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Schweitzer-His Black Brother's Keeper

BARNSTORMING FOR GOD!
It would hardly be guessed of one of the world's greatest organists.

Yet that is what Albert Schweitzer does when he comes out of Africa to raise money for his work among the Negroes-barnstorms for God through Europe.

[Black and white photograph of a man arm in arm with a girl]
Courtesy of The Christian Herald
A Barnstormer for God
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, one of the world's greatest organists, who uses his genius only that he may be "a poor Negro's doctor" in Africa.

This man, an authority on, and an interpreter of, Bach, who has stirred thousands with his music in Westminster Abbey, in Paris, in Berlin, who is learned in the arts, and an authority on religious subjects, who is a surgeon and a physician, refuses to be anything more than "a poor Negro's doctor" in French Equatorial Africa.

And once the Franch made him a prisoner of war-this man who by the accident of birth was an Alsatian and a German subject, but who actually was but a simple servant of humanity.

Bishop Barnes of Birmingham calls him one of the world's greatest living men. He had the musical world of Europe at his feet, but he chose to go to Africa, to pit himself against pestilence, suffering, ignorance, for the Negroes' sake.

One has only to read the story of him by Hubert W. Peet, in The Christian Herald, to learn that Crusaders still ride.

Son and grandson of Protestant ministers, Albert Schweitzer was born in Kayserberg, in Upper Alsace. As a boy he always championed the unfortunate. Sickness and misery always wrenched his heart, and when he snuggled down between the blankets at night, he said a little prayer of his own: "And Heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from evil, and let them sleep in peace."

THEN there was his music. Suffice it to say here that at sixteen a teacher caught a flash of his genius, and the boy progressed until Charles Marie Widor, the great Widor of Paris, taught him all that the teacher knew himself.

At twenty-three, Albert Schweitzer was a doctor of philosophy, at twenty-eight organist to the Bach Society in Paris and to the Orfeo Catala in Barcelona. "Europe," we read, "came to look upon him as their greatest authority in the playing and constructing of organs. He wrote a life of Bach. He had arrived."

But one day the infinite sadness in a Negro's face in stone caught his eye. He resolved to study medicine, and in four years he was graduated. He and his wife, a trained nurse, went to Africa, and the writer tells us:

"When he got off the boat at Lambarene, he had as capital: a patrch of forest (gift of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society) ; a piano in a zinc-lined case (gift of the Bach Society in Paris, and his one great link with the life he had left behind); a heart of oak, and God.

"He had, also, the suspicion of the natives of Africa. These black men had seen whites before: they had been robbed of their timber and their oil, their freedom and their very lives, by the pale-faced men from across the sea. And here was another. . . .

"But almost before the ground was cleared for his new hospital, the missionary had dispelled their suspicions. The impression that he was an exploiter of their resources evaporated like snowballs in a noonday sun.

"He cured a little boy of sleeping-sickness, and the mother went wild with joy.

"He cured a hostile tribesman of dysentery, and the man sang his praises all up and down the Ogowe River.

"The news spread like a prairie fire: a white man, who said that Jesus had sent him, had come to Lambarene, and he could put you to sleep, and when you woke up, you were well. Fearful, outraged Africa took heart-and came. God was playing His melody-on men of ebony!

"The patients persisted in eating the medicines he gave them; no matter what it was, if they liked the fragrance of it, they ate it.

"Then there was the matter of equipment. Surgical tools rust quickly in the jungle. Ether was hard to keep; and they had no place to operate. The only building they had in those early days was the Doctor's bungalow.

"But up on the hill above was a chicken coop. They operated in that. An old camp-bed was the operating-table; most of the dirt they swamped with whitewash.

"There was plenty of overhead lighting, the roof was full of holes. The Doctor had to stop, whenever it rained, and bandage his patient till it was over."

NEVERTHELESS, he became a victim of the war, and was imprisoned by the French as an "enemy alien," he who was alien to nothing but human misery.

"But the minute they let him out of the camp in the Pyrenees, Schweitzer was at it again.

"He needed money; the work had to go on; his dreams for the African needed a firm financial basis.

"So away he went. Up and down and across Europe; lecturing in Scandinavia; playing at the Abbey; giving concerts in Germany, France, Italy. People listened to him, loved him, gasped, and saw him go. 'Barnstorming for God,' he turned their suspicions (he was still German, then) into love.

"He was the first healer of the nations to cross Europe after the bloody cataclysm of the war. And when he had nothing else to do, he published two more books: 'The Decay and Restoration of Civilization,' and 'Civilization and Ethics.'

"He scraped together every cent he could get; then he caught the first boat for Africa.

"His wife was sick, and couldn't go. But a young medical student at Oxford, Noel Gillespie, had caught a flash of the divine spark in Schweitzer, and went instead. In the hold of his ship was a motor-boat, to be used on the Ogowe. Two trained nurses and two Swiss doctors were following on another boat.

"He had money, helpers, new friends at home. He had fired the youth of Europe with his story. God was at the organ. . . ."

He got the shock of his life at Lambarene; the jungle had reconquered his clearing; white ants had eaten up his hospital. And to top it all, a plague of dysentery had broken out. But-

"Scheitzer smiled, and took off his coat.

"He needed more land; he got it-from his late jailers, the French Government. He cleared that and his old site with only his convalescent black friends to help him.