of the Deaconesses of the Primitive Church in our Women’s Associations. This he sent to many persons of influence, trying to win their co-operation for the cause. He received a great many answers in reply, among them one from the Crown Princess Marianne. But while in a general way his project met with approval, no one could suggest a practical method by which his thought could be realized.
A distinguished woman, Amalie Sieveking, attempted the same task of utilizing the labor of Christian women as deaconesses in the Church. She belonged to a well-known patrician family in the old free city of Hamburg, and was well known for her philanthropic views and her generous deeds. “When I was eighteen years old,” she relates, “I first learned about the charitable sisterhoods in Catholic lands, and the knowledge seized upon me with almost irresistible power. Like a lightning’s flash came the thought, What if you were appointed to found a similar institution for our Protestant052/48 Church?”[1] The thought stayed by her, and disposed her to receive willingly a similar suggestion coming from the great Prussian minister Von Stein, the Bismarck of Germany during the first quarter of this century. He had been favorably impressed by what he had seen of the Sisters of Mercy in the camp and in hospitals. He consulted with one of his councilors about increasing their number, so that they could be employed in all the Hospitals, Insane Asylums, and Penitentiaries which had women inmates. To another minister he complained with warmth that the Protestant Church had no such sisterhoods by which the beneficent stream of activities among women could be directed into well-regulated channels. “The religious life of Protestantism suffers from the want of them,” he said. These words were repeated to Amalie Sieveking and stirred her to make the endeavor to fulfill her own long-cherished wishes, which were those of Stein. Just at this time, in 1831, the cholera broke out in her native city. She took this as a providential opening, by means of which deaconesses could begin their work, and went at once to one of the cholera hospitals, offered her services as a nurse, and at the same time issued an appeal for sister-women to053/51 join her. But no one came. The only outcome of her effort was a woman’s society which she formed to care for the sick and the poor of her native city, and to work for this she devoted the remainder of her life. Stein and Amalie Sieveking had in mind an order of women closely resembling the Sisters of Charity. That their efforts were not crowned with success seemed to the evangelical Protestant promoters of the deaconess cause in later times providential.[2]
Shortly after, in 1835, Count von der Recke, already well known as the founder of two charitable institutions, issued the first number of a magazine called Deaconesses; or, The Life and Labors of Women Workers of the Church in Instruction, Education, and the Care of the Sick. Only a single number appeared, but his earnest plea for deaconesses, and the elaborate plan he devised for an institution and officers, aroused wide attention, and brought him a letter of warm commendation from the crown prince, afterward King Frederick William IV. Evidently the idea was ripening, and a near fruition could be anticipated. But neither to minister of state, count, nor prince—to no one among the distinguished of the earth—was the honor given of054/50 reviving the female diaconate. It was to a humble pastor of an obscure village church that this work was committed.
The little village of Eppstein lies in a beautiful country, full of high mountains and deep-lying valleys, about a dozen miles from Wiesbaden. At the village parsonage of the little hamlet was born, January 21, 1800, a son, the fourth of a family that numbered twelve children. The pastor, whose father before him had filled a like office, was a favorite among his people for his pleasant speech, sound advice about every-day matters, and his faithfulness in instructing the children in the Bible and the catechism, and caring for the sick and the afflicted.
The little boy proved to be a strong, healthy child, and as he grew older developed a liking for books. His father taught a class composed of his children and some boys in the neighborhood, and when Theodor became old enough to join it he soon outstripped the rest, giving his father no little pride by his fluent rendering of Homer. Theodor Fliedner was not quite fourteen years old when the sudden death of the father changed the whole life of the family, and left the mother with eleven children to maintain and educate. Now began for Fliedner a struggle to complete his055/51 education. The simple, kindly hospitality that had been so generously exercised in the village parsonage met its reward. Friends came forward to offer help, and at the beginning of the New Year Fliedner and his brother went to the gymnasium at Idstein. Here he was obliged to live sparingly, and earned his bread by teaching, but he was happy and contented, and found in study his great delight. He was fond of reading books of travel and the lives of great men, which stirred him to emulation. In 1817 he went to the University of Giessen. Here he kept aloof from the political agitations among the students. Neither was he affected by the rationalistic teachings of the professors. His shy, retired nature aided him in this course, and his leisure hours were passed in reading the writings of the Reformers. The jubilee festival of the Reformation occurred in 1817, and the lives of the heroes of the faith were brought freshly home to him. Their strength of faith shamed him, but he had not yet learned the secret of their power. He was yet without a deep, spiritual life. From Giessen he went to Göttingen, where he devoted himself to a year’s study of history, philosophy, and theology. During the holidays, as is the custom with German students, he made repeated pedestrian tours. In this way he visited the great free cities of the north,056/52 Bremen, Hamburg, and Lubeck. From Göttingen he and his brother went to the theological seminary at Herborn, where the following summer he passed with credit his theological examination. He was now ready to enter God’s great school of practical life to be further fitted for the mission he was to accomplish. In September he went to Cologne and was employed in the house of a wealthy merchant as a private tutor. This was a great change for the quiet youth of country habits. He took great pains to accommodate himself to his surroundings, and to acquire the truly Christian art of becoming all things to all men. In after life, when speaking of this period and its usefulness to him, he wrote: “It is a great hinderance to a man, even to his progress in the kingdom of God, not to have been brought up in gentle and refined manners from his childhood.” Although a faithful and devoted teacher his life-work was not forgotten. He constantly sought to widen his knowledge and experience, was made assistant secretary of the local Bible society, and formed friendships which led to his appointment to the pastorate at Kaiserswerth. This was a Catholic town formerly of some importance. The ruins of an imperial palatinate are still to be seen there, but in Fliedner’s time it had become a little village of workmen dependent057/53 on a few manufacturers. On January 18, 1822, alone, and on foot, to save his poor society the expense of his journey, Fliedner entered the town where his life was henceforth to be centered. He was to share the parsonage with the widow of a previous pastor, and his sister was to be his housekeeper. His income was one hundred and thirty-five dollars a year. Only a month after his arrival the great firm of velvet manufacturers who provided the work-people with employment failed, and the little church community seemed about to be dispersed. The government offered him another and better appointment, but he felt that he must be a true shepherd, and not a hireling, and would not leave his people. He decided to make a journey to collect money to form a permanent endowment for his church. A journey over sixty years ago, to a young German of quiet habits, was a very different matter from a similar trip taken in this day of railroads and steamboats. To Fliedner it seemed a very important matter; and so it was in its results, which reached far beyond the little congregation he served. With great hesitation he began at Elberfeld, a town near at hand. A pastor of the city, to encourage him, accompanied him to friends, and on parting gave him a friendly suggestion that, in addition to trust058/54 in God, such work required “patience, impudence, and a ready tongue.” Before starting on the longer journey to Holland and England he returned to his congregation and encouraged them by the sum of nine hundred dollars that he had so far secured. He was now absent for nine months, and during that time obtained an amount sufficient to put the little church in a position where a certain, if modest, annual allowance was assured. The pastor had also, in serving others, greatly strengthened and broadened his own faith. As he says, “In both these Protestant countries I became acquainted with a multitude of charitable institutions for the benefit both of body and soul. I saw schools and other educational organizations, alms-houses, orphanages, hospitals, prisons, and societies for the reformation of prisoners, Bible and missionary societies, etc., and at the same time I observed that it was a living faith in Christ which had called almost every one of these institutions and societies into life, and still preserved them in activity. This evidence of the practical power, and fertility of such a principle had a most powerful influence in strengthening my own faith, as yet weak.” It was while in Holland that he wrote to Klönne concerning the deaconesses, whose duties he had observed among the Mennonites. After his return059/55 he applied himself with zeal and success to his pastoral duties. Work was a delight to him, and his energy and force of character were constantly seeking new ways by which to make his church services more attractive, and to increase his influence over each member of his congregation. “He never asked himself what he must do, but always what he might do.”[3] But, work as industriously as he would, his small society left him time for other activities. While in London he had been profoundly impressed by the noble labors of Elizabeth Fry in the prisons of England. It was this woman’s hand that pointed out the way for Fliedner in Germany. The prisons in his own land had remained untouched by any spirit of reform. The convicts were crowded together in small, filthy cells, and often in damp cellars without light or air; boys, who had thoughtlessly committed some trifling misdemeanor, with gray-headed, corrupt sinners; young girls with the most vicious old women. There was no attempt at classification of prisoners. Some of them might be innocent people waiting for trial. Neither was there oversight, save to keep the prisoners from escaping. No work was provided, and as for schools, where the larger number of convicts could neither read nor write, no one060/56 thought of such a thing.[4] That such idleness, the beginning of all vice, was here especially pernicious and corrupting can be readily seen. But few knew of this state of things, and those few left it for the government to provide a remedy.
Fliedner, however, could not rest in this indifference. He says: “The smallness of my charge left me more leisure than most of my clerical brethren, and the opportunities I had enjoyed on my travels of at once collecting information and strengthening my faith imposed a more urgent obligation on me to try to make up by the help of our God for our long neglect.” He tried to obtain permission to be imprisoned a few weeks in the prison at Düsseldorf, that he might view prison life from within the walls, but his request was refused. He then obtained leave to hold services every other Sunday afternoon in the prison at Düsseldorf. The efforts that he put forth succeeded in waking the interest of a great many persons, and at last there was formed by his efforts the first society in behalf of prisoners in Germany.
It was while engaged in this work that he met his wife, Frederika Münster, who was occupied in bettering the condition of the prisoners in the penitentiary at Düsselthal. He married her in 1828,061/57 and she became a helpful, inspiring co-worker with him in all his undertakings.
In 1832 he was commissioned by the government to revisit England, to furnish a report on the various charitable organizations, especially those connected with prisons and alms-houses. This brought him into closer relations with Elizabeth Fry, as well as with many other noble men and women of all ranks who were caring for the poor and neglected of England. He extended his journey to Scotland, met Dr. Chalmers, and found his heart strangely touched by what he saw. His spiritual experience had deepened with the years, and while here he wrote to some friends, “The Lord greatly quickens me.”
His heart became still more open to works of mercy and love, and he gathered rich experiences which were afterward utilized in his work.
Fliedner had now attained a certain reputation of his own as a friend to prisoners and outcasts. It was not surprising, therefore, that a poor female convict, discharged from the prison at Werden, should have taken the weary six miles’ walk to Kaiserswerth September 17, 1833, to ask the good pastor for help. There stood in the parsonage garden a little summer-house twelve feet square, with an attic. This was offered to the convict Minna as062/58 a temporary refuge, and she became the first inmate of the Kaiserswerth institutions. She had arrived at an opportune moment. In the previous spring Count Spee, the President of the Prison Society, had urged the founding of two institutions, one Lutheran and one Catholic, to receive discharged female convicts. Fliedner, who had seen such refuges in England, declared himself ready for the plan, and tried to induce the pastors of the larger and wealthier communities in the neighborhood to locate the Protestant asylum in some one of these cities. No one responded to his appeal. His wife, whose courage was often greater than his own, urged him to make a beginning in the little village where he lived, unpromising as the conditions seemed, and after a little hesitation, seeing no one was ready to assume any responsibility in a matter that he took so deeply to heart, the good pastor decided to follow her advice. The old parsonage was for rent, and he secured it on low terms.
Frau Fliedner had a friend of her school-days and early youth, now a woman of experience and ability. She sent for her to come and visit them to see if she would become the superintendent of the refuge, but shortly after her arrival she was taken sick, and her friends sent letters of expostulation063/59 urging her to return. Just now, when affairs were in rather an untoward state, appeared the first inmate. Let Fliedner tell the story:
“We at first gave her lodging in my summer-house, and the necessity of attending to her did more good to the poor, distressed superintendent than all her quinine and mixtures. Countess Spee, the wife of our president, had prophesied that our inmates would never remain with us a month, they would certainly run away. So when the first month was over I marched over to Heltorf and triumphantly announced, ‘Minna is yet there.’ Minna was followed by another, and the garden-house became too small.”
Finally Fliedner obtained possession of the house he had hired, after some delay on the part of the former tenants, and the asylum was opened. The number of inmates increased, and Fräulein Göbel soon had more than she could manage. She must have an assistant. The need of trained Christian workers, who could care for these poor women, grew daily more apparent.
Fliedner’s thoughts constantly dwelt on the subject; they gave him no rest. He had discovered with joyful surprise in 1827 the traces of the apostolic deaconesses among the Mennonites, and two years later he wrote:
“Does not the experience of this our sister Church, do not the women societies in our last war, does not the holy activity of an Elizabeth Fry and her helpers in England, and the women’s associations of Russia and Prussia formed after their model to care for the bodies and souls of women prisoners—do all these not show what great power God-fearing, pious women possess for the up-building of Christ’s kingdom as soon as they have opportunity to develop it?”[5]
His practical experience with the work he had in hand brought him to the same conclusion; namely, that there must be training-schools where Christian women, especially set apart for such service, could have instruction and practice in the duties they had undertaken. As a consequence there were drawn up in May, 1836, and signed by Fliedner and a few friends, the statutes of the Rhenish-Westphalian Deaconess Society.
Fliedner had now reached the work that was henceforth to be his life mission; that is, the restoration of deaconesses to the Christian Church of the nineteenth century.
[1] Denkschrift zur Jubelfeier, J. Disselhoff, Kaiserswerth, 1886, p. 8.
[2] Schäfer, Die Weibliche Diakonie, vol. ii, p. 86; Denkschrift zur Jubelfeier, p. 9.
[3] T. Fliedner, Kurzer Abriss seines Lebens, p. 43.
[4] T. Fliedner, Kurzer Abriss seines Lebens, p. 48.
[5] Kurzer Abriss seines Lebens, p. 60.