Pioneers and Founders

Just as John Eliot’s missionary zeal was the outcome of the earnestness that carried the Puritans to New England, so the fresh infusion of religious life, brought by Whitfield, produced an ardent desire on the part of David Brainerd to devote himself to the remainder of the Indians; and in the year 1742, at twenty-five years old, he was examined by an assembly of ministers at Danbury, and licensed to preach the Gospel, when he began at once with a little settlement of Indians at Kent, with such a sinking of heart at his own unworthiness that he says he seemed to himself worse than any devil, and almost expected to have been stoned rather than listened to.  Indeed, something of this diffidence and sadness seems always to have weighed him down when he began to preach, though the fervour of his subject and the responding faces of his audience always exhilarated him and bore him up through his sermon.  To learn the Indian language had not occurred to him as part of his preparation, but probably these Kent Red men had been enough among the English to understand him, for they seem to have been much impressed.

A Scottish Society for propagating Christian Knowledge had arisen, and the delegates hearing of the zeal of David Brainerd, desired to engage him at a salary.  The sense of his own unworthiness, and fear of keeping out a better man, brought his spirits down to the lowest ebb; nevertheless, he went to meet the representatives of the Society at New York, and there, though between the hubbub of the town and his own perpetual self-condemnation he was continually wretched, they were so well satisfied with him as to give him the appointment, on condition that he studied the language, intending to send him to the Red men between the Susquehanna and the Delaware; but there was a dispute between these and the Government, and it was decided to send him to a settlement called Kanaumeek, between Stockbridge and Albany.

Before going, David Brainerd, having no thought beyond devotion to the Indians, and thinking his allowance enough for his wants, gave up the whole of his inheritance to support a scholar at the University, and set forth, undaunted by such weakness of health as in ordinary eyes would have fitted him for nothing but to be carefully nursed; for even then he was continually suffering from pain and dizziness, and weakness so great that he could often hardly stand.

In this state he arrived at Kanaumeek, with a young Indian to act as his interpreter, and there spent the first night sleeping on a heap of straw.  It was a lonely, melancholy spot, where the Indians were herded together, watched with jealous eyes by adventurers who were always endeavouring to seize their lands, and sadly degenerated from the free, grave, high-spirited men to whom Eliot had preached.  His first lodging was in the log house of a poor Scotchman who lived among the Indians—a single chamber, without so much as a floor, and where he shared the family meals upon porridge, boiled corn, and girdle-cakes.  The family spoke Gaelic, only the master of the house knowing any English, and that not so good as the Indian interpreter’s; and, moreover, the spot was a mile and a half from the Indian wigwams, no small consideration to so weakly a man, thus poorly fed.  However, the Indians were pleased with his addresses, and seemed touched by them; but the evil habits of the White men were the terrible stumbling-block.  Parties of them would come into the town, and vex the missionary’s ears with their foul tongues, making a scandalous contrast to the grave, calm manners of the Indians.  More than ever did he love solitude, and when with his own hands he had built himself a log hut, where he could be alone when he pleased, his relief was great.

He was not the highly educated scholar and practical theorist that his predecessor had been: he seems to have had no plans or systems, and merely to have tried to fulfil immediate needs; but he soon found that he could not hope to benefit his Red flock without a school, so he made a journey to New Jersey to entreat for means to set one up, and this was done, with his interpreter as master.  His journey was made on horseback, and was no small undertaking, for even between Stockbridge and Kanaumeek he had once lost his way, and had to sleep a night in the woods.

He had by this time thoroughly repented of the uncharitableness and hastiness of his speech about Mr. Whittlesey, and he took a journey to New Haven to send in a thoroughly humble and Christian-like apology, requesting to be permitted to take his degree.  Twice he was refused, and the third time was told that the only condition on which the degree would be granted would be the making up his term of residence at Yale, which was, of course, not possible to a licensed minister in full employment, and in fact was an insulting proposal to a man of his standing and character.

His journey cost him dear, for as he was riding home he was attacked with violent pain in the face and shiverings, which forced him to halt at the first shelter he could find, happily with kind friends, who nursed him for a fortnight before he could return home.  He believed that had his illness seized him in his log house at home, he must certainly have died for want of care and attendance, although he was much beloved by his poor Indians.

His life was indeed a frightfully hard one, and would have been so for a healthy man; for he had to work with his own hands to store provisions for his horse in the winter, and that when weak and suffering the more for want of proper food.  He could get no bread but by riding ten or fifteen miles to procure it, and if he brought home too much it became mouldy and sour, while, if he brought home a small quantity, he could not go for more if he failed to catch his horse, which was turned out to graze in the woods; so that he was reduced to making little cakes of Indian meal, which he fried in the ashes.  “And then,” he says, “I blessed God as if I had been a king.”  “I have a house and many of the comforts of life to support me,” he says with great satisfaction; and the solitude of that house was so precious to him that, however weary he was, he would ride back twenty miles to it at night rather than spend an evening among ungodly men.  By this terrible stinting of what we should deem the necessaries of life, he was actually able, in fifteen months, to devote a hundred pounds to charitable purposes, besides keeping the young man at the University.

So much, however, did he love his solitude, that he counted it as no relief, but an affliction, to have to ride to Stockbridge from time to time to learn the Indian language from Mr. Sergeant, the missionary there stationed.  Something of this must have been morbid feeling, something from the want of energy consequent on the condition of his frame.  For a man in confirmed decline such an entry in a journal as this is no trifle:—“December 20.—Rode to Stockbridge.  Was very much fatigued with my journey, wherein I underwent great hardship; was much exposed, and very wet by falling into a river.”  Mr. Sergeant could hardly have been profane company, but Brainerd never enjoyed these visits, thinking that intercourse with the world made him less familiar with heaven.

Another inconvenience was the proximity of Kanaumeek to the frontier, and these were the days of that horrid war between England and France in America, when the native allies of each nation made savage descents on the outlying settlements, inflicting all the flagrant outrages of their wild warfare.  A message came one evening to Kanaumeek from Colonel Stoddart, warning all in exposed situations to secure themselves as well as possible, since an attack might come at any moment; and this Brainerd quietly records as a salutary warning not to attach himself too much to the comforts of life he enjoyed.

The attack was never made, but he came to the conclusion that his small congregation of Indians would be much better with their fellows at Stockbridge under the care of Mr. Sergeant, and that this would leave him free to go to more wild and untaught tribes.  It was carried out, and the Indians removed.  There was much mutual love between them and their pastor, and the parting was very affectionate, though even after two years he was still unable to speak the language, and never seems to have troubled himself about this trifling obstacle.  Several English congregations entreated him to become their minister, but he refused them all, and went to meet the Commissioners of the Scottish Society at New Jersey.  They arranged with him for a mission to the Delaware Indians, in spite of his being laid up for some days at the time; and when he went back to Kanaumeek to dispose of his books and other “comforts,” the effects of being drenched with rain showed themselves in continued bleeding from the lungs.  He knew that he was often in an almost dying state, and only wished to continue in his Master’s service to the end he longed for.  He owns that his heart did sometimes sink at the thought of going alone into the wilderness; but he thought of Abraham, and took courage, riding alone through the depths of the forest, so desolate and lonely day after day, that it struck terror even into his soul.  There were scanty settlements of Dutch and Irish, where he sometimes spent a night, but the Sunday he passed among some Irish was so entirely unmarked by them, that he felt like a “creature banished from the sight of God.”

At last he reached his destination on the fork of the river Delaware, and being within moderate distance of Newark, there received ordination as a minister on the 11th of June, 1744.  Severe illness followed the exertion of preaching and praying before the convened ministers; but as soon as he could walk, he set forth on his return, though he was so weak that he could hardly open his numbed hand, but his heart and hopes had begun to revive, and the little settlement of Whites with whom he lived were willing to listen to him.

The Indians were in the midst of preparing for an idolatrous feast and dance.  Brainerd spent a day in the woods in an anguish of prayer, and then went to the place of meeting, where, stranger as he was, he prevailed on them to cease their revels and attend to him.

His biographer, President Jonathan Edwards, provokingly leaves out his method of teaching, “for the sake of brevity,” and from his own diary little is to be gathered but accounts of his state of feeling through endless journeyings and terrible prostrations of strength.  He was always travelling about—now to the Susquehanna, now back to New England—apparently at times with the restlessness of disease, for this roving about must have prevented him from ever deepening the impression made by his preaching, which after all was only through an interpreter, for he never gave himself time to learn the language.

Yet after some months he did find a settlement of Indians, about eighty miles from the fork of Delaware, at a place called Crossweeksung, who were far more disposed to attend to him.  They listened so eagerly, that day after day they would travel after him from village to village, hardly taking any heed to secure provisions for themselves.  The description of their conduct is like that of those touched by Wesleyan preaching.  They threw themselves on the ground, wept bitterly, and prayed aloud, with the general enthusiasm of excitement, though, he expressly says, without fainting or convulsions, and even the White men around, who came to scoff, were deeply impressed.

David Brainerd had at last his hour of bliss!  He was delivered from his melancholy by the joy of such results, and in trembling happiness baptized his converts in the river beside their wigwams before leaving them to proceed to a village on the Susquehanna, where he hoped for an interview with the chief Sachem of the Delawares.

The place, however, was in the wildest confusion and uproar, it being the period of a great festival, when every one was too tipsy to attend to him.  At an island called Juneauta, he met a very remarkable personage, a Powaw, who bore the reputation of a reformer, anxious to restore the ancient religion of the Red man, which had become corrupted by intercourse with the White and his vices.

His aspect was the most dreadful thing Brainerd had ever seen.  He wore a shaggy bearskin coat, hood, and stockings, and a hideous, painted mask, so that no part of his person was visible, not even the hand in which he held an instrument made of the shell of a tortoise, with dry corn within, and he came up rattling this, and dancing with all his might, and with such gesticulations that, though assured that he intended no injury, it was impossible not to shrink back as this savage creature came close.

Yet he was a thoughtful man, such as would have been a philosopher in ancient Greece or Rome.  He took the missionary into his hut, and conversed long and earnestly with him.  He had revolted in spirit from the degradation of his countrymen, and had gone to live apart in the woods, where he had worked out a system of natural religion for himself, which he believed the Great Spirit had taught him, and which had at last led him to return to his people and endeavour to restore them to that purity which of course he believed to have once existed.  He believed there were good men somewhere, and he meant to wander till he found them; meantime, he was kindly to all who came near him, and constantly uplifted his testimony against their vices, especially when the love of strong drink was brought among them.  When all was in vain, he would go weeping away into the woods, and hide himself there till the hateful fire-water was all consumed and the madness over.  Brainerd was greatly touched by this red-skinned Epictetus, who, he said, had more honesty, sincerity, and conscientiousness than he had ever met with in an Indian, and more of the temper of true religion; and he expounded to him the Christian doctrine with great carefulness and double earnestness.  The self-taught philosopher broke in now and then with “Now that I like,”—“So the Great Spirit has taught me;” but when the missionary came to the regions where faith surpasses the power of the intellect and the moral sense, the Indian would not follow him, and rejected his teaching.  It was curious that he particularly denied the idea of a devil, declaring that there was no such being, according to the ancient Indians.  Now, the incantations of the Powaws were generally supposed to be addressed to evil spirits, and probably the perception of the falsehood of these pretended rites led to his disclaiming the Christian doctrine.

Whether time and further teaching would have overpowered his belief in his own inspiration does not appear, for Brainerd found the Indians too vicious and hardened to pay the least heed either to him or to their own reformer; and he went back to Crossweeksung, where his flock was still increasing, and in a most satisfactory condition, renouncing their heathen customs and their acquired vice of drunkenness, and practising some amount of industry.  A school was set up, old and young learnt English, the children in three or four months could read the Bible in English, and Brainerd’s sermons and prayers were understood without an interpreter.

This improved condition of the Indians destroyed the shameful profits of the nearest settlement of Whites, whose practice it had hitherto been to entice them to drink, and then run up a heavy score against them for liquor.  Finding that all endeavours to seduce them into drunkenness were now vain, these wretches first tried to raise the country against Brainerd, by reporting that he was a Roman Catholic in disguise; and when this failed, they laid claim to the lands of Crossweeksung, in discharge of debts that they declared to have been previously contracted.  Fortunately, Brainerd had it in his power to advance 82l. from his private means, so as to save his people from this extortion; but he afterwards thought it best to remove them from these dangerous neighbours to a new settlement, fifteen miles off, called Cranberry.  He remained himself in his little hut at Crossweeksung, after they had proceeded to raise wigwams and prepare the ground for maize; but, whenever he rode over to visit them, his approach was notified by the sound of a conch shell, and they all gathered round for his prayers and instruction.

His success with them seems to have greatly cured his depression of spirits, but his mind was balancing between the expedience of remaining among them as their permanent pastor, protector, and guide, and that of striving to extend the kingdom of faith.  Sometimes he liked the prospect of a settled home and repose, study and meditation; but, at the thought of gaining souls to Christ, all these considerations melted before him, and he believed that he was marked out for the life of a pilgrim and hermit by his carelessness about hardships.

He had not, however, taken leave of his flock when he set forth on another expedition to the obdurate Indians of the Susquehanna, in the September of 1746.  It was without result; he could obtain no attention, and the hardships of the journey, the night exposure, and the frequent drenchings completed the wreck of his health.  He came back with night perspirations, bleeding from the lungs, and suffering greatly, feverish and coughing, and often in pain; yet, whenever he could mount his horse, riding the fifteen miles to attend to the Indians at Cranberry, or sitting in a chair before his hut, when they assembled round him.

On Sunday he persisted in preaching, till generally at the end of half an hour he fainted, and was carried to his bed; and at the administration of the Lord’s Supper he was carried to the place where he had forty Indian communicants, and likewise some Whites, who had learnt to reverence him, and who supported him back to his bed.  He was quite happy now, for he felt he had done all he could to the utmost of his strength; but, soon becoming totally unable to speak at all, he felt that he must do what he called “consuming some time in diversions,” and try to spend the winter in a civilized place.

After riding his first short stage, however, his illness increased so much, that he was quite incapable of proceeding or returning, and remained in a friend’s house at Elizabethtown, suffering from cough, asthma, and fever the whole winter.  In March 1747 he had rallied enough to ride to Cranberry, where he went from hut to hut, giving advice to and praying with each family, and parting with them with great tenderness.  Tears were shed everywhere; for, though he still hoped to return, all felt that they should see his face no more!  But, to his great comfort and joy, his poor people were not to be abandoned to themselves and their tempters.  His younger brother—John—relieved his mind by offering to assume the care of them, and under his pastorship he could thankfully leave them.

In April he set out again on his journey, at the rate of about ten miles a day, riding all the way, and on the 28th of May arrived at Northampton, where Jonathan Edwards, afterwards President of the College of New Jersey, was then minister.  They were like-minded men, both disciples of Whitfield, and the self-devoted piety of the young missionary was already so well known to Mr. Edwards by report, that it was most gladly that he received him into his house and family.  There the impression Brainerd made was of a singularly social, entertaining person, meek and unpretending, but manly and independent.  Probably rest and brightness had come when the terrible struggle of his early years had ceased, and morbid despondency had given way to Christian hope, for he became at once a bright and pleasant member of any society where he formed a part, and to the Edwards family he was like a son or brother.  When he was able, Mr. Edwards wished him to lead the family devotions, and was always greatly impressed by the manner and matter of his prayers, but one petition never failed, i.e. “that we might not outlive our usefulness.”  Even in saying grace there was always something about him that struck the attention.

His purpose in coming to Northampton had been to consult Dr. Mather, whose verdict was that he was far gone in decline, and who gave him no advice but to ride as much as possible.  So little difference did this sentence make to him that he never noted it in his diary, though he spoke of it cheerily in the Edwards family—a large household of young people—where he was so much beloved, that when he decided to go to Boston, Jerusha, the second daughter, entreated to be allowed to accompany him, to nurse him as his sister would have done.

The pure, severe simplicity of those early American manners was such, that no one seems to have been surprised at a girl of eighteen becoming the attendant of a man of twenty-nine.  Jerusha had the full consent and approbation of her parents, and she was a great comfort and delight to him.  He told her father that she was more spiritual, self denying, and earnest to do good, than any young person he had ever known; and on doubt their communings were far above earth, hovering, as he was well known to be, upon the very borders of the grave.

They took four days to reach Boston, and there he was received with the greatest respect by all the ministers; but, a week after his arrival, so severe an attack of his illness came on that he became delirious, and was thought to be at the point of death.  Again, however, he came back enough to life to sit up in bed and write ardent letters of counsel to the brother who had succeeded him among his Indians, and likewise to give his friends the assurance of his perfect peace and joy.  He said that he had carefully examined himself, and though he had found much pride, selfishness, and corruption, he was still certain that he had felt it his greatest happiness to glorify and praise God; and this certainty, together with his faith in the Redeemer, had calmed all the anguish he had suffered for years.

Whenever he was able to converse he had numerous visitors, especially from the deputies of the Society in London which had assisted Eliot.  A legacy for the support of two missionaries had newly been received, and his counsel on the mode of employing it was asked.  He was able to strive to imbue others with the same zeal as himself, and to do much on behalf of his own mission, although he often lay so utterly exhausted that he said of himself that he could not understand how life could be retained.  One of his brothers, a student at Yale, came to see him, and to tell him of the death of his favourite sister, of whose illness he had not even heard, but it was no shock to him, for he felt far more sure of meeting her again than if she had been left on earth.

The summer weather, to the surprise of all, brought back a slight revival of strength, and some of his friends began to hope he might yet recover, but he knew his own state too well, and told them he was as assuredly a dead man as if he had been shot through the heart; still he was resolved to profit by this partial restoration to return to Northampton, chiefly because the rumour had reached him that the Bostonians had intended to give him such a funeral as should testify their great esteem; and being disappointed in this, they intended to assemble and escort him publicly, while still alive, out of their city, but the bare idea naturally made him so unhappy that they were forced to give it up.

Five days were spent in the journey, and again the Edwardses reverentially opened their doors to a guest so near heaven.  For some time he rode out two or three miles daily, and sat with the family, writing or conversing cheerfully when not engaged in prayer.  His brother John came from Crossweeksung and cheered him with a good account of his Indians; and hearing of the great need of another school, he wrote to the friends who had shown themselves so warmly interested in him at Boston, and was gratified by their reply, with a subscription of 200l. for the purpose, and of 75l. for the mission to the Six Nations.  His answers were written with his own hand; but he had become so much weaker that he felt this his last task.  He had been one who, in his short life, had sown in tears to reap in joy.

He was sinking fast as the autumn cold came on, often talking tenderly to the little ones of the house, but suffering terribly at times, and sighing, “Why is His chariot so long coming?” then blaming himself for over-haste to be released.

He had a smile for Jerusha as she came into his room on Sunday morning.  “Are you willing to part with me?  I am willing to part with you, though if I thought I could not see you and be happy with you in another world, I could not bear to part.  I am willing to leave all my friends.  I am willing to leave my brother, though I love him better than any creature living.  I have committed him and all my friends to God, and can leave them with God!”

Presently, looking at the Bible in her hands, he said, “Oh that dear Book! the mysteries in it and in God’s providence will soon be unfolded.”

He lingered in great agony at times till the 9th of October, 1747, when came a cessation of pain, and during this lull he breathed his last, then wanting six months of his thirtieth birthday.  He had told Jerusha that they should soon meet above, and, in effect, she only lived until the next February.  She told her father on her death-bed, that for years past she had not seen the time when she had any wish to live a moment longer, save for the sake of doing good and filling up the measure of her duty.

David Brainerd’s career ended at an age when John Eliot’s had not begun.  It was a very wonderful struggle between the frail suffering body and the devoted, resolute spirit, both weighed down by the natural morbid temper, further depressed by the peculiar tenets of the form of doctrine in which he had been bred.  The prudent, well-weighed measures of the ripe scholar, studious theologian, and conscientious politician, formed by forty-two years’ experience of an old and a new country, could not be looked for in the sickly, self-educated, enthusiastic youth who had been debarred from the due amount of study, and started with little system but that of “proclaiming the Gospel”—even though ignorant of the language of those to whom he preached.  And yet that heart-whole piety and patience was blessed with a full measure of present success, and David Brainerd’s story, though that of a short life, over-clouded by mental distress, hardship, and sickness, fills us with the joyful sense that there is One that giveth the victory.

CHAPTER III.  CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH SCHWARTZ, THE COUNCILLOR OF TANJORE

We must turn from America to the warmer regions of the East, from the patriarchal savage to complicated forms of society, and from the Red-skin to the Hindoo—a man of far nearer affinity to ourselves, being, like us, of the great Indo-European race, speaking a language like our own, an altered, corrupted, and intermingled dialect of the same original tongue, and his ancestors originally professing a religion in which the same primary ideas may be traced as those which were held by our ancient northern forefathers, and which are familiar to us in the graceful dress imposed on them by the Greeks.  The sacred writings of the Hindoos form the earliest storehouse of the words of our common language, and the thoughts therein found, though recorded after the branches had parted from the common stock, are nearer the universal germ than those to be found anywhere else, and more nearly represent the primary notion of religion held by the race of Japheth, after that of Shem, to which God revealed Himself more distinctly, had parted from it.  These oldest writings are quaint, pure, and simple, but on them the fancies of a race enervated by climate engrafted much that was hideous, monstrous, and loathsome, leading to gross idolatry, and much vice perpetrated in the name of religion.  Mythology always degenerates with the popular character, and then, so far as the character is formed by the religious faith, the mythology helps to debase it further, until the undying moral sense of conscience awakens again in some man, or band of men, and a new morality arises; sometimes grafted upon philosophic reasoning, sometimes upon a newly-invented or freshly introduced religion.

Thus, when Hindooism had become corrupt, the deeply meditative system of Buddha was introduced into many parts of India, and certainly brought a much higher theory and purer code than that founded on the garbled nature-worship of ancient India; but both religions co-existed, and, indeed, Buddhism was in one aspect an offshoot of the Hindoo faith.

Christianity—planted, as is believed, by St. Thomas, on the Malabar coast—never became wholly extinct, although tinged with Nestorianism, but it was never adopted by the natives at large, and the learning and philosophy of the Brahmins would have required the utmost powers of the most learned fathers of the Church to cope with them, before they could have been convinced.

The rigid distinctions of caste have made it more difficult for the Church which “preaches the Gospel to the poor,” to be accepted in India than anywhere else.  Accounting himself sprung from the head of Brahma, the Brahmin deems himself, and is deemed by others, as lifted to an elevation which has no connection either with moral goodness, with wealth, or with power; and which is as much the due of the most poverty-stricken and wicked member of the caste as of the most magnificent priest.  The Sudras, the governing and warlike class, are next in order, having sprung from the god’s breast, and beneath these come infinite grades of caste, their subdivisions each including every man of each trade or calling which he pursues hereditarily and cannot desert or change, save under the horrible penalty of losing caste, and becoming forsaken and despised of every creature, even the nearest kindred.  The mere eating from a vessel used to contain food for a person of a different caste is enough to produce contamination; the separation is complete, and the whole constitution of body and mind have become so inured to the distinction, that the cost of becoming a convert is infinitely severer in India than ever it could have been even in Greece or Rome, where, though the Christian might be persecuted even to the death, he was not thrust out of the pale of humanity like a Hindoo convert who transgresses caste.

The Christians of Malabar are a people living to themselves, and the great Bengalee nations never appear to have had the Gospel carried to them.  The Mahometan conquest filled India with professors of the faith of the Koran; but these were a dominant race, proud and separate from the mass of people, whom they did not win to their faith, and thus the Hindoo idolatry had prevailed untouched for almost the whole duration of the world, when the wealth of India in the early days of naval enterprise first began to tempt small mercantile companies of Europeans to form factories on the coast merely for purposes of traffic, without at first any idea that these would lead to possession or conquest, and, in general, without any sense of the responsibility of coming as Christians into a heathen world.

The Portuguese did indeed strive earnestly to Christianize their territory at Goa; and they promoted by all means in their power the labours of Francisco Xavier and his Jesuit companions, so effectually that the fruits of their teaching have remained to the present day.

Neither were the Dutch, who then held Ceylon, entirely careless of the duty of instructing their subjects; and the Danes, who had obtained the town of Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast, in 1746, sent out a mission which was vigorously conducted, and met with good success.  Hitherto, however, the English at Madras and Calcutta had been almost wholly indifferent, and it must be remembered that theirs was not a Government undertaking.  The East India Company was still only a struggling corporation of merchants and traders, who only wanted to secure the warehouses and dwellings of those who conducted their traffic, and had as yet no thought of anything but the security of their trade; often, indeed, considering themselves pledged to no interference with the religion of the people around, and too often forgetting their own.  However, the Danish mission received grants of money and books from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; and the first Indian missionary of any note, a German by birth, was equally connected with both England and Denmark.

Sonnenburg in Brandenburg, still an electorate at the time, was the native home of Christian Friedrich Schwartz, of whose parents it is only known that they appear to have been in easy circumstances, and that his mother, who died before he could remember, told her husband and her pastor on her death-bed, that she had dedicated her infant to the service of God, imploring them to cherish and forward any inclination towards the ministerial office that might be visible in him.  It was, of course, the Lutheran form in which the child of this pious woman was bred up, and in 1734 he was sent to the grammar school of Sonnenburg, where his piety was first excited by a religious master, then cooled by an indifferent one; and he was then taken by his father, walking on foot the whole way, to pursue his studies at Custrin.  There he became beset by the temptations that surrounded young students, and after giving way to them for a time, was saved from further evil by the influence of the daughter of one of the Syndics.  It does not appear to have been a matter of sentiment, but of honest friendship and good counsel, aiding the young man to follow his better instead of his worse impulses; and thus giving a labourer to the vineyard.

Before residing at Custrin, this lady had lived for a time at Halle, and what she told the young Schwartz of the professors at that university, inspired him with the desire of completing his course under them, especially August Hermann Francke, who had established an admirable orphan house, with an excellent grammar school.

In his twentieth year, Schwartz entered at Halle, but lodged at the orphan house, where he became teacher to the Latin classes, and was put in charge of the evening devotions of the household.  At Halle, he met a retired Danish missionary, named Schultz, who had come thither to superintend the printing of a version of the Bible in Tamul, the language of Ceylon and of the Coromandel coast; and this it was that first turned his mind to the thought of offering himself as a worker in the great field of India.

He was the eldest of the family, and his friends all declared that it was impossible that his father should consent to part with him; but when he went home, and earnestly stated his desire, the elder Schwartz, instead of at once refusing as all expected, desired to take three days to consider; and when they were passed, he came gravely down from his chamber, called his son Christian, gave him his blessing, and told him to depart in God’s name, charging him to forget his own country and his father’s house, and to win many souls to Christ.

And certainly that good old German’s blessing went forth with his son.  Christian Schwartz next resigned his share in the family property to his brothers and sisters; and after completing his studies at Halle, went to Copenhagen, since it was by the Danish government that he was to be authorized.  Two other young Germans, named Poltzenheigen and Hutteman, went with him.  The Danes, though Lutherans in profession, have an Episcopal hierarchy, and the three students were ordained by the Danish Bishop Horreboa on the 6th of September, 1749; Christian Schwartz being then within a month of twenty-three.