REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.
The report on the Association’s work in Africa, submitted to your committee, shows that the Mendi Mission has reached once more a degree of prosperity and promise. In its church, school and industrial work it has been prospered, and in the plan of preparing and using native helpers do we find the great principle of all successful schemes for disseminating the Gospel wisely adopted. Furthermore, the signal fact seems now already permanently established that the Freedmen are the providential missionaries for the dark continent. They endure the climate as Europeans cannot, and, as trained for their work in the seminaries of this society, they evince a capacity which fits them for a rare evangelical service in the land of their ancestors.
But the matter to which it is especially fitting that your attention be directed with unwonted seriousness is the conditional decision recently arrived at by the Executive Committee of this Association to accept Mr. Arlington’s offer of £3,000, and open in Eastern Africa a new mission station. That indicates what all interested in the great problem of Africa’s Christianization should welcome with thanksgiving and prayer, viz., that this Association is to take a new and advanced part in this latest missionary crusade. Now its work will have a higher significance and a wider reach; for under God does it more and more seem that to this Association is to fall the high part of preparing the needed missionaries for Africa. The relation of the educational work of the Association to this grand enterprise becomes impressively apparent. There is a compensation in God’s providence, and in this instance it is inspiring to believe that our Freedmen, as the best fitted agents, are to become the preachers of Christianity to the land from which their ancestors were cruelly carried away as slaves. Here, now, is something proposed which will tax our faith and test our courage and consecration.
The field for the proposed mission seems to be wisely chosen, and in the Nile basin, making one more in a chain of mission stations recently opened, will this Association have its place and do its share in redeeming the continent to which the entire church now is turning with a yearning heart. It is somewhat significant that the proposed field for this mission is in a portion of the continent most desolated by the slave trade. Pre-eminently appropriate is it that this society, so long the friend and advocate of the slave, should carry the tidings of “the liberty wherewith Christ makes men free” into the midst of tribes which have suffered from this terrible traffic.
The full and studied report of the Foreign Committee, in the April number of the American Missionary, on the character and promise of the special field designated by Mr. Arthington, makes it unnecessary for your committee to add anything touching upon this point. The careful investigation made in the first instance confirms the wisdom of Mr. Arthington in naming to this Association the field he has. His own letter, published in the March number, shows that he had conferred with the best authorities as to the location of the mission, and that he has chosen a district that offers unusual attractions for such a station as this Association should establish.
We believe your committee but voice the feeling of all friends of this Association when expressing the hope that the conditions on which this missionary advance depends will be promptly met, so that without delay measures can be adopted to enter this open door, and improve this latest and greatest opportunity of doing for the millions of the long-forgotten and long-despised continent. It is very evident that the foreign work of the Association is to become of increasing importance and magnitude, for to it has providentially fallen the high privilege of preparing the workers especially required in African evangelization. With its old mission on the West Coast rising now into fresh usefulness, on its new basis of depending upon Freedmen missionaries and native helpers, and the projected station south and west of Gondokoro, in a field full of promise, it will become a great evangelistic power in Africa. The springs and feeders of its work will be in those noble educational institutions established in our Southern land, for from these will go forth the colored men and women who will show of what holy sacrifice and achievements they are capable.
We should not forget that to this Association belongs the honor of inaugurating in this country the more recent phase of African evangelization. At the annual meeting in Clinton, Iowa, in 1874, was the first note sounded for a missionary advance into the heart of the dark continent, and in the annual gathering of 1875 and every year since has it been a prominent subject for consideration. Mr. Arthington was induced to make his offer to the Association because of its early and pronounced sympathy with this plan of interior missions in Africa, and we, of our own belief, would be disloyal to the flag we first gave to the winds of heaven if we did not gird ourselves for this new venture. This Association cannot afford to be absent from the Christian forces now entering the far land, for by Providence and the signal history of past years, and its peculiar relation to the African race, it is called to take its place, highest of all, in the lustrous belt of missions that now extend from the Zambesi along the chain of lakes to the region in the Nile basin which we are to man under the name of the Arthington Mission.
M. M. G. Dana,
H. T. Rose,
G. D. Pike,
S. J. Humphrey.