Various

“ So time is found for a sewing-school, for meetings with the women, for temperance societies, for mission Sunday-schools, and numerous other forms of systematic work—for the purifying of the home life, and to guard the children from the fate of the parents. Who but women could win an entrance into such homes and hearts? It is to counteract the ignorance and desolation of womanhood that woman’s help is needed in this broad field. ”

“ How shall the Indian cease to disturb us, and become a blessing to the nation?
There is really but one solution to the Indian problem, though many have been prominently attempted. We have tried to force the Indian. We have fought him. We have shut him in upon reservations. We have made a pretence of feeding and clothing him. We have tried our hand at civilization, have built school-houses, provided teachers, and gathered Indian children together, and taught them the rudiments of learning. ”

“ Who were the parents of these children? Slaves. Slaves who in return for hard labor received from the white man the cruelest wrongs and basest indignities; and yet people to-day speak as though this first generation born in freedom should be pure and virtuous. On every side you hear, “They lie, they cheat, they steal, are lazy, and it is simply impossible to do anything with them.” Many times this summer I have heard this sweeping assertion made, and by Christian people, who had simply traveled South, and who drew their conclusions from the servants they met in the hotels. ”

“ If woman works for the salvation of the physical life of her brothers and sisters, of course she must be equally anxious for the salvation of their souls. Woman has an instinct for religion. Living a life of greater seclusion than man, her heart in the silence, like a flower in the darkness, has grown toward the light. ”

“ We would never lose sight of the fact that the first and highest aim is to form a Christian character that shall go with its influence into their homes and be felt. It is no plan of Santee to isolate the child from the parent, but rather through the child to influence the parent and all home life. Where there is such strong family affection, there is a proportionately strong hope that the greater and larger good can be accomplished in this way. Through the past year there has been an awakening to the claims of their own people upon our pupils as never before. ”

“ I could tell you of young girls who, out of the wickedness and immorality around them, have grown up pure, consecrated Christian women, doing what they can for the Master they have promised to serve.
Such is the work the A. M. A. is doing throughout the South. Is there anyone who can afford not to have a part in this glorious work? Think of the privilege of being permitted to help lift these souls, born in ignorance and vice, into the marvellous light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Indeed the first station of the Kentucky missions is in Tennessee. This part of the work is under the direction of Rev. A. A. Myers. This region has only recently been opened to the outside world. Coal fields are abundant, and timber of the very best kinds still stands in vast forests on the hillsides and along the streams. These trees shoulder against each other like an army of giants marshalled to defend the wild freedom of their mountain home against the impertinent intrusion of the “humans,” as the mountaineers call men. ”

“ God does bless our efforts, and the hearts of the young are being won to his service. We know it is your work, too. We ask you still to strengthen our hands and hearts in the future. We need your interest and your prayers. We need your hearts with us constantly, that we may be able to do better and greater things. It is a privilege to try to teach those committed to our care, of the love of God and Jesus, which has existed so long for them, even as it has for us. It is a privilege, in place of their fear and worship of all nature, to tell them of the tender love and care of a Heavenly Father. ”

“ Against the dark background of thriftlessness and ignorance and poverty which we find among the colored people, such homes as these stand out in bright relief, and they should be a source of encouragement to all who are trying to do God’s work in the world. And so, dear friends, I have told you of these homes, that seeing the difference and what may be accomplished in all these homes by Christian education, you may not grow weary, but may look forward to that harvest-time when the seed which your [16] prayers and gifts have sown shall spring up and bear fruit even an hundredfold. ”

“ It is open, day and evening, to all who will come. The morning devotions, the pleasant social meals, the group around the table in the evening, which the older pupils often join, are phases of home life sharply in contrast to the shiftless, joyless homes about them. With the influence of this home as a starting-point, these teachers, in visiting from house to house, suggest, advise, encourage, finding always the children the most ambitious to improve and make the little cabin like the teacher’s home. ”

“ Help is needed, and it is needed now, before the millions of children grow out of our influence and reach, to become like their parents, and even a more dangerous element in society.
How shall the help be given? Every church is an organization which bands together Christian workers. The nearer all can come to the very heart of the great societies appointed to the work of missions, the stronger and warmer are the missionary pulsations. Here is the American Missionary Association, with its forty years’ experience in church and school planting, combined with woman’s work. ”

“ Indian rations and reservations have not satisfied the requirements of even their bodily comfort and sustenance; and the proposal now made and loudly advocated, of breaking up all their tribal privileges and allotting the property of the tribe to the members of the tribe in severalty, while encompassed by grave difficulties from the ignorance of the Indian and his need of guardianship, would endanger that sense of common rights and privileges, that communal relationship, on which not only the very existence of human society depends, but in which is the germ of whatever is distinctively human. ”

“ Fisk the age that is to be—the age when every worthy man shall be to every worthy fellowman a brother. Fisk University is your child, and one of which you can justly be proud, and may you fully nourish and protect it. It is a great light in a dark land—an oasis of living thought in a vast desert of parched and stupid ideas. ”

“ And yet the solution of the Indian problem is not a matter of theory or of speculation, but is an accomplished fact. It has been wrought out before our eyes. Wild, savage Indian tribes, as fierce, as lawless, as intractable as any now existing, have been tamed, have been taught the arts and ways of peace, have subjected themselves to law, and are now living in orderly, peaceable, industrious communities. ”

“ Christian churches and schools, like the gates of heaven, should be open to all, and we bitterly regret that anything further should be done to outrage the enlightened Christian conscience that this century has developed. It is mere mockery to cut off the branches from a tree of evil and leave its roots and trunk untouched. ”

“ How would every difficulty in our social state, our vice and crime and poverty, our selfishness and sensuality and woe, all disappear if the Gospel only dwelt among us, a living principle in every heart! We need no other evidence of its divine all-sufficiency than the adaptation it has already shown to every human need, and we need no other motive to its proclamation than the privilege of being co-worker with Him, “Who shall deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor also, and him that hath no helper. ”

“ Look in upon a single mission station. A group of three buildings attracts our attention as a bit of New England transplanted, a church, a good-sized school-house, and between the two a neat white painted cottage. The missionaries number four, of whom three are ladies from the North. Over 200 children and youth come daily to the school, where these missionary teachers instruct in branches usual in primary to grammar grades, and also in Christian morals and manners, with the Bible for [18] a text-book, seeking earnestly to develop heart, mind and body to honor and righteousness. ”

“ It is apparent to any who study the character of the field of the American Missionary Association, that not only is there ample opportunity for women to work, but that it becomes a necessity to the successful accomplishment of the good designed. ”

“ I have heard and seen much of the thriftlessness of the South, but here at least was thrift and prosperity. Coming back to the house we were introduced to the father, a dark-browed but fine-looking man, who by honest toil is trying to support his family, and give to his children the opportunities which shall make of them good men and women. These children are sent to the Sunday-school and day-school regularly. Can we doubt that from these they shall gain that which shall make them a blessing to their race and to the world? ”

“ Charles Dickens never exhibited a truer insight into human nature than when he made a woman the impersonation of remorseless vengeance.
But notwithstanding all that women are doing in trades, industries, politics, it still remains that in works of reform, charity and missions, she is especially distinguishing herself. ”

“ Among the people there needs to be developed a better conscience as to the sanctity of an oath, and the sacred majesty and divine authority of law that knows no conditions of society and no distinctions of race. ”

“ One of the crying evils of the times is the severe tax put upon the eyes by reading small print. The American Missionary has been an offender in this respect, but it has seen the error of its ways and promises to try to do better. It has selected the first month of the new year in which to inaugurate the reform. Small print has been banished from its pages of reading matter. We trust that this effort of The Missionary to make its pages more readable will be responded to by a great increase in the number of its readers. ”

“ Woman’s work for woman among the blacks of the United States is the most important of all work for that people. Pure women have lessons to teach their own sex who have been degraded by a century of bondage, [7] or who are the inheritors of the legacies of slavery, that none others can teach, and which must be well learned before there can be much progress in the moral amelioration of the race. ”

“ The Bureau of Charities in New York is very largely managed by Mrs. Lowell and her devoted co-workers. The President of the American Branch of the Red Cross Society, that non-sectarian, but most Christian Association, which extends its arms of blessing wherever human suffering is found, is that American Florence Nightingale, whose heroism and sacrifice on Southern battle-fields can never be too highly appreciated—Clara Barton. And these are only hints, here and there, of woman’s work in charity. ”