BY WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH.
A Weak Beginning—Persecutions—Firm Faith—Rapid Growth—A Trio of Leaders—Theological Schools—Publishing House—Hopeful Outlook.
THE American traveler in Germany has to seek for the Baptist churches, if he is to find them. His Baedeker has no star to point them out, and their commanding spires will not arrest his eye as he strolls through the streets. The church at Hamburg is the only one that is notable as a piece of architecture; and its arches, though the delight of lovers of the Gothic, are the despair of preachers. Many of the churches still worship in halls, and some of these halls are none too prominent. The writer of this sketch remembers looking for the Baptist church in a large city of Southern Germany. He followed his clew into a narrow street, then through an overhanging archway into a still narrower court, up two flights of stairs to a door from which his knock drew no voice nor sound of an answer. The Baptist church at Leipzig has its place of worship in one of the suburbs, about three miles from the centre of the city, and away from the bulk of the membership. How many of those who have studied there know that there is a Baptist church in Leipzig? Of course our Baptist Brethren do not choose obscurity and inconvenience from any predilection for them, but from due deference to the ever-present question of rent. Ground is high, and Baptist money scarce.
However, many of the churches have gradually worked their way to the possession of chapels of their own. But even these present no very churchly appearance. The ground has to be utilized carefully. Dwelling apartments have to be built over, or under, or in front of, or back of, the auditorium of the church, sufficient at least to house the pastor, and often sufficient to bring an income that will carry the interest on the debt. But the work is growing. Better accommodations are being secured. Even now there are chapels seating over a thousand people. Several churches in the large cities, for instance, at Berlin and Königsberg, have two church buildings, without, however, on that account dividing the church organization.
The “statistics” for 1889 reports 106 churches with 20,416 members in Germany proper, and 123 churches with 23,976 members in the entire “Bund,” which includes the churches in Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Roumania and South Africa, all of which are organically connected with the German Baptist Mission and off-shoots from it. Fortysix churches in Russia with 12,448 members, and 21 churches in Denmark with 2,711 members, which formerly belonged to the German “Bund,” have recently formed organizations of their own. It is wonderful to think that such a growth has been attained within so short a time. It was only in 1834 that the first seven believers were baptised in the Elbe by Professor Barnas Sears. Twenty-five years later, they had grown to a thousand times seven.
The first twenty-five years were full of privations and persecutions. The reader will understand that in Germany the maintenance and regulation of religion is considered one of the duties of the State, and a disturbance of religious order was punishable by law, just as a disturbance of social order would be with us. It seemed outrageous and detrimental to the interests of society that artisans and laborers should assume to teach and preach, and even to administer the ordinances. Existing laws were applied to them, or new laws were framed to meet their case. As late as 1852, a law was enacted in the principality of Bückeburg, a small state in northern Germany, providing that any emissary of the Baptists found within the boundaries of the principality should be imprisoned for four weeks, and that the punishment should be doubled on a repetition of the offense. Any one attending the meetings was to be imprisoned for four weeks; any one conducting them, for eight weeks; any one baptising, or administering the Lord’s Supper, for six months. One of the old veterans of those days has counted up that he was imprisoned thirty-three times, and in nineteen different jails. Nor were the jails very pleasant places to be in. But sometimes they turned even the prisons into places of joy and prayer. There is just a smack of holy malice in the story of one brother who tells how six of them were imprisoned together for holding a Baptist meeting. As soon as they were lodged in jail, they used the government’s own house and the government’s chairs to hold a glorious Baptist protracted meeting that lasted for four weeks.
Still these imprisonments are pleasanter to tell about than to go through. They told on the health of the brethren. Their property was seized to pay fines. Their wives and little ones were left unprotected. Their earnings ceased during the imprisonment, and when they came out of prison they often found their occupation gone. But the men bred by those times were strong in the Lord, nothing daunted by the adversary, conscious that they were the soldiers of God, called, like Gideon, to do battle with a handful, but with the Lord on their side. Three men stand out as a kind of trio of leaders during those early years, Oncken, Lehmann, and Köbner. Mr. Oncken was thirty-four years of age when he shared in that baptism by night in the Elbe. God had taken him out of the rationalistic religion of his own country when he was nineteen years old, and had sent him to England. He was converted there, and returned a few years later as a missionary of the British Continental Society. He labored most faithfully for some years before he became a Baptist. He understood the Scriptural doctrine of baptism several years before he had the opportunity to follow Christ in baptism. After that time, he pushed the work with great executive ability and intense earnestness. He was a leader of men. He did great service to his brethren by his knowledge of English, which enabled him to represent the cause in Great Britain and also in the United States, and to gain for it the financial and moral support of England and America which has been so helpful to the work. In 1879 he was paralyzed, and spent the last years of his life in forced retirement in Zürich. The active brain had become feeble. The only thing which rekindled the old fire in the dying embers was prayer and the words of the Bible. He entertained his visitors by reciting, with evident spiritual enjoyment, a verse from some familiar hymn, and a few moments afterward he would repeat it over again, forgetting what he had just said. He died at the age of eighty-four, and was buried with all honors at Hamburg, on the eighth of January, 1884. His name will remain the great name in the early history of the Baptists of Germany.