SALUTATIONS.
We extend to our friends the salutations of the season, and rejoice that we can do it with more of gratitude and hopefulness than we have been privileged to do for many years. Like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, we have passed through the Slough of Despond, and the heavy load of Debt has fallen from our shoulders; but, as in the case of the Pilgrim, this is no signal to us, or our friends, for rest in the Arbor, but for addressing ourselves to the real Christian life-work before us.
1. In this we have many things to encourage us:
(1.) The renewed prosperity of the country puts it into the hands of our friends to aid us in the needed enlargement of the work before us. We are grateful for the help given in the dark days of business stagnation, and we hope that with the reviving industry and commercial activity, gratitude to God and love for His cause will stimulate the friends of the poor to increased liberality.
(2.) There is a more full realization of the importance of our work. Never before since the war has the North so well understood that the only real solution of the Southern problem is in the intelligence and real piety of the Freedmen. Every day’s developments make this the more plain. In like manner the rights and wrongs of the Indian never forced him upon public attention with a more imperative demand for answer. So, too, the right of the Chinaman to a home and legal protection on the Pacific coast, has never become more clearly defined or more intelligently recognized. Constitutional enactments and hoodlum mobs have only set forth his wrongs more sharply and made our duty more plain. Africa looms up with more distinctness as a field of Christian labor. Not only triumphant exploration and crowding missionary enterprises stir the Christian heart, but the very difficulties and disasters arouse new zeal. Our hopeful endeavors to introduce the colored man of America as a missionary to the land of his fathers adds a new element of hope and activity.
(3.) The most encouraging outlook before us, however, is in the deeper spiritual and prayerful interest which our work awakens. Among other signs of this fact are the aroused attention of the praying women of the North to the woes and wants of the colored women and girls in the South, the increasing volume of prayer going up from the churches of the North for Africa, and the prayer and consecration awakened in its behalf among the colored people of the South. But above all, we believe that the followers of Christ are coming to realize that in this whole range of work it is only in the Divine arm that effectual help can be found.
2. We have a great work before us.
(1.) In our own special field we have the urgent call to make the repairs and improvements which we were compelled to refuse when in our great struggle for the payment of the debt. These can no longer be denied, in some cases, without sacrificing the health of the missionaries and teachers, as well as the progress of the work.
(2.) The call for enlargement confronts us on all sides. We cannot meet the demand in the public mind at the North if we stand still, and still less can we meet that of overcrowded schools and for new churches in the South. We refer our readers to the following article for some stirring details on this subject.
(3.) Our friends need to be on their guard against one incidental drawback. The Presidential election occurs this year, and the experience of this, and all other missionary societies, shows that such years mark diminished receipts. We can only say to our friends: Do your duty at the ballot-box, but do not forget the contribution-box and the prayer for missions!