THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
its activity for the first century of its existence principally to the religious care of the colonists. The powerful East-India Company, which received its charter in 1600 from Queen Elizabeth, gave no thought to missions.
Denmark also possessed colonies after 1620 in
the East Indies and after 1672 in the West Indies.
The first Lutheran mission started from Denmark
in 1705, on the initiative of King Fred-
7. Early erick IV But as no missionaries could be Danish found in Denmark, the court preacher
Missions. Luetkens of Copenhagen, who had been called from Berlin, turned to his pietist ic friends in Germany. In this way the Danish mission came into relationship with the German Pietists and soon also with August Hermann Francke (q.v.). Two of his pupils, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg (q.v.) and Heinrich Pliitschau, went as " royal missionaries " to East India (Tranquebar), where they opened the way for an Evangelical mission. In Copenhagen there was founded a royal "College for Advancing the Cause of the Gospel," but Francke was the effective leader. Through him Pietism was combined with the mission and this combination kept the latter alive. Still another mission was established by Denmark, namely in Greenland, not however by the king but by a pastor of the Lofoden, Hans Egede (q.v.), who succeeded in reaching the land for which he longed only in 1721, after unspeakable efforts and only by connecting himself with a commercial company enjoying a royal privilege.
2. The Era of Pietism and Rationalism: Pietism (q.v.), the first great reform movement inside the churches of the Reformation, insisted upon personal Christianity instead of mere submission to external authority, upon a Christianity of deeds l.Francke's instead of a Christianity of words;
Services, upon Bible Christianity instead of dogmatism; and upon the general priesthood instead of adherence to a rigid rule of office. Its insistence upon an active faith qualified Pietism for the mission task as soon as its attention was directed to the non-Christian world. Pietism was the father of the heathen mission as of all the institutions for rescue work, a combination which was illustrated by Francke, who became the standardbearer of the missionary movement emanating from Pietism. By bis far-reaching pedagogical plans, by his correspondence with Leibnitz, and by the call of two of his pupils to aid in the Danish mission, he was led to mission work to the heathen. His chief services in the field are: (1) that he provided it with workers. A pedagogue of great talent, he was able to make his orphan asylum a means of education of workers of all descriptions in the service of the kingdom of God; (2) that he awoke in Evangelical Christendom the consciousness that it should itself carry on the mission task by sustaining the missionaries with its prayers and gifts; (3) that by a periodical publication he diffused knowledge and understanding of mission work. Francke was the first to collect a praying, giving, and striving missionary society, and so began to lift from missions the ban of being merely the official duty of the Christian colonial government.
Naturally, for the time being, it was only the Pietists of North and South Germany who took part in the work; orthodoxy still fought it bitterly. The institutions of Francke graduated in the course of the eighteenth century about sixty missionaries, among them, besides Ziegenbalg, Fabricius, and Christian Friedrich Schwartz (q.v.), so that the Tranquebar mission is rightly called the Danish- Halle Mission. Amid much trouble caused by petty annoyances from colonial officials, by war and disputes of various kinds, this mission endured until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when it was undermined by rationalism at home. English aid saved it from entire destruction; later, the Leipsic Lutheran Mission entered into the old inheritance, so far as it had not already been absorbed by Anglican societies.
A thoroughly new life came into the missionary movement by the entrance of the United Brethren into the field. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (q.v.) was the instrument whom God used to raise the missions to a higher plane. Zinzendorf can well be called a missionary genius. 2. Zinzen- His first impulses to mission work were
dorf and received in the house of Francke, and the "United the last impulse to the practical real- Brethren, ization of his missionary plans was given by the sojourn in Copenhagen, 1731, where he became acquainted with a negro from St. Thomas, West Indies, and with Greenlanders. But the inclination toward the mission was implied in the whole quality of his religious nature. He was full of Christian zeal which animated him to collect around him and to organize coworkers, for whose sphere of activity he recognized no local limits. In the winning of these coworkers, the Providence of God is unmistakable. Zinzendorf found them among those heroic Moravians who were driven from their fatherland because of their faith and were ripened by suffering and persecution. From them and certain pilgrims who came to Herrnhut, the organizing genius of the count formed a community which became in the highest degree a mission church. That a community was then established which put all its energy into the heathen mission, so that its very existence became identified with this work and has remained so to this day, is the great achievement of Zinzendorf in the history of missions. At the death of the count (1760), the missionary success of the Moravian Church surpassed everything that had been done by the Protestant world for the conversion of the heathen. They had sent out 226 missionaries to all parts of the earth, except Australia, and not alone to Protestant colonial possessions. In this business-like haste, the restless genius of the count shows itself, but, nevertheless, there is something heroic in the fact that such a small community could operate enterprises which extended over nearly the whole world.
Nevertheless the missionary activity, till then unheard of, developed by this community, failed to inspire the Protestantism of the eighteenth century to missionary effort. The missionary era of Zinzendorf fell in the transition period between the decline of orthodoxy and the rise of rationalism, and