Various

“ Twenty-one years ago, when this Association called for teachers and [35] missionaries to submit to reproach, and obloquy, and ostracism for the sake of these needy ones, these rare women, in numbers beyond our ability to send, answered the call. And during all the years they have stood at our doors, as they stand to-day, saying “Send me.”
The work they have done in school building, in church building, in home building and in character building, cannot be matched in the history of this generation, certainly, and probably not in the history of the world. ”

“ When we have a certain matter that we cannot manage at all, and when we would bring it to God, we must first make our hearts ready to pray and then without doubting draw out the true thoughts of our hearts and feel that God is above us and Jesus is on one side. Then comes the Holy Spirit into our hearts to teach us how to pray. After we got up from prayer I am sure we can feel that we were heard, and if we are not answered on a certain hour we must wait and pray without ceasing until it comes, for God not, like man, would fail you sometime. This is the kind of prayer that God does hear. ”

“ I have a great deal more to say about the heathen prayer, but I have no time for it just now. So I must go on to the true prayer, which our Lord Jesus Christ taught his disciples to say. Yet even such a true and short prayer as that, which we have repeated every evening in our schools, many of us would forget before we go to bed at night. This won’t do, my Christian brethren. We must give all our hearts to God before we shut our eyes. We cannot pray to God for a certain thing that must be done while our hearts are on something else, or are doubting whether God could hear us or not. ”

“ How loving, pitying woman, whose labors and sacrifices are so abounding in behalf of women, should have seen with so little responsive interest the necessities for work among the colored women of this land, is among the marvels of Christian ethics.
If women, anywhere, are under obligation to help women, it seems to us the women in our churches are indebted, beyond words to tell, to the negro women in the South. ”

“ There can be no sure and lasting elevation of that people without refined and intelligent homes; and there can be no such homes without pure and intelligent colored women to build them. Such women can be brought forward, only as they have pure models to imitate, and refined teachers to instruct and guide them.
Fortunately, Northern homes are full of such models and of such teachers; and they only need the supporting word and hand of their sisters to go forth in larger numbers, and to lay, more broadly and grandly, the foundations of a regenerated South. ”

“ This is, largely, due to the Christian teachers and missionaries of the American Missionary Association. No society has sent so many of them to the field, or has so signally demonstrated the quality and the value of their work. If the history of many of the most promising and useful of our graduates could be written up the story would read like romance.
The draught upon mind, and heart, and body has been heavy and exhausting. Not a few have left the service broken in health for life, and others have paid the penalty of overwork in early graves. ”

“ But let us not convey the impression that Christian women have been wholly indifferent to the wants of their colored sisters. On the other hand, we affirm that there is not a brighter page in modern missions, than that which records the labors and sacrifices of Northern women for the lowly dwellers in the cabins of the South. We only speak, comparatively, of the great body, who need to be stirred and mastered, as have been the few who have hurried with the medicine of light and love to relieve the stricken and the despairing. ”

“ The Revised Statutes of this Congress make obsolete those of the last, not necessarily because superior wisdom has devised better, which must prove a permanent gain; but when a law of human society has been recognized and so enunciated that it becomes a regulating force, civilization has taken a forward step. The race is not simply less disturbed and more comfortable because temporary adjustments have been made of conflicting interests, but it is richer and stronger because of an enduring possession, and we can afford to labor and wait for such. ”

“ We are not only made glad by work done far away, but workers are here with us—true hearts that love to do something for Jesus every day. Several have joined the Association this year; among them, Fong Bow, who is one of the class for whom I requested your prayers several months ago. He seemed to have much to hold him back; outside influence made it hard for him to decide. He has been [55] a member of the school so long that we feel more than usually happy in his coming. May we not hope and still pray, in faith, for the other members of the class? ”

“ These have sacrificed youth and beauty, and the hope of family love and joy, in the attempt to serve a race. With a calm and reverent step they have gone into the darkest homes of poverty and suffering to clothe the naked, to minister to the sick, to comfort the dying, and to save the perishing. ”

“ Each new application of an old principle calls for a fresh statement of the principle. That man’s personal rights are modified by the fact of his social relations, is a truth old as the beginning of civilized life, but that he may not suffer his children to grow up in ignorance, is a proposition startling to many, and practically asserted by but few of our State governments, though it is well-known that our government itself as well as all our social interests are put in jeopardy by the ignorant citizen who becomes a voter. ”

“ We have had 92 pupils enrolled. Our school is the only one for colored children within a radius of 65 miles. We are giving some attention to church work, and are using our school-house as a place of worship. We have service every Sabbath morning at eleven o’clock—the audiences are large. We are gratified to say that the influence of the teachers takes fast hold upon both parent and pupil. We have Sunday-school every afternoon at three o’clock, and these services are largely attended. Thanksgiving day was appropriately commemorated. A sermon was preached in the morning by the missionary pastor. ”

“ When it is remembered, that in 1863 the slaves in the South did not own an acre of ground and had not a cent of taxable property—that they had no right to know a letter of the alphabet, and that there was not a legal marriage among them: but that in 1880 they were taxed for a hundred millions of dollars—that some 800,000 of them had learned to read, and that purer churches were teaching purer and better morals, one can but exclaim, “What hath God wrought!” ”

“ That the safety of the Republic requires a general diffusion of intelligence [38] no sane man will deny, and yet some assert that it will subvert the fundamental principles of this government if it practically secured this prime condition of its own life—that it must delegate to other hands the control of conditions and facts vital to its life, with no power or right to enforce attention to them. ”

“ In 1878, when the 150 acres of arable land of the Hampton Institute could offer no more farm work to the increasing number of negro and Indian students, a generous lady, of Boston, Mass., gave, principally for the benefit of the Indians, the sum of nine thousand dollars, to purchase a fine grass and grain farm of 350 acres, five miles from the school, to which was added, by purchase, 250 acres more, and to it has been given the name “Hemenway Farm,” as a memorial to the husband of the giver. ”

“ At seven o’clock in the evening a very large number of patrons and friends of the school gathered, and partook of a repast prepared as a thanksgiving token for them by the teachers and pupils. Toasts were responded to by the several pastors of the town and teachers. I said we had service in our chapel at 11 A.M. every Sunday. We could induce as many to come in the evening if we had lamps to light up our chapel. Equally as good results would come from a weekly prayer-meeting, if we had sufficient lights. ”

“ The making or unmaking of the one is the facile work of charlatans when by some mysterious providence they find their way into our legislative halls; the discovery of the other is work for seers and statesmen which once done is done forever. ”

“ Broad questions of Statesmen receive tardy attention from the average legislator because they receive but little from his constituents, while such matters as the imposition or removal of a tax upon cigars is to him of pressing interest, because it concerns the “boys” who run the caucases. This is perhaps well, as questions of policy are tentatively settled and affect only passing and limited interests; issues that are fundamental and vital, which are to be settled for all time, come to a full recognition slowly. ”

“ Louis Sing, too, was under great pressure while in China to take part in worship with his relations, but could not, he said, because he knew the uselessness of such worship. We hear of Gwan Lee, our organist, as standing firm amidst the powers of darkness—holding fast to the living faith. He is one of those whom the present law prohibits from returning to this country. We all feel as though we could not give him up, and that some way must be found by which he may come back. ”

“ Edson’s gift is to be used in instructing students in the church service.
The number of persons over ten years of age among the colored people who could not write, in the sixteen old slave states, according to the census report of November, 1882, was upwards of three millions; the number of native-born whites who were equally illiterate was upwards of one and a half millions. We believe there is no more imperative necessity than endowments for educational institutions sustained for the purpose of ridding the country of this illiteracy. ”

“ We do what we can to make it worth the price asked. Nearly all the articles it contains are written expressly for the Missionary, and pains is taken to give variety and freshness to each number.
Upon annual application, the following persons are entitled to receive the American Missionary free: life members, ministers whose churches take an annual collection for the Association, Superintendents of Sabbath Schools, and donors who contribute in a year not less than five dollars.
We wish to congratulate the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church on her growing helpfulness to the colored people. ”

“ Our national Congress is constrained to hear the cry that is coming up from all parts of the country calling attention to this duty. Let not those who feel an interest in this, relax effort or lose heart. It is not a measure to be adopted in a moment. ”

“ They are an ignorant, destitute class, but, as a rule, are most willing, earnest and deserving students. After working all day, they study harder at night than any others in the school. Ten hours of handling lumber at the saw-mill, or steady work on the farm, or in the machine shop, is no trifling duty, but they are eager for their night lessons.
The ten at the Hemenway Farm are a part of 130 “work students,” thirty of them girls, employed in the various industrial departments, constituting about one-third of the colored pupils at Hampton. ”

“ During the past three years and a quarter, more than 450 have, for a longer or shorter period, been members of our Sacramento school. I would that all who come with us in the school could remain until they are converted and ready to work for the salvation of their people. We know of the good service of many who have gone out from us to visit their homes. For instance, Fong Get Roy, who wrote you something of his work while in China: he has not ceased to labor for Christ since his return ”

“ In churches that do not follow a fixed system as to time for taking collections, we suggest that the claims of our work be explained and urged at least once a year, and that contributions be forwarded to us at the earliest date possible. ”

“ The call, however, for woman’s work in America during the past twenty years seems to us to have been peculiarly urgent, and yet we think the majority of the noble Christian women in our churches have, up to this time, seen only dimly the demands upon them in this regard. ”

“ They devote a preliminary year to day labor and night study, to fit themselves to enter the junior class of this year’s course, and to accumulate a small fund, averaging $75 for the year, to help meet cost of board, ten dollars a month, besides clothing and books. This is done in part by working two days each week of the regular course. With strict economy and working all vacations, they maintain themselves through the entire course graduating without receiving a dollar in charity, some, however, need help the last year and none are more worthy of it. ”

“ Missionaries were appointed to preach, and to teach day-schools, and assistants, both male and female, were sent out; from 3,000 to 5,000 pupils were taught yearly, until about 1872, when the secular or day-school system was given up, and efforts concentrated on permanent or higher institutions, some of which had been planted in 1865. ”

“ Of every Congregational Sunday-school superintendent to secure from his school a contribution to our “Student Aid Fund.”
AID
Of every Ladies’ Missionary Society to sustain our work among the colored women and girls.
ENDOWMENTS
For Professorships and Scholarships in our schools. The time has come when in our larger institutions the chairs of instruction should be endowed, that the Association may be left to enlarge its missionary work in other directions. ”

“ This is entirely a negro affair; no white person lives on the place. Its Christian character and influence are earnest and emphatic. Nothing in the Hampton system is more satisfactory than this farm. I hope others like it will be provided for other institutions, but to fit up an old Southern farm after buying it, costs about as much as the land costs. ”

“ The book was prepared to help ministers and laymen, and contains an abundance of suggestive and available information. There is no work more dear to this Association than revival work, and no volume has recently come to our knowledge apparently more fitted to promote it.
WOMAN’S OPPORTUNITY THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE AGE.
There is nothing like it in any land—the opportunity of the Christian women of America to labor for the uplift of womanhood the world over. ”