O God, a world of empty show,
Dark wilds of restless, fruitless quest,
Lie round me wheresoe'er I go
Within, with Thee, is rest.
And sated with the weary sum
Of all men think, and hear, and see,
O more than mother's heart,
I come A tired child to Thee.
Sweet childhood of eternal life
Whilst troubled days and years go by,
In stillness hushed from stir and strife
Within Thine Arms I lie.
Thine Arms, to whom I turn and cling
With thirsting soul that longs for Thee—
As rain that makes the pastures sing
Be Thou, my God, to me.
—G. TERSTEEGEN.
HENRY TERSTEEGEN was, as we have said, a merchant of this little town, in the duchy of Berg, one of those unquiet and unhappy provinces which had so long been a bone of contention to many different claimants.
Little Gerhardt, his youngest son, not quite six years old at the time of his father's death, could remember little of his words and ways. But as he grew older he learnt, from old papers and letters left behind in desks and drawers, that Henry Tersteegen was a man who loved and served God, and who kept up a voluminous correspondence with awakened Christians in Holland and Germany.
Labadists, no doubt, were amongst them ; for Labadist " families," like that of Amsterdam and Herford, had sprung up all around the town of Meurs. Labadist preachers had laboured in neighbouring towns and villages, amongst them Reiner Copper, from Mülheim, who had removed to Duisburg, and after a while was deprived of his pastorate by the elders of the church, on account of his refusal to admit unconverted persons to the Lord's Supper.
Labadist conventicles were, as we know, to be found at Mülheim and in the towns around, within easy reach of Meurs.
The house of Henry Tersteegen has still many visitors to whom the memory of Gerhardt Tersteegen is dear.
Just after his father's death, Gerhardt was sent to the Latin school at Meurs, where for nine years he studied diligently. He was the least robust of Cornelia's six boys, but the only one who appears to have had extraordinary powers of mind. His mother intended to send him later to a university, and with this prospect he devoted himself to classics, learning also Hebrew and French.
He was beautiful, we are told by one who knew him, clever and gifted beyond other boys. He was also industrious, honourable, and conscientious. But it was for himself and for the world that he lived and worked. The God of his father was as yet unknown to him, and perhaps all the more so, because his blameless life blinded him to the fact that he was lost, and dead in trespasses and sins.
And yet blameless ! Blameless in the eyes of man. But He whose eyes are as a flame of fire saw in that young heart no spark of love to Him who was one day to be all to him in time and in eternity.
Four of the elder brothers were in business as merchants. The fifth was later a preacher, but died young. This brother, nearest in age to Gerhardt, his best-beloved brother John, died in middle age.
Gerhardt worked hard to distinguish himself at the Latin school, and he succeeded. He could look forward to honours in his college life. It must have been a bitter disappointment to him when his mother found that the expense would be too great for her small means. She had no choice but to send him to learn business with his brother-in-law, Matthias Brinck, who lived at Mulheim, on the Ruhr.
The boy was then fifteen years old, delighting in books and in thought, by no means interested in money-making, or in the traffic and employments of the people of Mülheim, then, as now, a busy manufacturing town, with a great trade in brown-holland, linen of all sorts, ribbons and silk.
But if this appeared to be a common-place life to Gerhardt, there was another side of Mülheim life far from common-place. It was, at the time of Gerhardt's arrival, a town most extraordinary and remarkable. We have a little picture of it drawn by Professor Melchior, who was a pastor there from 1708 to 1717.
We remember that it was in the year 1712 that Gerhardt was sent there, just about the same time that another boy well known to history, John Wesley, was sent from the Lincolnshire rectory to study at the Charterhouse.
Professor Melchior tells us of Minheim, " If songs were heard in the workshops or the fields they were not profane songs, but sacred—either the psalms of David, or hymns from the hymn-books. It would have been difficult to find a man who went to his work without sonic book to read in his spare moments that would stir him up to godliness. Even the little boys and girls who went to the field with the sheep or cows could seldom be found without such a book to beguile the time."
Do we know any of these hymns ? Some of them are still sung and loved in German towns and villages. You might hear the washerwoman singing as you passed her door. It was to her as though the words came to her from the lips of Christ.
" Can a mother cease to care
For the sucking child she bare ? Faithful I will be.
Yea, amen, My oath is given,
Nor can aught in hell or heaven Sever thee and Me.
"Thee eternally I claim,
On My hands I find thy name,
I who graved it there.
Ever in My thoughts thou art, Evermore within My heart,
Evermore My care."
"I always know, when I have been travelling about, that I am getting back to Mülheim," said Pastor Melchior, " for I hear the singing everywhere."
Thus it was not in vain that Untereyk and Copper, and Sybel and Backhaus, and the Countess Charlotte, had lived and laboured at Mülheim, and that Yvon and Dulignon had preached there of the love of Jesus. And when Gerhardt came there the sound of the singing filled the town.
It has been truly said, that from the time that the people of God came out of the house of bondage, from the land of Egypt, every time of deliverance and of refreshing has been marked by songs of praise. When the light broke in upon the German convents of the Middle Ages, when Huss and Luther preached the glad tidings. from heaven, when the Huguenots were aroused in the Cevennes to make their glorious stand for the gospel of Christ, when the Methodists were sent forth through the dead towns and villages of England, "then," as Goebel writes, "did the life and freshness of Christian life break forth in glorious songs and hymns, which told the wonders of that heavenly life in clear and lovely music."
Thus there was something more than the sound of factory wheels to reach the ears of Gerhardt Tersteegen, and his soul was filled with longing for that sunny mountain-side of which John Bunyan tells us.
" I saw," said Bunyan, " as if the poor women I had met at Bedford were on the sunny side of some high mountain, there refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the sun, while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold, afflicted with frost, snow, and dark clouds."
And so also it seemed to Gerhardt when he saw and heard the preachers of Mülheim, and those who came there from time to time from the Holy Land of Germany—the little district of Wittgenstein—which was to Germany as the Cevennes to France, and as the valleys of Piedmont to Italy. A short history of this obscure corner of Westphalia will be needful in this place.