American Missionary Association.
With this number, the American Missionary passes into the hands of Rev. C. C. Painter, as Editor and Business Manager. Mr. Painter was born in the South, educated at the North, where he was for several years a pastor, and more recently a Professor of Theology in Fisk University, and connected with its financial management. He brings to the work a ripe scholarship, the pen of a ready writer, and a deep interest in the varied work in which the Association is engaged.
The retirement of the Rev. Geo. M. Boynton, who, for several years, has acted as Editor of the Missionary, is felt to be a great loss to the Association. His peculiar skill in editing, his facility in writing, and his quick apprehension of current events bearing on our work, enabled him to give to our magazine a freshness and attractiveness it never before had attained. Mr. Boynton’s usefulness as a member of our Executive Committee makes his loss to us the greater. In his new pastorate in Jamaica Plain, Boston, he bears with him the warmest affection and best wishes of the officers of the Association.
As we make our bow after the above graceful introduction by our honored Senior Secretary, we are conscious that all eyes are turned regretfully toward the departing, rather than hopefully to the incoming, Editor. We are in the position similar to that of a new minister, who is told as he makes his first pastoral visits, “We never expect to love another pastor as we loved Mr. B.” We are glad for all that makes our position difficult, and suggest as the only remedy for the loss the Missionary must otherwise sustain in the retirement of Mr. Boynton, that all who feel it, shall make the appropriate effort to prevent it. Let our teachers and missionaries understand, that they must come to the rescue by prompt and faithful reports of every phase of their work; giving us rich material from which to select what, from our stand-point, appears the thing to be said at any given time. Let Pastors and Superintendents, and other co-laborers, feel that they must stand between this work and loss, and double their diligence, and quicken their zeal, in keeping their churches and schools informed and interested; and, finally, let all who have felt an impulse to give more, show their appreciation of the late Editor’s good work by such an increase of gifts, as shall meet the urgent demands on our Treasury; and in reporting all this, we promise the most interesting numbers of the Missionary yet published. Thus:
“Out of these golden griefs
Bethel we’ll raise.”
We have received a copy of the new map of Central and Southern Africa, published by the A. B. C. F. M. As an outline map for chapel purposes, we believe it unsurpassed in beauty and cheapness. The price, on paper, is 75c.; on cloth, $1.25; to be had of C. N. Chapin, 14 Congregational House, Boston.
Dr. T. Thornton Macklin, who for several years was connected with the Blantyre Mission in the region of the Nyassa, is making a brief visit to this country, and gave us much valuable information about methods of work in Equatorial Africa, in an hour’s interview at our office. Dr. Macklin is anxious to return to Africa and enter upon pioneer work, such as that proposed by Mr. Arthington to the A. M. A., in the Nile basin.
We are glad to know that Dr. G. B. Willcox, whose presence and counsels are sadly missed in our Committee meetings, loses none of his enthusiasm for the American Missionary Association and its work, because of his new home and new duties. At a recent meeting in Dr. Noble’s church in Chicago, he read an address which we wish could be put into the hands of every Christian, and of every citizen, in the land. It is too long to print in our pages, and too consecutive to dismember without marring. We hope he may have calls to deliver it before the other churches of that city, and of other cities, East and West.
We fear that a fact, stated by Mrs. Hill in our last number, has not been fully taken in by our readers. Writing from Marion, Ala., of her work among the children, she said, incidentally, and most of us read it without comprehending it, “The girls’ sewing-class has sent $38 to the Mendi Mission.”
The “Girls’ Sewing-Class!” “Thirty-eight Dollars!” Sunday-school workers of New England, think what that means! We venture to say there is scarce a Sunday-school connected with one of our churches in New England where the same amount of money would cost a girls’ sewing-class one-half the self-denial and labor that is represented by this $38 for the Mendi Mission. And it came from a colored girls’ sewing-class!
Some time since, a request came from a teacher in one of our institutions to the Sunday-school of the Second Congregational Church in Rockville, Conn., that it should raise $70 for a promising young man who, for lack of it, must leave his studies. The matter was brought before the school and laid over for consideration. On the next Sabbath, a class of young men, every one of whom was earning his own living, stated that it would assume the responsibility for the whole amount. To raise this money did not hurt them; on the contrary, it did them as much good as it did the one who received it. What if this same spirit should become epidemic in our schools!
The Sunday-school at Kenosha, Wis., when its pastor read to it President Cravath’s article in the October Missionary, entitled “What shall we do?” promptly responded by sending a check for $50. Pastors, Sunday-school superintendents and teachers, it is not a difficult thing to do, but a most easy, and as blessed as easy, to enlist your young people in this beneficent work; beneficent not alone in relation to the ignorant negroes, but to your own young people. The needs of our work are great, but the need that our Sunday-school children and young people be educated out of narrow, selfish views of life, is even more urgent. Let this double education go forward steadily and by organized effort; thus shall sower and reaper rejoice together, and it will be difficult to tell the one from the other in their mutual joy and benefit, for both are reapers of such sowing.
The Selma, Ala., Daily Times notes the fact that our Field Secretary, Dr. Roy, preached in the First Presbyterian Church of that city in the morning, and the Rev. H. S. DeForest in the evening, of a recent Sabbath, and says that more than usual interest was manifested in both services. Also, in a kindly notice of the Fifth Annual Convention of the Congregational Churches of Alabama, convened in that city, it says: “This church is doing a great work for the education and religious culture of the colored people in Alabama, and the other Southern States.”
Dr. R. S. Rust, Secretary of the M. E. Freedmen’s Aid Society, in his Twelfth Annual Report of the work of that Society, speaks with a just pride of the twenty distinctive colored schools established in the South, with an aggregate of 2,510 pupils: of these, 453 are classed as Biblical, 20 law, 60 medical, 74 collegiate, 270 academic, 1,020 normal, 242 intermediate, and 371 primary.
We congratulate him and his church on the good work done, and to be done.
Prof. J. W. Randolph, of Waco College, Texas, which, we understand, is a newly-projected school, to be under management of the colored people, announces his purpose of publishing a new music and hymn-book for and by his own people; and so the genius of this people is reaching out into new fields of effort.
Facts are facts positeevely, as Dr. John Brown’s Scotch beadle would say, and will assert and establish themselves if we can only have patience in well-doing. The professor of Greek in one of the State Colleges of the South said to us, some months since: “I spent a day in Fisk University, and as I am, and have been all my life, a teacher of Greek, was curious to see what the negro could do with that language; and, sir, I should be most proud and happy if I had twenty boys in my College who could recite Greek as I heard that number of boys and girls reciting it in that school.”
The teacher of these boys and girls was a young colored woman, 22 years of age, herself a graduate of the school in which she was then teaching.
Among the many indications of the growing interest taken by the best class of Southern people in the educational work of our schools, we note the frequent kindly notices, given in the daily papers of the cities in which our schools are located, of anything that concerns the work. We clip the following from the Morning Ledger, of Memphis, in appreciative mention of the lecture course before Le Moyne Institute of that city: “It is an encouraging sign of the times when such men as Dr. Maury, Judge Morgan, Col. Eaton, and Judge Hammond give their time and talents for the instruction and elevation of the colored race, especially when these people show a disposition and a capacity for moral and intellectual improvement. It is an indisputable evidence of the amiable relations of the two races, and gives assurance that the traces of the war, and its bad passions, are wearing out, and that we have entered upon a peaceful, law-abiding era, with a good basis for solid prosperity.”
At the close of the last lecture, delivered by Rev. Mr. Trible, Col. L. B. Eaton arose, and after reference to the success of the course and its good results to the community, proposed, as appreciative of the lecture and expressive of their interest in the object, that they should take a collection, which resulted in over $30 for the library of the school.
We learn that these lectures have been prepared with the same care as if intended for the most cultivated white audiences, and without condescension or patronage, were delivered as if addressed to an audience of young men and women without any hint, direct or implied, of race, color, or previous condition.