[Sidenote: The First Missionary Society.] At the meeting of the West Pennsylvania Synod in Mechanicsburg in 1836 there was formed at the recommendation of the General Synod a Central Missionary Society whose object was “to send the Gospel of the Son of God to the destitute portions of the Lutheran Church in the United States of America by means of missions; to assist for a season such congregations as are not able to support the Gospel; and, ultimately to co-operate in sending it to the heathen world.” Later the name of the society was changed to “The Foreign Missionary Society of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States of America.” [Illustration: A MALAGASY WITCH DOCTOR.] [Illustration: NATIVE LUTHERAN MINISTERS IN MADAGASCAR.] [Sidenote: Two Appeals.] There had come meanwhile to the Lutheran Church in America two appeals from the foreign field, one from Missionary Rhenius in India whose career we have described in Chapter II, the other from Gützlaff in China, whom we shall study in Chapter V. It was decided in answer to the appeal of Rhenius that _John Christian Frederick Heyer_ should go to India as the first missionary of the General Synod. When it appeared probable that difficulties would arise on account of the connection with the inter-denominational American Board under whose direction Heyer was to go, he resigned, and in 1841 was sent by the Pennsylvania Synod which had withdrawn from the General Synod after the first meeting. The death of Rhenius and the return of his followers to the English mission made it possible for the Americans to select a wholly new field. [Sidenote: The First American Lutheran Missionary.] In April, 1842, a hundred years after the arrival of Muhlenberg in America, Mr. Heyer became the first fruit of his missionary hopes. Heyer was of German birth and had come to America when he was fourteen years old. From 1817 till 1841 he had been a home missionary, laboring in difficult and widely divided fields in Pennsylvania and Maryland, Indiana and Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri. Travelling from settlement to settlement often amid the greatest hardships, he had established churches and Sunday schools.