Part I, Chapter II — The First Foreign Missionary, the Rev. C. F. Heyer, M. D.
The life of the Rev. C. F. Heyer, M. D., though not that of a great man as the world estimates greatness, reminds us that we, also, as servants of God, may make our lives sublime by the reception and reflection of the light of truth and grace, which is perfectly manifested in Jesus Christ.
By the grace of God Dr. Heyer was a cosmopolitan, a fine type of the Christian pilgrim and stranger who, seeking to reach the city which is to come, labors, while he journeys heavenward, for the extension of the kingdom, power and glory of God on earth. In a review of his life and career one is led over land and sea, from continent to continent, finding traces of his footsteps especially in Germany, the land of his birth, in the United States, the land of his adop- tion, and in India, the land of his most memorable work. Heyer's career teaches us in unmistakable language that human life in the fear of God and in the faith of Jesus Christ is neither a dream of worldly dehght nor a nightmare of hope- less despair, but a real and earnest existence, lacking neither innocent romance nor beneficent tribulation in the steady pursuit of the divinely appointed calling, the dignity, duties and destiny of which are determined and developed by faith- ful service to Jesus Christ, the di\ane Redeemer and Lord of all men and of all things.
Heyer was a conspicuous figure in our Lutheran Church in America two generations and more ago. Esteemed by his cotemporaries for the vigor of his faith and the value of his service, the kindly dignity of his manhood won for him the unique title of Father Heyer. He has been described as "a man of short stature, untiring energy, cheerful disposition, unflinching courage and self-denying spirit." Eager and zealous to the very last days of his ripe old age to propagate
FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONARY, REV. C. F. HEYER, M. D. 23 the Gospel, both at home and in the foreign field, the Church instinctively turned to him whenever it contemplated a new mission enterprise. His success, both as a home and as a foreign missionary, entitles him to the first place in the fist of the great missionaries of the Lutheran Church in America; and his name will ever be recalled as an abiding inspiration for mission effort in every direction.
John Christian Frederick Heyer^ was born in Helmstedt, duchy of Brunswick, Germany, July lo, 1793. Europe was then in a state of turmoil caused by the rise and spread of revolutionary ideas and movements, which had made the United States free and independent of England and were rapidly demolishing the established institutions of France. Napoleon Bonaparte was in the near background of current events and was already beginning to shape the course of his- tory. Heyer was eleven and a half years old when Napoleon was crowned emperor of France.
The French Revolution was accompanied by a storm of religious error, which developed into the tornado of Ration- aHsm, swept over France, Germany, England and America, and left in its wake broken faith and buried piety. As a student at the University of Goettingen, Heyer faced this storm and remained in the faith of the fathers.
Of greater significance as a world-movement than either the French Revolution or Rationalism was the revival of the spirit and work of Christian missions to heathen lands. It is more than a mere coincidence that the year of Heyer's birth was the year in which William Carey landed on the soil of India. Forty-nine" years later Heyer established the Guntur India Mission for the Ministerium of Penn- sylvania.
John Christian Frederick was the third child and second son of John Henry Gottlieb and Sophie Johanna WagenerHeyer. His father was a burgher and master-furrier in Helmstedt, His parents were pious Christians and brought him up, as he afterward testified, in the nurture and admoni- 1 He almost invariably signed his letters and articles C. F. Heyer. The baptismal record in Helmstedt gives his name as Johann Christian Friedrich.
24 AMERICAN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN MISSIONS IN INDIA tion of the Lord. He seems to have been a precocious child, for he began to attend the village school at the early age of three years, and when he was thirteen years old a company of French soldiers, quartered in Helmstedt, employed him as an interpreter. Fearing, perhaps, that young as he was, he might be drafted into the French army, his parents decided to send him to an uncle living in Philadelphia. After he had been confirmed in St. Stephen's Church, Helmstedt, in 1807, his father took him in August, that year, to Hamburg, but find- ing that port blockaded by French war ships, proceeded to Friedricksstadt, Denmark, where the father entrusted his son to the care of Captain Wilhams, master of the American ves- sel "Pittsburg," bound for Philadephia. The voyage across the Atlantic Ocean lasted eight weeks, and the passage money, amounting to $140, was paid by the Philadelphia uncle. For a while the fourteen-year-old immigrant attended Pastor Passey's private school, and then he worked in his uncle's fac- tory, learning the trade of a furrier. Despite the reHgious in- difference of his uncle and remembering the precepts of his parents and pastor in Helmstedt, Heyer regularly attended Zion's German Lutheran Church at Fourth and Cherry streets, of which the Rev. J. H. Ch. Helmuth, D. D., was then the senior pastor. He became a teacher in the Sunday school and joined the choir and the Mosheim Society, a lit- erary, social and religious association of young men in the congregation. The junior pastor of the congregation, the Rev. John C. Baker, D. D., awakened in him the desire to enter the holy ministry, and in 1809, being in his seventeenth year, he joined the Httle circle of students who gathered around Drs. Helmuth and F. D. Schaeffer for theological in- struction. For about five years he studied under their direc- tion.
He preached his first sermon in the Almshouse in Phila- delphia in 18 13, and on Trinity Sunday of the following year was permitted to deliver his first sermon in Zion's Church, at the afternoon service. His text was Matthew 6:6. Con- cerning this maiden effort he wrote long afterward, "In this case, also, the word was confirmed, 'The Lord is mighty in the
FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONARY, REV. C. F. HEYER, M. D. 25 weak.' The sermon made a good impression. After more than fifty years I, to-day, still thank God for it." From Sep- tember 15, 181 3, to May 8, 1815, he taught the parochial school which Zion's Church conducted in Southwark, Phila- delphia, occasionally preaching on Sunday evenings in the schoolhouse.
In March, 181 5, Heyer returned to Germany for the double purpose of seeing his parents again and of completing his theological studies at Halle. Three weeks after having lost sight of the American shore, the "Washington" on which he was a passenger, was intercepted by a British man-of-war in search of Napoleon who had escaped from the island of Elba. Several days thereafter another ship hailed them with the news that Napoleon had returned to France, driven the king from Paris, and gathered an army to regain his lost pres- tige and power. Hamburg was in a state of intense excitement over the renewal of war; and Heyer, remaining on ship- board, wrote and told his parents that he would return to America on the same ship, because he feared that, if he pro- ceeded into the interior of Germany, he would be forced into the army. Carl, his elder brother, hastened to Hamburg and persuaded him to accompany him to Helmstedt, overcoming his fear by offering to become his substitute in case he were drafted. In the old home a joyful reunion of the family was held, and the young theological student from America was honored with an invitation to preach in the church in which he had been baptized and confirmed. Almost two th' usand townspeople gathered to hear his sermon.
Instead of going to the University at Halle, which was temporarily closed, because the students had left it to form a volunteer company under Marshal-General Bluecher, Heyer accompanied by his younger brother, Heinrich,^ went to Goet- tingen, where he was matriculated in 181 5. The prevailing rationalism of the university only served to strengthen him in his faith; and in Pastor Thilo who served a congregation 1 This brother, although a confessed rationalist at first, afterward became an orthodox Lutheran pastor and served a congregation in Gross-Poserin, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg, remaining in this pastorate over forty years.
26 AMERICAN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN MISSIONS IN INDIA near Goettingen, he found a kindred spirit and a good friend.
In 1815, while he was spending a fall vacation of several weeks at home, his "good and pious" mother died at the age of hfty-seven years. The next year he returned to America and was licensed to preach by the Pennsylvania Ministerium at York, Pa., in 181 7. The synod assigned him work in its most northwestern parish, in Crawford and Erie counties. Pa., made vacant by the death of the Rev. Mr. Colson. He was to serve for three months and receive a salary of $100, the synod promising to supplement the contributions of the parishioners if they failed to reach that amount. On his way to Meadville, where he was to reside, Heyer stopped in Lehigh County to preach trial sermons in the congregations of the par- ish just vacated by the Rev. Mr. Heine. Two of the congrega- tions voted for him and two for the other candidate, the Rev. Mr. Trumbauer, whereupon both withdrew as candidates. In the Macungie congregation he was defeated, because the people objected to a preacher who had studied abroad, wore long hair parted in the middle after the manner of German university students and, as they believed, forgot his text until he had reached almost the middle of his sermon, because he announced and recited it only after a lengthy introduction. "What trifling circumstances may give one's life a different course!" was Heyer's comment on this incident.
Continuing his journey on horseback through Orwigsburg and Sunbury, Heyer reached an outpost of the Lutheran Church in Center County, where Pastor Illgen distributed to his widely scattered flock both spiritual sustenance and drugs, gotten from Halle, Germany. In Venango County, while stopping over night with an EngHsh family in whose home family prayer was customary, the visiting minister was asked to offer the evening prayer. Familiar as he was with the English language he had never yet attempted a public prayer in that language. His effort to translate the devotional expressions of his habitual German prayers was a failure. Several months later, however, he preached his first English sermon at French Creek.
FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONARY, REV. C. F. HEYER, M. D. 27 His parish consisted of small congregations in Meadville, where services were held in the court house; at French Creek where a small, frame chapel had been built; in Erie County where a country schoolhouse was used for church purposes; and at Connaught Lake, where services were conducted in the largest house in the settlement.
Before the three months of his engagement had expired he was elected by the congregations as their regular pastor. He remained to serve them for nearly a year. During that time he instructed and confirmed thirty-five persons, baptized fifty-three children, built a neat frame chapel and bought a parsonage with forty acres of land in Meadville. When he left Meadville in the summer of 1818, riding 200 miles on horseback to attend the meeting of the Ministerium in Harris- burg, both he and his parish expected his return; but the synod decided that, because he had shown his ability to preach in both German and English—a very rare accomplishment in those days—and because he had displayed commend- able zeal and pastoral wisdom, he was just the man needed to reorganize the congregations of the Cumberland parish in Maryland. Reluctant as he v/as to leave his work in northwestern Pennsylvania, he went to Cumberland, where he found the church-building and the congregation in the town in a woeful state of collapse. The Methodists had converted (?) most of the Lutherans. All but Martin Rizer, a faithful deacon, and four other men with their families had deserted the congregation. Enthusiastically aided by his loyal deacon, Heyer began the work of reconstruction. "My Enghsh sermons, at first," wrote Heyer, "attracted no special attention, the proselyters harboring no fear that the little German preacher would put a stop to their sheep-stealing; but gradu- ally, as through diligence and practice I attained greater pro- ficiency, the audience increased. The people were curious to hear the strange preacher; the crowds came to us." For six years he labored wisely and well in Cumberland, rebuilding the dilapidated log church, reorganizing the congrega- tion, increasing its membership, and serving seven or eight preaching points in the country. His parish ex- , 28 AMERICAN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN MISSIONS IN INDIA tended eighty miles east and west and thirty miles north and south.
^
After having been a candidate for ordination, licensed to preach and administer the holy sacraments, for three years, he was solemnly ordained a deacon at the Lancaster, Pa., meeting of the Ministerium in 1820,^ and was at the same time appointed to undertake a missionary tour through parts of Kentucky and Indiana. He spent three months, from July to October, 1820, on this tour, covering a territory of twenty- five hundred miles, travelhng at first on foot and then on horseback, preaching wherever he could gather a few people, administering the holy sacraments, and distributing German and English tracts.^ In September, 1822, the congregation in Cumberland, being then in its most flourishing state during Heyer's pas- torate, entertained the newly organized synod of Virginia and Maryland, which he had joined the year previous and which had admitted him as a full-fledged pasfor. During the fall and winter of 1822 and throughout 1823, Cumberland was visited by a prolonged epidemic of fever. Not a family escaped. Heyer lost his youngest child and he himself contracted the disease. He and his family, as well as many of the townspeople, spent the summer of 1823 in the mountains near Cumberland. During his absence the Cumberland congregation became sadly disorganized; and, after having supplied the congregation in Somerset, Pa., for several months, he followed a call to that parish in 1824.'* In Somer-
^ He served either temporarily or permanently the Wellersville (Wellersburg) Combs, Greenville, Uhls, Yough, Glades, Germany and George's Hill congregations. ^ Theological students who preached were termed catechists. Then they were licensed and tested in some parish, their license being annually renewed, until they were ordained deacons. Subsequently they were admitted to the Ministerium as regular pastors by the right hand of fellowship. ^ The synod paid for these tracts and gave Heyer a compensation of forty dollars a month for his service. He found Lutherans scattered through Boone, Jefferson and Nelson counties in Kentucky, and through Harrison, Boyd and Jefferson counties in Indiana. During his absence the Cumberland congregation was supplied by the Rev. A. Reck, of Winchester, Va.; the Rev. C. P. Krauth, of Shepherdstown, Va., and the Rev. Benjamin Kurtz, of Hagerstown, Md. * This parish consisted of congregations in Somerset, Friedensburg, Stoystown and Samuels.
FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONARY, REV. C. F. HEYER, M. D. 29 set he was called upon to wage a spiritual warfare against the followers of Alexander Campbell. In the midst of a series of sermons directed against the errors of this new sect, which disturbed the minds of many in his congregation, the frame church-building of the Lutheran congregation was destroyed by fire. Suspicion of incendiarism rested on a certain CampbelHte. The embers of the rained church still glowed when Alexander Campbell himself arrived from Washington, Pa., to crush the little Lutheran preacher who had dared to call the CampbelHte teachings into question. The sympathies of the people, however, were with the afflicted Lutheran congregation and Campbell got a scant hearing. The congregation at once began to build a new brick church, the corner-stone of which was laid in 1825; but soon there- after the building operations were suspended, and Heyer resigned, in 1827, to follow a call to Carlisle, Pa., succeeding the Rev. Benjamin Keller.
While pastor in Somerset he helped to organize the synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church west of the Susquehanna River, afterward called the West Pennsylvania Synod, and at its meeting at York, Pa., in 1828, he was elected secretary. Three years later at Indiana, Pa., he was honored with the office of president. On June 21, 1830, Heyer became the agent of "The Sunday School Union of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States," which had been formed in October, 1829, by a number of delegates to the General Synod at Hagerstown, Md., at the suggestion of the West Pennsylvania Synod. Heyer, who had been the chairman of the committee which drafted the constitution of the society, entered on the dudes of the newly created office with much enthusiasm. He was convinced that what the church needed at that time, above all other things, was the organization of a Sunday school in every Lutheran congregation. ^ In the course of eighteen months 1 In the minutes of the first meeting of this synod held at Chambersburg, September 4, 1825, he is recorded as a member, absent and excused. ^ Experience seems to have cooled his ardor. Some years later he wrote: "Sunday schools are only small plasters on large sores. We consider it our duty to recommend their establishment most heartily, but they are not to be considered as substitutes for Christian day schools."
30 AMERICAN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN MISSIONS IN INDIA he visited about three hundred congregations, travelled over 3000 miles, advised and aided pastors in the establishment of Sunday schools,^ and distributed and sold about 13,000 German Sunday school hymnals and tracts.- While serving in the capacity of Sunday school agent, Heyer assisted in the services of laying the corner-stone of the Seminary building in Gettysburg, May 26, 1831, and afterward served this institution as a member of the Board of Directors. He was, moreover, one of the first mem- bers of the Board of Trustees of Pennsylvania College.
Although heartily commended by the German Sunday School Union at its meeting, November 13, 1831, for "his faithful and successful exertions to promote the object of his appointment," he felt constrained to resign at that meeting, partly because of a lack of sufficient support and partly because of "the weariness and difficulty" of winter travelling in the open country.
The congregation in Somerset, Pa., which had been un- fortunate in its selection of Heyer's successor, petitioned the General Synod, in 1831, to permit Heyer to return. During his absence of over four years the sectarians had wrought havoc in the congregation, the church-building had remained in the unfinished condition in which he had left it, and the church property had a heavy debt resting on it. Heyer resumed charge in January, 1832. So vigorously did he carry on the work of restoration that in five months the debt was paid and the new church completed and consecrated. His second pastorate in Somerset lasted about four years. After he had preached his farewell sermon the officers of the con- gregation approached him with a petition to remain, but he comforted them with the assurance of the Apostle Paul, "Be- hold, the third time I am ready to come to you " (2 Cor. 12 : 14), and with many good wishes they let him enter the service of
^ In 1 83 1 the number of schools connected with the Union was 74; teachers* 677; and pupils, 4890.
- The first German Sunday school Hymnal of the Lutheran Church in America was that published by the West Pennsylvania Synod about this time. It was revised and enlarged in 1832 and contained 85 hymns, and was sold at six cents a copy. Heyer wrote the manuscript of an A B C book for Sunday schools, which, however, was never published.
1 FIRST FOREIGH MISSIONARY, REV. C. F. HEYER, M. D. 3 The Central Missionary Society of the General Synod as its home missionary in the Mississippi Valley. The call of the society specified that he should "traverse the principal por- tions of the entire Mississippi Valley and ascertain all German settlements, spending a short time in each." Starting on December 30, 1835, from Somerset, and accompanied as far as Laurel Mountain^ by two of the deacons of his late parish, he made the trip from Wheeling to Cincinnati on a steamboat. In the state of Indiana he visited the Rev. Mr. Lehmanowsky in Henry County and co-operated with the Rev. B. Haver- stick, travelling missionary in the service of the Pennsylvania Ministerium. Following the Ohio River through soathern Illinois, he crossed the Mississippi River near Cape Girardeau into Missouri, traversing the eastern part of that state and going as far as Iron Mountain. Returning in April, 1836, he visited the central counties of Illinois, proceeded as far north as Peoria, and then revisited Wabash County in order to assist the Rev. Mr. Haverstick in laying the corner-stone of Jordan Creek Union Church, west of Mt. Carmel, the members of which were mostly Lutherans from Lehigh and Northampton counties. Pa. In June he was back in Somerset after an ab- sence of six months from his family which had continued to reside there. The next month he started for western Pennsyl- vania.
Pittsburgh was then looming up as a center of industry, and many Germans had settled there. A German Union congregation had been established, but the West Pennsylvania Synod desired to organize an English church. Heyer, together with a number of other pastors, was entrusted with the preliminary work. He went to Pittsburgh in November, 1836, and, with the aid of Mr. G. Weyman, succeeded in establishing the First EngKsh Lutheran Church. The first steps in this direction were taken when Heyer preached to a small audience representing seven or eight Lutheran families, assembled in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church on the first Sunday in November, 1836. Several weeks later he
' Here they were hospitably entertained by Mr. J. Gebhart, the treasurer of Pennsylvania.
32 AMERICAN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN MISSIONS IN INDIA revisited Pittsburgh. Meanwhile the Unitarian church build- ing in Smithfield Street had been leased for six months and the congregation had adopted a constitution. Instructed to remain in Pittsburgh, Heyer served the English congregation and, also, in January, 1837, organized Holy Trinity German Lutheran Church, which worshipped in the same building. After the lease had expired a schoolhouse, and then the old court-house, were temporarily used by both congregations. Heyer also served a German mission in Allegheny, across the river, for a time.
After an amicable separation of the English and German congregations, thus begun by Heyer, he continued to serve the latter, while the Rev. E. Fry and later the Rev. D. John McCron, under the appointment of The Central Missionary Society, served the English congregation. Under Heyer's energetic leadership the Germans bought a lot at Sixth and Grand Streets and planned to build a church. The congre- gation, however, was poor, and Heyer undertook a tour in the East to collect a building-fund. He returned with enough money to erect the church which was consecrated on April 5, 1840.1 While engaged in his mission work in Pittsburgh, Mary, his wife, a native of Philadelphia, died at Somerset, Pa., January 13, 1839, aged fifty-two years, nine months and twenty days. She was the widow of Captain Gash when Heyer married her in 18 19. Her maiden name was Mary Webb. Six children, one of whom died in infancy at Cumber- land, Md., were born of their union. The interment was made in the cemetery of the Lutheran Church at Friedens- burg, near Somerset.
In May, 1840, Heyer was called by the General Synod's Foreign Missionary Society to be its foreign missionary to India. He handed in his resignation as the pastor of Trinity Church, Pittsburgh, but the congregation was unwilling to ac- cept it. Thereupon he requested the male members of the con-
^ The English congregation also bought a lot on Seventh street near Smith- field and built a church, Mr. G. Weyman bearing almost all of the expense. It was consecrated at the meeting of the West Pennsylvania Synod in October, 1840.
FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONARY, REV. C. F. HEYER, M. D. 33 gregation to remain after the Sunday morning service. Ex- plaining the situation to them, he asked those who were will- ing to let him go to take seats on the right side of the church, and those who were unwilling, on the left side. The former were in the majority, and after a few words of encouragement he dismissed them all, thanking them for concurring in his decision.
Directed by the executive committee of The Foreign Mis- sionary Society "to turn his attention at once to those studies which would be subservient to the work in which he was to engage," he left Pittsburgh for Baltimore, where, during the fall and winter of 1840-41, he attended lectures in Washington University, devoting himself to the study of medicine and San- scrit. Meanwhile he had accepted the appointment of the Maryland synod of which he again had become a member, to take charge of Trinity Lutheran church at Fell's Point, Balti- more. A large church property, belonging to Episcopalians, was bought and repaired, and Heyer served the congregation until the fall of 184 1. He preached his farewell sermon on Sunday, September 26th The congregation expressed its regret over his departure and its sincere appreciation of his service in a set of resolutions which were published in the church papers.
We have already learned how, after having declined the call of The Foreign Missionary Society of the General Synod, Heyer became the foreign missionary of the Pennsylvania Synod's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. He left Baltimore on September 30th, going to Gettysburg, where he left his youngest son, Theophilus. Then he turned his face toward India, where much labor and sacrifice but also great honor and blessing awaited him.
Daring the twenty-four years which elapsed between his licensure and his departure for India, Heyer held eight differ- ent appointments, averaging three years in each. The reason for these frequent changes may be found, in part, in a roving disposition; but we must not overlook the fact that the work to which he was called in most of his appointments was of a temporary character. At any rate, it is evident that the
34 AMERICAN EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN MISSIONS IN INDIA Church always displayed confidence in his ability and fidelity, regardless of the task which it asked him to undertake. As new movements were begun Heyer was selected to do the pioneer work, and he never failed to respond to the call even though the prospects were not promising. He served in six established congregations or parishes and all but one of them in some way expressed sincere regret at his departure. To- day, after more than half a century, every congregation with which his name was in any way associated, refers to that asso- ciation with justifiable pride, for Father Heyer is undoubtedly one of the great men of our Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.