Various

“ If the Indian and the negro are to be elevated, they must rise by the same steps as have others. They must work their way up. But they who are above them, remembering the pit out of which they themselves have been dug, must give them a chance to rise, and help them as they try to rise. That they have the capacity for elevation along every line of human development has been abundantly proved over and over again. The industrial exhibit of the colored people at the recent Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, was in every way gratifying to their friends. ”

“ Grains of sand make the mountains, and drops of water the ocean, and the invisible workmen rear the coral islands; so may God's people one and all do what they can, and your debt will be wiped out."
"At our meeting last evening, I read your appeal and took up a collection of $6, which I send you. It is a little Home Missionary church of only 10 members, but they are good ones, and in earnest. Hope all other churches will do as well and your society be saved from debt." ”

“ Were we to continue sketching the salient points in the work of our other schools scattered all over the South, it would be simply to give fresh illustrations of the five facts already made prominent—crowded schools, growing necessities, faithful work, good results and outside commendation.
As compared with last year, the statistics in our school work show a falling off of two chartered institutions and seven common schools. On its face, this looks like loss; in reality, it is gain. ”

“ He was a man of great power over other men, especially over young people, who were caught up by his enthusiasm, and borne along sometimes to the attainment of surprising results. He was well fitted to be a leader in the sphere he chose for himself, and made his mark upon his generation, and had a large and honorable share in securing the results already achieved, which are to bless the State and nation with increasing power. ”

“ We are steadily but slowly coming to the realization of the idea that was the inspiration of the American Missionary Association's school system—Christian colleges and Normal schools for the training of leaders, and Christian preparatory schools to furnish them with the right kind of material. The South is year by year, as its financial ability increases and its public sentiment improves, doing more for the rudimental instruction of its children. ”

“ The family and the home where mother and sister are the strong guard of purity and moral strength, the newly-freed people knew nothing about from experience. Our missionaries, more than two-thirds of whom were women, found themselves face to face with the duty of caring for their unfortunate sisters. When the Christian women of the country were taking up and discussing the special claims of degraded and lost women for woman's special effort, and organizing societies to meet that claim, the American Missionary Association had the whole business in operation on a large and successful scale. ”

“ The reflex influence of these evangelistic services has been productive of great spiritual blessing to our missionaries and to the Chinese Christians. It has driven them to realize that they must more than ever trust in the power of God's spirit to overcome the difficulties; that they must faithfully hold and work every point now occupied; that they must pray on and labor on until the Holy Spirit descend in power to break the stony hearts and dissipate the opposing forces of Mongolian heathenism on the one hand and Caucasian inconsistency and infidelity on the other. ”

“ The citizens of Memphis two years ago gave Professor Steele $1,000 to put a girl's industrial department into the Le Moyne school, and now they have pledged him $600 more to secure a workshop for the boys. Fort Berthold in Dakota and Fisk and Straight Universities at the South greatly need industrial buildings, and there are other schools of which the same might be said with equal emphasis.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of industrial training. Latest in development in connection with our schools, it may yet prove first in value. Labor is heaven-ordained. ”

“ They should be at once so far endowed that the question of their permanence as conservators of the supremacy of Christian leadership in the thought, character and life of the people should be settled beyond peradventure for all time. ”

“ The judicial forces of Nature will soon cast him into a prison, out of which he shall not come until beginning at the bottom, by diligent labor, he is willing to pay the last farthing at every step in the process of his advancement. The implements and the products of industry are the gauges of civilization. ”

“ The teachers, imbued with the missionary spirit, have been a power in the church and in the community as well as in the school. The question whether our schools could be kept up if colored students were admitted, has been squarely met and answered, and right at our central station, Williamsburg, we have had colored pupils during the past two terms. ”

“ During the last year of his life he took great interest in the successful opening of an industrial department in the institution, and for the last few weeks his great anxiety had been to secure the furnishing of a large new building whose erection he had personally overlooked. He had returned to Atlanta in advance of his family to make preparations for the school year soon to open, had completed most of his plans, and seemed in unusual good health and spirits. ”

“ Of course, just now, and for a great many years to come, by far the greater part of our school work must be in the lower grades of instruction. So long as it can be said, that in the Southern States eighty per cent. of the colored and thirty per cent. of the white population are illiterate; that there are not educational facilities enough to furnish fifty per cent. ”

“ It is the chief instrumentality through which a people are elevated. Grace saves the soul and transforms character instantly. It makes [Pg 310] the savage and sinner kind and good instantly; but it will not instantly make him a good farmer, a skilled mechanic, a trained scholar. ”

“ Tillotson Institute, Texas, has also had a very crowded and successful year. This is the youngest of our chartered schools. It has the modesty that in every way is becoming the youngest member of the family, but in all that is excellent in work it stands not a whit behind the oldest and the best. It has already outgrown the comfortable limits of its habitation. ”

“ This school, with its 177 pupils busily engaged in their studies under the instruction of an able corps of teachers, in possession of buildings that are up to the times in all their equipments, reaching by its influence every Indian village of the great empire of the Missouri River basin, is an institution from which, with God's blessing upon its work, we have a right to expect great things in the future. ”

“ Talladega College has had 365 students. This was more than it could comfortably care for. The girls' hall was crowded. Some applicants had to be refused for lack of room. The new Cassidy School building, having been used by over 200 pupils, continues to justify its right to be. Prosperity has marked the life of this college in all its departments.
Atlanta University maintains its well-earned reputation for school work of the highest order; 297 students have shared its privileges. ”

“ Griffiths, wife of the pastor of the Congregational Church in the place. She has the constant coöperation of her husband, who welcomes to his church all who can be induced to attend from the school. The mission at Stockton, the first one established by us in California, was closed last year, but has been reopened with an attendance and promise such as it never had before. Our schools are all in the hands of devoted and efficient teachers, are well located and well rooted. We are justified in feeling that they are all fairly on the way to become permanent. ”

“ We received during the year contributions from 1,677. What can be done to bring the non-contributing churches into line is a question we beg the pastors of contributing churches and the friends of the Association to help us answer. The pastors and members of these non-contributing churches as a general thing do not read our magazine. They are ignorant of our needs, and we do not know how to reach them so as to wake them up. Had we an army of agents to visit and talk to them, we might move them to take our work upon their thought and sympathy. ”

“ It is a custom among the colored people to give the hand of welcome to those who have made up their minds to become Christians; and we can well believe, as an eye-witness describes, "it was a beautiful as well as a touching scene when this little girl stepped forward to welcome father and mother on the Lord's side." ”

“ He who climbs up into position or who is foisted into it by any other instrumentality than by the toil necessary to fit him for the position, the same is a thief and a robber. The police forces of Nature will speedily put him under arrest. ”

“ Up from the lowest to the highest, man must toil patiently and laboriously. Nature will tolerate neither jumps nor deceptions. It is no kindness to put a man where he is out of place, and still less is it a kindness to make him believe that he has a right to be there. ”

“ Straight University, New Orleans, notwithstanding the devastation of floods and the failure of cotton crops that last year so severely affected the very limited finances of the colored people of Louisiana, was filled with students at the beginning of the school year, and continued not only crowded, but overcrowded to the end; 584 scholars were enrolled, including representatives from Cuba, Honduras, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois, and even Old England. ”

“ A good man has fallen, and a great gap is made in the ranks of laborers at the front; but the Lord who loves his own cause better than we do will see that it suffers no loss. As the Lord has taken care that his servant rests from his labors, it is ours to see that they follow Him. ”

“ At Marion there were 55 who professed Christ, the work spreading from our church into the State Normal school located there. Two-thirds of the converts were young men, ranging from fifteen to twenty years of age, who gave themselves earnestly to prayer and labor for the conversion of their comrades. A little girl, eight years old, was the first of a family to accept Christ. Her mother followed. The father, a drunkard, through the persuasion of friends, visited the church for the first time. ”

“ It has been a long ascent for fifty years, but now fourteen churches, with a thousand members; eleven young men's Christian associations; a native missionary society, receiving contributions amounting this year to $1,165, much of it the fruit of hard labor by Dakota women, with the needle and at the wash-tub; a Christian community with its own native justices of the peace, rigidly enforcing temperance and marital law, and, according to the testimony of the United States agent on the ground, more careful of religious observances than white communities, and no less exemplary in morals ”

“ The task before us, therefore, if our work was to be kept to its former scale, was to increase our receipts over the previous year $27,571.72, or twice the deficit. We have made that increase in donations from the living, with $69.86 to spare, and that, too, in the face of the stringency of the times. Had the legacies remained the same as the preceding year (which were $61,807.31 less than the legacies of the year preceding that) , we should have closed this year without a debt, and had $7,605.89 on hand to apply on the debt with which we started out. ”

“ Atlanta, Talladega and Tougaloo have farms which are worked by the students under the instruction of practical farmers. At several other points farming could be successfully taught if only we had the farms, and we could have the farms if only we had the money. ”

“ Industrial teaching is made prominent at Santee, Oahe, at all of our chartered institutions, at Le Moyne Institute, Memphis, Tenn., Lewis High School, Macon, Ga., and incidentally at six other schools. Aid has been received from the Slater Fund for this work at Macon, Atlanta, Nashville, Tougaloo, Talladega, Memphis and Austin. Nearly all the scholars in attendance pursue some of the branches of industry taught. ”

“ Among the Poncas, since last December, we have had a missionary, Rev. J. E. Smith, who, while maintaining Sabbath services with good attendance, has during the week taught a government school. At the Upper Ponca settlement, during the months of February and March, a mission day school was kept by Albert Frazier, a native teacher.
Oahe.—This mission, with its out-stations, is in charge of Rev. T. L. Riggs. The native helpers are Titus Jugg, Elizabeth Winjan, William Lee, Daniel Lee, Samuel Smiley, Stephen Yellow Hawk and Edwin Phelps, all, with one exception, full-blood Dakota Indians. ”

“ Pilgrim Church, under the joint pastorate of the Rev. Artemas Ehnamani and Rev. A. L. Riggs, honors the faith and polity of the Pilgrim Fathers in its co-operation with the school, nurturing and extending the cause of Christian education. Its roll numbers 164 names, and its Sabbath-school reports an attendance of 183.
Great and urgent fields inviting missionary occupancy lie all around Santee. Swift Bear's colony, numbering sixteen families, an offshoot from Rosebud agency, has located along the Niobrara. Others are coming down this fall as soon as their little crops are harvested. ”

“ The greater part of these are young men and women, not more than half being over thirty years of age and not more than five being past forty-five years. This church enjoys the ministrations of Stephen Yellow Hawk and David Lee.
Fort Berthold.—This point with the territory adjacent is held by Rev. C. L. Hall. The day school has had 129 pupils during the year. Six of the Indian girls have been taken into the teachers' home, with marked benefit to the mission work. Increased interest has been manifested in the church services, the average attendance being 75. ”