Various

“ We feel that you agree with us when we express the hope that the time will come when there will be no distinction of North and South, but when our whole people will understand and trust and love each other. Political parties pass away and new ones take their places; but, God helping us, the Congregational method of church government shall never pass away, but it shall be (as long as grass grows and streamlets flow) a firm bond of union and brotherly love between us and you and all other Christians who accept it in its purity. ”

“ If considered as antagonistic, which it is not, but rather co-operative, the real rival of the Methodist Episcopal church in the South is the Congregational, with its institutions of learning sustained by the American Missionary Association. It moves upon those lines which will give it a future, while other and older denominations are sleeping, apparently unconscious of the mighty revolution that has taken place, and indifferent to those principles which will inevitably impress themselves upon the church of the next century. Intelligence and morality are everywhere seen in that communion. ”

“ Now at Berea is a college in some respects unlike any other in the land. Here, three hundred in all, are seen white and colored students in about equal numbers. Here is a sort of Mecca for the colored people of the State, and a door of hope for many in the mountain region, who, though white, have had but few religious and educational privileges. Here is a college ably manned, with the confidence of the North, and growing in the regard of the South, sending forth its streams of blessing in every direction. ”

“ All the dark places of the earth belong to us to do something for, to do what we can for, and we are not to raise our money nor use it so that this part of the work is neglected. To cheat the heathen out of his portion of the Gospel is an immorality. To help carry the Gospel to the heathen in the uttermost parts of the earth must be accepted by every church as a part of its moral obligation. ”

“ It teaches us, both as citizens and Christians, to love each other. In this spirit of love some of the ablest and most devoted ministers and educators of our denomination have been giving their best strength to our missionary institutions of education in the South. This work is supported by the self-sacrificing contributions of our churches. They believe (what your leading men have told us) that the race for which they do this missionary work must have a training and education in morality and in religious principle, or they will be the greatest source of danger and evil to the South. ”

“ The primary school-room contains twenty stout fellows ranging from eighteen to twenty-five years of age; but it is not uncommon for one of these boys to go forth as a tolerable school-master among the colored people after two years’ hard work at Berea. Indeed, if one were to look for signs of mental power, he need not go outside the beautiful campus of this school. We positively never witnessed such progress in learning as is the common talk among these teachers. These stalwart young men and resolute maidens from the mountains buckle to their books with a will that knows no discouragement. ”

“ A man may have much less than John’s spirituality or Paul’s experience to decide that there is a glaring inconsistency in praying for the building up of God’s kingdom on the earth, and then withholding the means necessary to that end; in praying that the Gospel may fly to earth’s remotest bound, and then refusing to contribute to the amount of a single wing feather to help its flight. ”

“ When the time come for me to say good-by, and return to California, I feel I like great deal better to stay and work there for Christ. I promise myself, as soon as I can gain enough to live upon, I will return and give my whole time to work for my countrymen, and bring all I can to bow down to the true God. ”

“ What a noble enterprise for someone to found an industrial school for colored boys, which shall draw in the bright-eyed ragged boys, now lounging on the street corners or quarreling in the alleys, learning nothing except evil, daily! ”

“ Out from this interesting region come the majority of the white students of Berea. Few of them are able even to meet the yearly sum of seventy-five dollars, for which their education is given them. Many of them, even the girls, walk from their homes, and come in with nothing but a stout suit of clothes, a good head and a brave heart, paying their way as they go by such work as turns up, and the small wages of mountain school-keeping in the long summer vacations. ”

“ It is already commending itself to many of the best people of Kentucky, receiving students from families of highest respectability in the neighborhood, and on commencement days the great tabernacle is crammed with three thousand people, from the humblest to the highest in the proud old State. Berea is a great American fact, comprehensible only to a man who has read, pondered and inwardly digested the Sermon on the Mount and its corollary, the Constitution of the United States. ”

“ If now our means could be made more commensurate with our necessities, if our resources could compare with our opportunities, what a grand work of patriotism and Christianity might not the College attempt and expect in the near future. As regards the higher branches of learning, the College has an unrivaled place in a great State, half of whose population is black. It has in Alabama more than 600,000 colored people from whom to draw its students. It cares for muscle as well as mind, and for heart most of all. ”

“ Idols cannot help you.’ They say to me: ‘You no worship idol, by and by you have no house, no children, no money.’ I answer: ‘Other nations that not worship idols have more money and better houses than any we have in China. We go work for them to get money. We do not have to worship idols to get money.’ I say: ‘Whomsoever worship gods made by men’s hands, it is transgress to God.’ They say: ‘How is this our nation so great, so many wise men all worshipping idols ”

“ The black block makes no insignificant figure, after all, and its rapid growth suggests that to have, through neglect, a dense body of such dimensions depressed by ignorance were a blunder matched only by the wickedness of oppression. The size of the Indian and the Chinaman suggests strongly the outrageous meanness of ill-using them; it makes more striking the absurdity of a war policy against the red man, and of the demagogue’s appeal to fear on account of the presence of the Chinaman. ”

“ My wife more faithful than I. She willing to put away the idols, and like to go from house to house, when she have a chance, to tell the people about Jesus. My son attends school. All his school-mates laugh at him, but still he pray to God that He give him more faith, that he not care about the laughing. At the school they have a person’s name which they required to worship, that he may help them study and learn; but my son not want to worship him, after he believe in Jesus. ”

“ Nestling in a charming “glade,” overshadowed by the North-western foot-hills of the mighty Appalachian mountain world, is Berea College. It is not exclusively a school for teachers, but includes the entire organization of popular education from an effective primary school up to a solid university class of twenty-five, with a normal course for instruction in methods of teaching. ”

“ Nearly every student is a member of the church and the temperance society, and the carrying of arms is cause of expulsion. All classes of the Southern people are good listeners. We never addressed an audience of three hundred people that put us more decisively on our mettle than the crowd of students and villagers that did us the favor to crowd the chapel on four unpleasant nights to listen to our talks on education.
We do not propose to defend Berea against any objector. A school with such tough Kentucky roots as Fee, Hanson, and their compeers ”

“ Somebody else have no god in the kitchen; they go to work; by and by they have something to eat!’ I say: ‘You place the idol by the front door; you leave the door open, not watch; you think no thief come? God made all things. He is the one to worship. ”

“ One year before I return to China I sent have house built. When I arrived home, I found idols in some of the rooms to worship: in the kitchen, to the god who takes care the cooking; at the front door, the one who looks and guards the door to let no evil spirits come in to trouble us; also, in the parlor I found the one who watches the whole house. I found blocks of wood with names of ancestors, carefully keep time of birth and death. All these they expect me to worship on my return. I told them: “My father dead—gone away. If he bad man when he live, God punish him now. ”

“ It aims especially to furnish men well equipped for the Gospel ministry, and thinks it has found a place for uplifting not only America, but Africa, and that by laboring there among the foot-hills of our own Blue Ridge, it may help beautify the Dark Continent with salvation. As long as cotton grows on those black bottoms, or those hills yield their treasures of iron and coal, so long will Talladega College be needed, and so long it hopes to stay. It desires to grow with the generations and increase with the ages. ”

“ With better equipments than ever before, with a field as large as it can wish, the College, backed by the history of half of one generation, looks forward with hope to the growing and unfolding future. ”

“ Its pupils are of both sexes and colors, and another year may possibly witness the white, negro and Indian quietly at work in the same class-rooms, with no rivalry except the honest pride to excel in good scholarship and manly or womanly character. But in this, for the South, exceptional feature, there comes in the most interesting peculiarity of this most “peculiar institution.” With a few exceptions from the North and the blue-grass region of Kentucky, the white students come from the great mountain country that overlooks the college campus. ”

“ A white male high school building, reared by the unrequited labor of the slave, was bought at a mortgage sale and opened for the Christian training of all, without respect to color or sex. Men, black either in pigment or in figment, began to come, and the reconstructed building gave shelter to school and church. But a home was needed, and two years later, in 1869, Foster Hall was built, affording rooms for the girls and teachers, and also table accommodations for the entire family. ”

“ By evangelical sentiments, we understand, among others, a belief in the guilty and lost condition of all men without a Saviour; the Supreme Deity, Incarnation and Atoning Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the only Saviour of the world; the necessity of regeneration by the Holy Spirit; repentance, faith and holy obedience in order to salvation; the immortality of the soul; and the retributions of the judgment in the eternal punishment of the wicked, and salvation of the righteous.
[Pg 320]
The American Missionary Association. ”

“ Art. VIII. This society, in collecting funds, in appointing officers, agents and missionaries, and in selecting fields of labor and conducting the missionary work, will endeavor particularly to discountenance slavery, by refusing to receive the known fruits of unrequited labor, or to welcome to its employment those who hold their fellow-beings as slaves. ”

“ White is the emblem of mourning among the Chinese, and gave to the poster much the same significance that black, emblazoned with skull and crossbones, would have done to the colored voters of the South some years ago. ”

“ Their singing they do with faces all smiles, and when the moment comes for distributing the text-cards and child papers full of beautiful pictures, their joy knows no bounds. These may be loaves and fishes for which the children come, and yet, like the multitude of old, they perhaps carry away with them something better. ”

“ And it is not necessarily any high revelation required, but only an appreciation and approval of square dealing, to convince us that a church must so raise its money, and to such amounts, that it will be able to do its share towards carrying on the great work of evangelizing the world. ”