“Hail to thee, monarch of African mountains,
Remote, inaccessible, silent and lone--
Who, from the heart of the tropical fervors,
Liftest to heaven thine alien snows,
Feeding forever the fountains that make thee
Father of Nile and creator of Egypt!
I see thee supreme in the midst of thy co-mates,
Standing alone ’twixt the earth and the heavens,
Heir of the sunset and herald of morn.
Zone above zone, to thy shoulders of granite,
The climates of earth are displayed as an index,
Giving the scope of the book of creation.
There in the wandering airs of the tropics
Shivers the aspen, still dreaming of cold:
There stretches the oak, from the loftiest ledges,
His arms to the far-away lands of his brothers,
And the pine looks down on his rival, the palm.”
[Sidenote: David Livingstone.] This section of Africa cannot be passed
without a mention of that other hero, David Livingstone, the missionary,
scientist, and explorer, who said, “I am tired of discovery if no fruit
follows it”, and “The end of geographical achievement is only the
beginning of missionary undertaking”, who was a king among men and who
considered it his only glory that he was a “poor, poor imitation of
Christ.”
There is a very particular reason for including a mention of Livingstone
in a history of Lutheran missions, because his impulse to become a
missionary was directly inspired by a Lutheran, Karl Frederick Gützlaff,
whom we shall study in Chapter V. Livingstone was interested in missions
and had resolved “that he would give to the cause of missions all that
he might earn beyond what was required for his subsistence.” When he
read Gützlaff’s appeal on behalf of China he determined to give himself.
For various reasons Africa rather than China was determined upon for the
scene of his labor.
The first German movement toward a missionary possession of the German
colonies in Africa was in Bavaria where a group of men who had been
influenced by Krapf, planned a Wakamba mission. Their society is
generally known by the name of their headquarters, _Bielefeld_. One of
the leading spirits and a director of this society was Bodelschwingh,
the famous leader of Germany’s Inner Mission movement. Bodelschwingh,
like Francke, was an illustration of the fact that they who do mission
work at home do also mission work abroad.
The principal field of the Bielefeld Society is Tanga and the country
lying behind it. In 1907 it began a new mission in the northwest corner
of German East Africa, a densely populated district between Lakes
Victoria Nyanza, Kivu and Tanganyika. In its two fields the mission has
thirty-five missionaries and about two thousand Christians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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