In 1913 the mission reported twenty-seven German missionaries and sixteen thousand five hundred converts.
|Work Interrupted.| It is with a sad heart that the lover of missions contemplates the condition of German missions in India to-day. Instead of the longed-for and expected harvest there is blight and desolation; instead of plenteous rain there is drought. These Germans, pious, diligent and successful, find drawn across the history of their work a deeper rift than that which was drawn by the mutiny of ’57. Removed from their missions and either held as prisoners of war or returned to Germany, they watch with distress as the labor of years is disastrously halted. The Basel mission which is partly manned by Swiss, is not so seriously affected as the Leipsic, the Hermannsburg, the Gossner and the Schleswig-Holstein or Breklum missions, which are deprived of their workers and deprived of support.
Lutherans in other lands are doing all that they can to care for these enterprises. The Leipsic Mission will be looked after by the Lutheran Church of Sweden; the Schleswig-Holstein or Breklum Mission by the General Council; the Hermannsburg Mission by the Joint Synod of Ohio, and the Gossner Mission by the General Synod. In this cause the American Norwegian and Danish bodies have offered their services, as might have been expected from their characteristic liberality.
Scandinavian Societies.
|A Trans-formation in Fifty Years.| The Home Mission to the Santals, founded, as we have learned in Chapter II by Hans Peter Börresen and Lars Skrefsrud was so called because the founders wished it to have the nature of a “home” from which all sorts of improving influences should flow. The Santals are akin to the Kols of the Gossner mission. Terribly oppressed, especially by Hindu money lenders, they rose in 1860 in a bloody rebellion which called public attention to their misery. In 1867 the two ardent Scandinavians set to work among them, and in a short time saw the harvest beginning to ripen. The chief station is at Ebenezer and round about are many smaller and independent stations. Good schools and a mission press from which a monthly paper, “The Friend of the Santal”, is issued, are among the means for education. The thirteen thousand five hundred Christians are so well trained that a great part of the mission work is conducted by them. In Assam the mission provides for its converts who have gone thither to work on the tea plantations.
The mission is supported, as we shall see, not only by the Scandinavians of Europe, but by those of America.
The Danish Evangelical Lutheran Missionary Society has since 1862 stations in Pattambakam in South Arcot. It has twenty-seven men and women at work and a Christian community of over seventeen hundred.
The terrible heat of Southern India is one of the conditions which make especially heroic the service of the Scandinavians who are accustomed to an almost arctic climate. In 1886 a Danish missionary wrote to his friends at home with no expectation that his letter would ever be printed:
|Heroic Service.| “Though only May, it is now ninety-six degrees in the house night and day. Our little son, four years old, will often throw himself despairingly on the floor, exclaiming, ‘O mother, this country is too warm, too warm; can’t we go into the great ship again and sail home to Denmark?’ In the morning we find no application of our Danish hymn, ‘Renewed in strength by nightly rest’. The power of the hot, scorching wind is the same day and night. Yet we are thankful for general health. But we cannot help thinking how, when nature is the most withering upon us, she is opening into her fullest loveliness in Denmark. This very day letters were received from home, and all spoke of the Spring, of the beeches that were ready to leaf, of wood anemones and violets, of gardens filled with Easter lilies, crocuses, hyacinths, and all the other delicate and gracious flowers which are now covering the Danish land. Nor did the letters merely speak of them; for in one there were violets, in another tender beech leaves. We are fresh from seeing all this; how living it all becomes on the receipt of such letters. Involuntarily we exclaim:
‘The Pentecostal feast does nature keep