Various

“ The golden image could not protect from the dangers of the fire the king's mighty men that cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the furnace. And why? Because it was simply an image, the work of men's hands. And now, what are our Chinese idols? Are not they the works of men's hands too? We all say that they are true gods and are very powerful; yet, you all well know that we have a common saying: "Though the gods are powerful, yet they are not able to protect an unfortunate man." So let us seek, believe and worship the only true God, and Him alone. ”

“ How much good a missionary could accomplish by going into their homes and teaching them the true Christian way of living! The mothers with whom I talked seemed willing, and even anxious, to know better ways. Any instruction in housekeeping would be gratefully received, and a sewing class, where cutting and making plain clothing were taught, would be eagerly accepted. A mothers' meeting once a week would be more helpful to those barren minds than words can express. The work is right there, all ready and waiting for some loving, self-denying Christian woman to take up. ”

“ A people who had received only the degrading tuition of slavery could not produce at once many who should have the reliable qualities and the intellectual and moral training needed for the responsible and, to a large extent, the unsuperintended work of a foreign missionary. Then, every capable preacher, teacher and leader has been needed in a hundred places at home. They could scarcely be justified in leaving their own brothers and sisters in heathenism and without the truth within their reach, to go to the heathen abroad. ”

“ It was necessary that one man should die for the people (John xviii, 14) , and God arranged that he who is likewise one of the great benefactors of the human race as well as of his native land should crimson and beautify with his blood the soil that gave a cradle and a tomb to the Father of his Country.
Grand indeed is the greatness of the rock-ribbed Adirondacks where John Brown lived, prayed, thought out his great life-thought, and made his first trials in the work of emancipation, but grander is the stone there that marks the grave of him whose mighty spirit is still "marching on;" ”

“ A former slave of Jefferson Davis is not only a successful missionary in Africa, but has proved himself such a level-headed man that he has been chosen treasurer of one of the missions of the American Board. Such as he are an earnest of what shall be, when the colored people shall be more fully evangelized and the appeal for Africa can be made strong to their hearts and consciences. Then there will be such a going forth as will astonish the Christian Church.
The bearing of the work for the one hundred thousand Chinese in this country on foreign missions can be clearly seen. ”

“ How can it be otherwise than that, when once the Indians of our land shall come to have and appreciate the blessings of a Christian civilization, their hearts shall be stirred by the needs of their brethren according to the flesh, and that they will go to them with the gospel story?
There remains one other field—the whites of the South and especially the "Mountain Whites." As a class, they are poor, ignorant and needy in every way—materially, intellectually, morally and spiritually, but they are not the "poor, white trash" of the South. ”

“ That afternoon, at the woman's meeting, we learned that they had given away everything they possessed, furniture, clothing, bedding, dishes, and were absolutely destitute of the barest necessities of life. This is one of their customs. They reason thus: Our child is dead; our hearts are sad; life has no longer any attractions; take all we have. The Christian Indian women in our church each gave something out of her little property to help these poor heathen people, who in their superstitious ignorance had made their lot so wretched. ”

“ The two Riggs brothers, whose heredity as well as personal consecration fit them for large usefulness in the Indian work, were especially rich in experience and inspiring in conference. One thing, especially, impressed me in this Indian work, and that was, the difference in character between the average teacher employed by the Government and those employed by this Association and other missionary bodies. Many noble men and women are at work under the Government in teaching the Indians, but the purpose of the Government-school at the best is simply to make intelligent citizens. ”

“ We realize more than ever that the American Missionary Association is a great National Society, limited neither geographically nor by any race restrictions; actually gathering in its schools and missions, Negroes, Whites and Indians, and Chinese and Japanese, and Hondurans and Cubans, and who knows how many other needy and destitute people! Another fact that must impress one, is the thoroughness of the work done. The examinations were thorough and exhaustive in the schools. ”

“ Speaking of the race problem, in his baccalaureate sermon at Vanderbilt University, recently, Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, of the Methodist Church, South, startled his hearers by the following vigorous declaration: "It is a travesty on religion, this disposition to canonize missionaries who go to the dark continent, while we have nothing but social ostracism for [246] [246] the white teacher who is doing a work no less noble at home. The solution to the race problem rests with the white people who live among the blacks, and who are willing to become their teachers in a missionary spirit." ”

“ It is truly fitting, therefore, that they who were rescued by him from bondage should love and honor his glorious name, and that we all should chant the praises of the man who was the chosen instrument of Providence in destroying out of our country the inhuman custom of human slavery. ”

“ Nothing, however, dies so hard as prejudice, and nothing is so cruel; but missions do not cease to be Home Missions, because they may be where there is sinful prejudice and dense ignorance.
Q. What would be Foreign Missions in the South?
A. Missions in the South which would treat an entire race as foreigners and aliens because in God's wisdom he has seen fit to make them black, would be foreign to the spirit of the Gospel: "For He is our peace who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us. Through Him, we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. ”

“ College, three in log churches, owned by other denominations, not having Sunday-schools, two in log cabins. "In one school, teachers and scholars have to huddle together under umbrellas, if they have any, or go wet, if they haven't them, whenever it rains; and it is a sight which makes one long for better accommodations, that more efficient work may be done," writes this self-sacrificing professor in a note just received. In one house, he found a family of white children, all of them very ignorant, and, so far as he was able to discover, there was not a single book of any kind in the cabin. ”

“ The Southern Congregationalist, published in Atlanta, does not have a high opinion of such men as John Brown. We quote:
There are men who never are mistaken. If your opinion or plan, no matter how well sustained, differs from theirs, they solemnly greet you: "Our conscience is our monitor: we can make no concessions of principle." ”

“ The Gospel does not classify with other schemes of amelioration."
This accords with our thought of the methods of Christ. The way to meet that which is wrong, is to meet it as a wrong. We shall not do well to ameliorate it. If we may not expect those who have been "raised" amid prejudices and ignorance to be leaders for the absolute rectitude of things, those who have not lived where this excuse is available should be the leaders. If some do not lead, none will follow. ”

“ Christian work for them is missionary work for China—it sends them back to become missionaries to their native land. The fruitfulness of this work for foreign missions has been fully demonstrated.
The possibilities of the influence of the evangelization of the Indians on foreign missions is a topic which I do not remember having seen or heard mentioned. Yet it seems to me worth thinking about.
Mexico has four million Indians; Central America, one million five hundred thousand, and South America seven million. Here is a foreign mission field of twelve and a half million souls. ”

“ Race tastes and race affiliations will make for churches essentially white and essentially black. "But to close the door on any Christian is in so far to make it an unchristian church. To go into the South and establish white churches from which, whether by a formal law or by an unwritten but self-forcing edict, men are excluded because God made them black, is to deny one of the fundamental tenets of Christ. ”

“ We have been thinking that the methods of Christ were divine as well as his truth, and that when the Christian world will use Christ's methods in the propagation of truth there will be a great advance upon some features of the present. Dr. Parkhurst has some very suggestive sentences in this line of thought in a sermon on "The Regenerative Force of the Gospel." His words are: "Christ never patches. The Gospel is not here to mend people. Regeneration is not a scheme of moral tinkering and ethical cobbling. In the Gospel, we move into a new world and under a new scheme. ”

“ If those who have not shared in the work of the Association as yet, this year, will make a corresponding effort with those who have done so, we shall have reason to hope that we can go to our Annual Meeting in Chicago, owing no man anything but love and good will.
But those who have waited are many, and we are waiting and depending on these. Those who have not taken their contributions have the power to convert our hopes into realities. ”

“ A prominent editor of a Southern political paper—white and [244] [244] democratic—testifies this month: "Yours is the most practical missionary work ever undertaken by a Christian body, and should have the hearty and unstinted support of all Christians." The cases are few where good will does not exist between its teachers and ministers and the white people among whom they live.
Q. Does not social ostracism show that the white teacher is engaged in a Foreign Mission?
A. Social ostracism is gradually giving way among the more intelligent Christian people. ”

“ We can, however, but admire the fidelity of the church to its doctrines, and the Christian example it gives to all missionary societies in its recognition of man as man. The quotations which we make from the Roman Catholic Quarterly will account for the strong hold that Romanism is beginning to secure upon the negro race.
The following, for example, is a Roman Catholic tribute to John Brown:
On the 2nd of December next, thirty years will have passed since John Brown, in his sixtieth winter, ascended the scaffold and gave his life for the colored race. ”

“ He invited the children to Sunday-school, where, like Robert Raikes, he teaches reading and spelling as well as the Bible, but the mother indignantly refused, saying that she "didn't let her children go to school with Niggers!"
There are many evidences of heroic sacrifice on the part of the people among whom we labor, that one runs across in such a trip as this. Here is one: A small church in Alabama has recently voted to pay fifty dollars per month of their pastor's salary, that they may become self-supporting, and so let the funds which they have received go to other more needy fields. ”

“ What a grand thing it would be, if the good friends of the Association in New England, and elsewhere in the North, to whom our work is only presented through an appeal for funds, might visit some of these grand institutions in the South and West, and see just what is being done for these neglected people! ”

“ The A.M.A. is planting white churches (so called) every year, and has added several this year, though none of them would refuse membership to a man because he is black, and is planting colored churches (so called) , none of which should be excluded from State Associations merely because of color.
Q. Should the missions of the A.M.A. be called Foreign Missions because its schools and churches cannot win the co-operation of the Christians among whom they live? ”

“ Joseph's Advocate, as to the color line:
Man was created in God's own image and likeness. This image and likeness is, however, not a physical one, it is a spiritual or soul likeness. The likeness and image of the operation of the human soul—the mind—through the material, physical medium of the brain, is not only similar, but substantially and formally alike in every division of the human race. It thus follows that fundamentally there is an identity of mental or soul activity and action in all the human race. ”

“ Such men are of little use in the world. They may have a few satellites, but that is all. It is noticeable how uniformly the conscience and principles of these men agree with their prejudices, salaries and other interests, and with changed circumstances how "concessions" distill from them gently as the dew. ”

“ Riggs found it impossible to get an Indian to go to the assistance of these poor people. They were all afraid. Rumors were afloat that the father was going to shoot anyone connected in any way with the school, Indian or white. When an Indian is sorrow-stricken over the death of a friend or relative, he alleviates his suffering by killing some one else. ”

“ Amid these emotions, gratitude stands prominent—gratitude to the honored Association which has placed within our reach these opportunities for the development of intellect and of character that fit us to take our places in life as intelligent men and women. ”

“ Neither color, nor form, nor feature, nor clime, operates a change on the formal and fundamental identity of human thought as evolved by the human mind....
It follows that the negro race, thinking the same thoughts, have the same apprehension of the perfect, good and true, and, thinking in the same lines as the Caucassian race, must needs be of the same order of creation, in the image and likeness of their Maker, although physically different in color, yet in mind and soul the same. ”