PROGRESS—ENCOURAGEMENT.
The work in the Southern States moves slowly; there are many hindrances, and we are sometimes discouraged. But then, again, a way-mark is reached showing such progress as to rebuke unbelief. We point to one such.
Will the reader picture to himself the early toils and trials of Rev. John G. Fee in Kentucky. The son of a slaveholder, he began to preach an anti-slavery gospel, and organized a church excluding slaveholders. In 1855 he was mobbed; again in 1858; and in 1859 a meeting was assembled in Richmond, the county seat of Madison County, which sent a committee to Berea to warn Mr. Fee’s associates (he was then in the North) to leave in ten days. The warning was given with such quiet emphasis that it had to be obeyed. Thirty-six persons were banished from the State.
The change in twenty years is indicated in the following extract from the Kentucky Register of February 21, 1879, published in that same town of Richmond, Ky. It can be seen, too, in the prosperity of Berea College, with its 273 pupils, one-half of them white:
“Rev. John G. Fee at the Court-House.—Probably no man in Madison County in past years has been talked about as much as Rev. John G. Fee, the founder of the town and college of Berea. He has been a resident of the county for more than twenty-five years, has been a preacher of the gospel, and, yet strange to say, never until last Sunday preached a sermon in this place. On the day named, he occupied by invitation the pulpit of Dr. T. H. Clelland at the Court-House. Owing to the fact that no general notice of Mr. Fee’s intention to speak had been given, his audience was very small; otherwise the Court-House would have been filled to its utmost capacity. Mr. Fee is a forcible and pleasant speaker, agreeable in his manner, and impresses his bearers that he is in earnest, honest in his convictions, and conscientiously seeks the advancement and well-being of his fellow-men.
“As he stood before his audience, a messenger for Christ, and preached the words of the Master, one could but recall the trying years of the past, when the speaker fearlessly combated a race prejudice and battled for the freedom of a people who seemed hopelessly enslaved; when he stood alone in his advocacy of negro liberty, and in his mild and gentle way, sought to convince his neighbors that human slavery was wrong and condemned by God; when his enemies persecuted him, and the people among whom he lived sought to pull him down, and even threatened to take his life—one could but recall these stormy days of hate and sectional prejudice, and at the same time remember that when the war came and Mr. Fee’s party was in the ascendant, he had no man punished; he sought to avenge no personal grievance, but went on with his life-work in his quiet, unobtrusive way, forgetting his enemies or only remembering them to forgive them.”
We print in this number the first of a series of five articles, from the pen of Dist. Sec. Woodworth, on the general topic, “Congregationalism in the South.” They will give an outline of its history, and hints as to its responsibility and opportunity. While it will not be, as it has not been, the sole object of the Association to extend the form of church polity, to which most of the churches which contribute to it are attached, but rather to labor for the intelligent Christianization of the people who most need it, we are disposed to think that there will be found a greater affinity between the Southern people and the Congregational way than many have supposed. We do not endorse all the utterances on the incompatibility between the two which were made at the last Annual Meeting, and are glad to have so careful a survey of the whole subject as these articles will furnish.