THE INTERNATIONAL SUNDAY-SCHOOL CONVENTION.
MRS. T. N. CHASE, ATLANTA.
As gems are valued by their rarity, so you can imagine how such a gathering as the Sunday-school Convention seemed to us in Georgia.
We were favored, not more by hearing the appointed speakers in the great Convention, than by the personal presence and good words of many of its delegates in our own school-room. Gen. Fisk, who has given not only his name, but his heart and hand to our Fisk University, took Atlanta and the Convention by storm with his happy address of welcome. It seems to me our young men can never lose the inspiration of hope and courage that must have come to them from him, whose youthful struggles had even exceeded many of their own. Then we heard Dr. H. M. Parsons. All who ever listened to him will understand how, at the close of his words, we felt that, next to the Rock Christ Jesus, there was not beneath the sun so firm a foundation as our blessed Bible. Another day, Dr. McVicar, a college president from Montreal, warned us of the Jesuits, with an earnestness such as, perhaps, only a good Scotch Presbyterian could feel. Then we had “Hope Ledyard,” the charming correspondent, whose young life seems too exquisitely moulded to have always escaped the loving Father’s crucible.
Best of all, we had good words from many not heard in the Convention, and, perhaps, unknown to fame. There was Judge Harman, of Oswego. How his clear eye took in the large possibilities of our work, and how his great heart went out toward us! As he warned us of the perils of a life without Jesus, and the depths of despair into which life’s trials could plunge a soul unsupported by the Everlasting Arms, his peaceful face and silvery hair assuring us he knew whereof he affirmed, some of us had rare glimpses into the blessed beyond. The words of Rev. A. P. Foster, Dr. Tully, and several that I was prevented from hearing, so lifted both teachers and pupils above the plane of plodding school life, that we almost trembled to look down. The fact that many such men, of kindred mind and heart, filled the silent pews of the Convention, seemed to me the secret of its power. We had heard as good papers from other platforms, but the sight of such a body, all delighting in the Master’s command, “Feed My lambs,” was enough to send us to our homes feeling, as one of our girls expressed it, “I know I shall be a better woman for having attended the Convention.”
In response to an invitation for the delegates to visit our school, Governor Colquitt, who presided, remarked to the Convention: “The University is a good place to visit, and is doing a good work”; and added that he had a servant who had attended our school some years, and the instruction received there had not pushed him above his position—he was the same humble, faithful boy about his work. Every summer he came to him for a recommendation to teach, which he cheerfully gave him, and the boy always returned in the fall the same good, modest young man.
Dr. McVicar also took a public occasion to express his appreciation of our work. After the close of his sermon, at the Central Presbyterian Church here, while recounting to the audience the many things of interest he had enjoyed in their city, he remarked that he had recently visited most of the universities of Europe, and added that nothing in Atlanta, or the great universities abroad, had interested him so heartily as their Atlanta University.