STILLNESS midst the ever-changing,
Lord, my rest art Thou ;
So for me has dawned the morning,
God's eternal NOW.
Now for me the day unsetting,
Now, the song begun ;
Now, the deep surpassing glory,
Brighter than the sun.
Hail all hail ! thou peaceful country
Of eternal calm ;
Summer land of milk and honey
Where the streams are balm.
There the Lord my Shepherd leads me
Wheresoe'er He will ;
In the fresh green pastures feeds me
By the waters still.
Well I know them, those still waters !
Peace and rest at last.
In their depths the quiet heavens
Tell the winds are past ;
Nought to mar the picture fair
Of the glory resting there.
—G. TERSTEEGEN.
LONG ago, in the days of our Queen Elizabeth, there lived and ruled at Wittgenstein the good Count Lewis, who is on record as "one of the most remarkable princes of the sixteenth century."
His domains formed the southernmost point of the province of Westphalia, divided from the central and Catholic part of Westphalia by the high and rugged Rothhaar mountains. Two rivers, the Eder and the Lahn, flowed from the mountains through the Wittgenstein territory. But the land was for the most part rugged, stony, and barren, so that only in the sheltered valleys rye could be cultivated, and even oats and potatoes grew but sparingly in most parts of the territory; fruit only in the warmest valleys on the sunny hillsides.
On the other hand, the mountain slopes and glens were thickly wooded with magnificent trees, and in these forests game of all sorts abounded. Here and there were patches of green meadow and heath-land.
The peasants, who were mostly very poor, lived chiefly by wood-cutting and charcoal—burning. Besides the count no landed proprietors existed, nor was there anything at that time that could be called a town. Later on the town of Berleburg was built, where it was recorded in the chronicles that Count Lewis "was a famous and learned lord, whose like was not to be found in the Holy Roman Empire, well versed in many languages, namely, in Latin, Greek, French, and other tongues, and withal a good theologian. Moreover he was specially a lover of the word of God, and he was zealous, which was an especial and great gift which God gave him."
The count had studied in his youth at Paris and at other universities, probably at Zurich. He had spent three years at Rome as the Pope's chamberlain, and had brought home from his travels the knowledge of the gospel, which he had learned from the Swiss Reformers, He therefore laboured for the spread of the Reformed teaching in his dominions, and lived to see the whole territory reckoned amongst the Protestant states of the Reformed Church.
At his death his son Lewis inherited the southern and more fertile district of his dominions, properly called Wittgenstein ; his son George, the rough mountain country of Berleburg. Thereafter the two families lived on as loving relations, true to the Reformed faith, and in 1657 the respective heads of the two branches married two pious sisters, namely, the Count Gustave of Wittgenstein, Anna Helene; and the Count George of Berleburg, Amalie Marguerite, daughters of a French nobleman, Francois Vicomte de Machaud, whose family had fled to the Netherlands on the occasion of the massacre of S. Bartholomew.
When, in the reign of Louis XIV., fresh persecutions of the French Huguenots broke out, the two countesses found a pleasure in welcoming to their secluded homes any who were seeking a safe refuge from the king's dragoons.
The Wittgenstein families owned several fine castles, some of which they gave up entirely as homes of shelter to the persecuted French—amongst others the castle of Schwarzenau, commanding some of the loveliest views in the valley of the Eder.
The French brought prosperity with them. They set up woollen factories, which greatly increased the revenues of the little state, as their fine stuffs found a ready sale at Frankfort and elsewhere.
Other persecuted Christians—Labadists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and such like—hearing of this safe and hospitable corner, joined the French community from time to time ; and the good counts and their wives, who thought little of outward distinctions, but loved and welcomed all who loved Christ, gladly received these waifs and strays of orthodox Christendom.
But the word of God has shewn us that He desires for us not only that " our love should abound more and more," but that it should be "in knowledge, and in all judgment." This last the Counts of Wittgenstein appear to have overlooked. They not only entertained angels unawares, but also many who were by no means angels, and thus many troubles and scandals arose.
Count Gustave seems to have been liberal beyond his means ; for having reduced himself to poverty, he gave up the government of his territories in the year 1698 to his eldest son, Henry Albert, and retired with the Countess Anna Helene and his four daughters to Magdeburg, where he died two years later.
All the count's children, with the exception of his second son Augustus, were of like mind with their father and mother. Augustus had a good appointment at the court of Berlin, where he was in high favour. Henry Albert married his cousin, the grand-daughter of Count George and Amalie Marguerite. She also was an earnest and devoted Pietist.
Her mother, the Countess Hedwig Sophie of Berleburg, was the widow of Count Lewis Francis, "a God-fearing lord, who loved his Bible," writes the chronicler. She was left with two boys, Count Casimir and Count Franz, and several daughters, whom she trained up as best she could in the fear of the Lord. Her time was chiefly devoted to the education of these children.
Casimir was sent, at the age of seventeen, to the neighbouring universities of Marburg and Giessen. The countess sent with him his chamberlain, who was, as she believed, an earnest Pietist. This man, Uffelmann, was, however, a proficient in hypocrisy. He led the young count into habits of gambling and self-indulgence; and when later on Casimir was sent by his mother to the Pietist university of Halle, Uffelmann carefully kept him out of the way of Pastor Francke and others, on the plea that they were Lutherans, and the count of the Reformed Church.
Uffelmann discovered a Reformed pastor, the Court preacher Schardt, to whose theological classes he introduced Casimir, well aware that he would learn theology from Schardt rather than the gospel of Christ. The countess happily was warned of this by a Christian lawyer at Halle, who wrote to tell her, that whilst Count Casimir was learning controversy, his soul was starved. The countess dismissed Uffelmann, and sent a Lutheran Pietist to travel with her son in Holland and England.
Casimir returned from his tour to Wittgenstein, thoroughly converted to God, and therefore overflowing with affection to the mother whom he could now value as never before. He married soon afterwards " the pious and modest Countess of Isenburg."
The countess, his mother, glad to give up to him the reins of government, retired, in the year 1712, to her dowry castle of Christianseck, four or five miles distant from her children and friends in Schwarzenau and Berleburg. We shall hear of her again.
Meanwhile the refugees of Wittgenstein and Berle-burg had increased in numbers, and we may also say in variety; for whilst many who were suffering for Christ's sake had found shelter there, others had followed who had made themselves justly obnoxious to sober and right-minded Christians, by wild notions and unseemly behaviour. Men and women who had given way to mere fleshly excitement, and who saw visions and dreamt dreams from this cause alone, people who were more or less disordered in mind, or half insane from spiritual pride, found their way to this harbour of refuge.
Persons who believed themselves to be sinless were not lacking, and of these not a few fell into habits of the grossest and most open immorality. They were then no longer harboured by the two counts ; but the examples of wickedness with which they polluted other neighbourhoods, when banished from their former home, brought a very evil name upon the communities they had left.
Not only were the family castles peopled by refugees, but shooting-boxes, farms, mills, barns, and even caves and mountain clefts, were turned into dwellings for this motley assemblage. Many besides built for themselves hermitages and huts in the thick forests around. Of these Protestant hermits, some were men of simple faith and truly devoted in heart to God. They had sought in vain in many places for those who were like-minded, and with whom they could live in Christian fellowship. But in the long years that followed the Thirty Years' War, Germany had become, with few exceptions, a barren and dry land where no water was. They had found preachers and teachers of theology and controversy ; they had found bitter zeal for Lutheranism and Calvinistic Protestantism, and bitter hatred of Lutherans to Calvinists, and Calvinists to Lutherans. They had found still more deadly hatred on the part of Rome against all Protestants alike, witnessed by the desolate and blackened ruins and deserted villages which the Imperial armies had left behind them.
They had found heathen vice in high places, which the Protestant divines had vainly attacked, armed with the law instead of the Gospel, and which Catholic France and Jesuit missionaries had taught and fostered. They had found wars, and controversies, and strife in the world and in the Church. They had found schools of rationalist philosophy springing up amongst the dry divinity schools of the Protestants, and wild sects which had branched off from the Established Churches.
They had found feasting and drinking in the convent life of the monks of Catholic Germany. " They have an excellent pack of hounds in this convent," writes one, "a stable of fine hunters, apartments magnificently furnished—a dozen of most beautiful singing girls, and their wine-cellar excites the utmost astonishment. The number of casks is really amazing, each being about seventeen or eighteen feet in height. They have three large rooms for games, and an excellent band of musicians."
Can we wonder that there were some amongst Christian men who longed "to flee away and be at rest—to wander far off, and remain in the wilderness," alone with Christ and their Bibles ?
They protested long and vainly against the desecration of the holy things of God, against the meeting of the world and the Church at the table of the Lord ; and they had found that, as in the days of fallen Israel, "all tables are full of filthiness, there is no place clean."
To them the quiet woods and glens of Wittgenstein were a haven of rest, and through them that little territory became, as Goebel tells us, "the centre and the hearth of a mighty awakening, which spread through the whole of Western Germany from the Alps to the Northern Sea—which gathered together the children of God who were scattered abroad, and scattered broadcast spiritual food, and was watered everywhere by showers of spiritual blessing."
"The history of this awakening," wrote Stilling, "has the closest connection with the ' Crusaders ' of our time. To him who attentively watches the signs of the times, it is perceivable that in the first half of the eighteenth century an extraordinary movement aroused the whole of European Christendom, especially in Germany. It was then that arose the great institutions at Halle, under the blessed Francke and his friends ; it was then that Zinzendorf called together and sent forth the Moravian Brethren; it was then also, we may add, that the martyrs and preachers of the whole of Southern France suffered and died in multitudes amongst their mountains, or were scattered abroad in distant lands ; it was then that in England the Methodists went forth, and in all the history of the Church there was no time when the coming of the Lord was so bright a hope, the object of so deep a longing."
Since then, it is true, the coming of the Lord has again been preached more scripturally and spiritually, and for this let us be thankful. But let us also thank God for these banished, despised, and detested witnesses, who in the forests of Westphalia "wandered in deserts and mountains, and in the dens and caves of the earth."
One more variety of the Wittgenstein hermits has, however, to be mentioned. Of this class many were to be found in all parts of Catholic and Protestant Europe. They were the Theosophists, the Cabbalists, the Alchemists, who were classed together by most men as mystics or magicians. Some, superstitious seekers after the secrets of the universe by the arts of "white magic"; some, inventors of many ways of satisfying the craving of the soul for intercourse with God, or with demons.
Pietists had here and there been fascinated by these dreams, and the marvels that were told by Rosicrucians, and Behmenists, and the disciples of Paracelsus. Reiner Copper was, we find, an adept in alchemy in his later days. And amongst those who buried themselves in the woods of Wittgenstein were here and there uncanny men, who built for themselves laboratories, and gave themselves up to the deciphering of the secrets of things on earth, and of the stars in heaven, who were learned in mystic numbers, and words, and signs, and in the sympathies and antipathies which ruled the course of men's complex lives, and whose mysterious theories broke out at times into strange forms of wickedness and blasphemy.
These also were by degrees expelled from the lands of the pious counts, though at first the skill in medicine, which was claimed by some of them, gave them a hold in the castles of both of the Wittgenstein families, to whom we must now return.