Various

“ Here is the mightiest, the widest, the most fruitful, the most abundant, the most prolific, missionary field that was ever opened to any Christian people. It is right here at your doors. It is not across the Pacific Ocean and it is not down yonder around the Cape of Good Hope. Right here at our doors is the greediest people for education and the gospel there is on the face of this earth, not counted among our white race. ”

“ The male may bring, as an exotic, a foreign graft, say, of civilization, to a new people. But what then! Can a graft live or thrive of itself? By no manner of means. It must get vitality from the stock into which it is put; and it is the women who give the sap to every human organization which thrives and flourishes on earth.
"I plead, therefore, for the establishment of at least one large 'Industrial school' in every Southern State for the black girls of the South. I ask for the establishment of schools which may serve specially the home life of the rising womanhood of my race. ”

“ About fifteen young Chinamen are seated at the tables, all reading and studying aloud in true Chinese fashion. Just as you enter the teacher, touches the bell. Books are closed and all take seats on the benches in front of the organ. A Chinese evangelist is present, and while he makes an impassioned address, accompanied by most expressive gestures, you are free to study the faces upturned to listen. What a contrast to the faces you have just left in Chinatown, idly staring at the passer-by, or, vacant of all interest, staring at nothing! ”

“ Here is this God-given task laid at our very thresholds and with all the sentiments of patriotism and Christian devotion urging us to our large privilege.
What the race needs now is right leadership, and for many years to come we are to equip men and women religiously and intellectually, who, in home, in church, in social and business life, will be moral and social leaders. And by this power of leadership I mean something far other than those foolish conceits which have taken possession of a few who have touched only the surface of the new life that is coming to this people. ”

“ And we may not have to wait as long; for in spite of slavery's binding chain thrice drawn round his soul, the American Negro has been absorbing during the past from a civilization which has been fitting him somewhat for the large Christian movement of the present. We are working for a people which in all probability will form at least one-eighth of our whole population; and we have the problem of lifting them as a race up into Christian enlightenment. The dark skin is growing darker. ”

“ These institutions, standing out in the darkness when nothing else stood by them, when the land was racked and torn and bled afresh under the agonies of reconstruction, these institutions began and carried on the blessed work of raising up leaders, intellectual leaders, among the black people, for the guidance and stimulation of the colored race toward the aspirations of American citizenship and Christian intelligence. ”

“ She has rarely been taught to sew, and the field-labor of slavery times has kept her ignorant of the habitudes of neatness and the requirements of order. Indeed, coarse food, coarse clothes, coarse living, coarse manners, coarse companions, coarse surroundings, coarse neighbors, both white and black, yea, everything coarse, down to the coarse, ignorant, senseless religion, which excites her sensibilities and starts her passions, go to make up the life of the masses of black women in the hamlets and villages of the South. This is the state of black womanhood. ”

“ From the very commencement of the meetings a good spirit was manifest, which deepened day by day until forty or more persons professed faith in Christ, young and old being reached by the power of the gospel. One man sixty-one years of age surrendered to the overtures of God's love and received Christ as his Saviour. Another of seventy-five years was pointed out to me as a hardened sinner. When approached he was full of self and reason, "I don't believe in mourner's benches and such like; do you think my going there will make me a Christian or do me any good?" ”

“ Hence all study of this educational question must have in view the large moral and intellectual enterprise of dealing with a race as a race. I believe that there is nothing in all history to compare with this opportunity which has come to our very doors. Here is a nation in our land and with it every perplexity, every difficulty, every embarrassment, and also every encouragement, every hope, and every inspiration for work, that can appeal to any foreign missionary. ”

“ The benevolence of Northern men and women, yea, and even of Northern children, helped to establish in the South these missionary colleges, these educational missions, wherein not the black man alone, not the black woman alone, but every one who was qualified with orderly behavior and a rational intellect might come, and get, not only an education, but a Christian education, and not only a Christian education, but a Christian American education. ”

“ Every class, yea, every girl in an out-going class, would be a missionary of thrift, industry, common-sense, and practicality. They would go forth, year by year, a leavening power into the houses, towns and villages of the Southern black population; girls fit to be the wives of the honest peasantry of the South, the worthy matrons of their numerous households.
"I am looking after the domestic training of the masses; for the raising up of women meet to be the helpers of poor men, the rank and file of black society, all through the rural districts of the South. ”

“ I might tell of the needs of the cabin home life as I have seen them in these States, how the scholars from Christian schools are the leaven that is slowly transforming this, the greatest of all human institutions; how while from one-quarter to one-half of the colored population is progressing, gaining in education, property and character, there is another large part of the race that is either stationary or sinking into more miserable conditions. Are we seeking for paganism to battle with? ”

“ Before the war, the South knew nothing of the benefits of public schools, and the private school was in harmony with its social and political conceptions; but of late, and especially during the last decade, a remarkable change has taken place which is doing as much to affect the whole Southern problem as anything that has occurred there during half a century. It is a movement in the South, which, however imperfectly it has been developed as yet, has come to remain, and will ultimately affect every institution, social, political and religious, in our section of the country. ”

“ Alas, there was a serpent in Eden, so there was a skeleton in the closet of the Atlanta Constitution. It was a dreadful skeleton. The Constitution seriously publishes the fact that "it was whispered about for some time," until patience ceased to be a virtue, when it sent a guardian of public safety in the form of a reporter to investigate. "Was it really true that a white man who was giving music lessons to white people was also teaching a colored class at another time and place? If so, what about the New South? ”

“ The American Missionary is not published for the entertainment of its readers. It has a more serious purpose. It speaks for races who have suffered grievous wrongs, and for peoples whose condition is exceedingly sad. It has to do with tragic facts, and much of what it has to say must excite compassion, and must appeal both to the consciences of our readers and to their sense of duty. To call upon those whom God has blessed, to insert themselves into the woes and spiritual wants of others who need their help, is grave and serious. ”

“ The American Missionary Association and those allied to it have been the chief agency, so far as benevolent effort is concerned, in diffusing right notions of religion, and in carrying education to the darkened mind of the negro."
Here is the large door that God has opened for us, and through which we are reaching this people, and in a still larger degree may carry the truths of the Kingdom of God to them. What they need most of all is light. ”

“ And when you think that the masses of these women live in the rural districts; that they grow up in rudeness and ignorance; that their former masters are using few means to break up their hereditary degradation, you can easily take in the pitiful condition of this population and forecast the inevitable future to multitudes of females, unless a mighty special effort is made for the improvement of the black womanhood of the South. ”

“ It is now being recognized in every Southern State that free government is based upon a public common-school system. It has taken two decades to incorporate this public school policy upon Southern institutions, but it has now the evidence of permanency and it is offering to Christian philanthropy an unparalleled opportunity, such as God seldom gives to any people, and one which should rally the churches as never before in support of the great enterprises of the American Missionary Association. ”

“ Over and above the evils to which we must call earnest heed, the dangers which are not far away, and the exigencies of the cause of Christ, we are sure that no one can read the MISSIONARY without being cheered and quickened in gratitude to God for what he is graciously doing for his needy ones through his people. ”

“ For when the new educational movement began, the property and a large part of the intelligence belonged to the opponents of the new educational policy, but now, in the words of a prominent Southern gentleman: "The conviction has become very deep that in the altered condition of our people the only hope left us is to do all that can be done towards elevating the masses irrespective of race." ”

“ We are dealing with a people with race peculiarities: but it seems to me that it is very useless to ask whether we are training an inferior stock. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior {96} to its present condition. We ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to become very pharisaical.
Here is a race with its idiosyncrasies, and its peculiar latent possibilities, which we cannot know until Christian education has unfolded them through many years. We ought not to wonder that in many respects this people is yet in its moral and intellectual infancy ”

“ As to this new movement in the South, I do not conclude that more than the first step has been taken, exceedingly important as that step is. Many of the schools as yet are in a wretched condition. The buildings in the rural districts are small and rudely built, and many of them are positively unfit to be used as school houses. There are neither maps, nor charts or other appliances for the teacher's use in his work, and in fact everything about these school houses is of the most primitive type. ”

“ Intellectually the work in the Chinese missions is already far beyond the elementary stage, and is growing more virile every year.
But everything is made but the means to the spiritual end. Not for an hour is this lost sight of. The whole drift of the teaching, the songs, the pictures, the Scripture text, is to make known Christ. Every evening's lesson ends with worship. For a month or more the Chinese preacher to whom I have referred, has held evangelistic services in the Santa Barbara mission. To-day he leaves for points farther south to do the same work elsewhere. ”

“ As we have seen some very ludicrous manifestations of character and conduct in the terrible struggles of a battlefield, and have brushed aside our tears at times for an irrepressible bon mot in a hospital, so in the weighty and solemn considerations which continually appeal to us, and while we are anxiously asking how we can make the most bricks for the Lord's building with the least straw, incidents arise which not only throw light upon our serious work, but which are irresistibly amusing. ”