The Pastor Who Buried Four Thousand and Still Gave Thanks

In the Saxon town of Eilenburg, Germany, the Thirty Years' War brought suffering that defied description. By 1637, plague and famine had claimed so many lives that Pastor Martin Rinkart was the only clergyman left alive in the city. Day after day, he conducted funerals — sometimes forty or fifty in a single day. He buried more than four thousand of his parishioners that year alone, including his own wife.…