In robes of flowery magnificence.’
Ah! how lovely is Denmark!”
The contributions of Norway to India are given to the Home Mission to the Santals.
|Help in Time of Famine.| The Evangelical National Missionary Society of Sweden works among the Gonds in the Central provinces of India. Beginning in 1877 it has now extended its work to include all natives in its vicinity. It has fifty-three Swedish workers. The most important station is Chindwara, where the senior missionary lives and where there are training schools and two large orphanages founded during the terrible famines of 1896 to 1900. Other institutions established during that trying period are industrial schools for men and women which are now self-supporting. There is also a hospital and very active Zenana work.
|A Missionary Family.| The Church of Sweden Mission in India was begun in 1855 when two Swedish missionaries went into the service of the Leipsic mission in Tamil land. In 1869 they were joined by Dr. C. J. Sandgren, who is still alive and at work surrounded by five of his children as fellow workers. In 1901 several stations of the Leipsic mission were handed over to the independent control of the Swedes and since then the mission has grown rapidly. Madura is the central station and at Tirupater there is a fine hospital. The mission has profited greatly by the mass movements toward Christianity which have taken place in recent years in South India, in which whole villages have asked for baptism, a condition which brings new missionary problems.
It is to this mission that there has passed during the war the work of the Leipsic Society.
American Societies.
|The Patriarch of the American Lutheran Church.| Among the heroes of the American Lutheran Church is Henry Melchior Muhlenberg who was born in Germany in 1711 and died in America in 1787. He was educated at the University of Göttingen from which he went to Halle to teach in the Orphanage and to prepare himself for missionary work in India. Instead he accepted a call to become the pastor of the scattered congregations of Lutherans in Pennsylvania. When he arrived in 1742 he found the people without church buildings or schools and at the mercy of imposters who claimed to be clergymen. At once he began to preach and to organize. Travelling from New York to Georgia, doing pastoral work, forming constitutions for churches and for the first American Synod, he filled forty-five years to the brim with valuable work. Of him Doctor Henry E. Jacobs says: “Depth of religious conviction, extraordinary inwardness of character, apostolic zeal for the spiritual welfare of individuals, absorbing devotion to his calling and all its details, were among his most marked characteristics. These were combined with an intuitive penetration and extended width of view, a statesman-like grasp of every situation in which he was placed, an almost prophetic foresight, coolness and discrimination of judgment, and peculiar gifts for organization and discrimination.”
Under the ministrations of Doctor Muhlenberg the Lutheran Church in America was firmly established. That his heart turned longingly to the first field of labor which he had selected, we know from his own records. In giving an account of the Third Convention of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, he said that when the delegates gathered for an evening meeting at his house he told them of the Mission among the Malabars and among the Jews. Doubtless he was consoled by the hope that there might go from his American Church those who would do what he had wished to do.
|The First Missionary Undertaking.| The missionary consciousness of the new church found its first expression is an unsuccessful effort to evangelize the American Indian. In Georgia a little was accomplished by the pious Salzburgers, but the withdrawal of the Indians from the neighborhood of white settlements and the growing and natural distrust which they felt for the whites soon put an end to missionary work among them.