American Missionary Association.
We are glad to be able to announce the safe arrival of Prof. Chase at Sierra Leone, about the 8th of January, and hope before our next issue to receive valuable advices from him.
We call attention to the Thirty-third Annual Report of the Association, recently published. In addition to the general survey which was read at the Annual Meeting at Chicago, and the minutes of that grand gathering, we have given, as usual, a detailed report of our work, and we suggest to pastors and others who may desire to inform themselves in regard to particular aspects of it, that if they will notice, they will find all this matter so classified in the Report that they can easily select just what they want. Thus, after the list of institutions and teachers, they may find the following headings: Delay in Opening Schools, Quality of the Work, Closing Exercises, Industrial Departments, Growing Favor, Buildings, Rented Property, Libraries, Student Aid, Religious Character of Schools, Colored Teachers, Theological Departments. The Church Work and other main departments are analyzed in the same way. We have done this, hoping to make the Report a helpful document and one easily used by the friends of the Association. Dr. Storrs’ sermon is also printed with it.
Miss Parmelee’s paper, read before the Woman’s Meeting at the Anniversary in Chicago, excited so much interest at the time and since, and gave so vivid, so faithful and so sympathetic a view of the perils of the girls of the South, that we have, besides giving a portion of it in a former Missionary, re-printed it in full, and have sent it largely to the Christian women of our churches. We beg them to read it, remembering that its statements are facts, and that the evils of which it speaks are among the better class of the colored women of the South, and hardly suggest the depths below, in which the mass are at home, and into which education and enlightenment only make the fall more fatal. May God’s spirit move the hearts of our Christian women to save their sisters.
One of our colored ministers, trained in an American Missionary Association school, in stating some incidents of his life to a friend, said that he was led, when about sixteen years old, to give up gambling and licentiousness, simply out of regard for his teacher, fearing that she would learn of his evil ways and despise him. That teacher little thought then, and has never learned even, of the blessed influence upon that young man, of her pure and consecrated life, which, through the providence of God, led to the transformation of a gambler and profligate, into an efficient and esteemed Christian minister, through whom she is now preaching to hundreds and even thousands.
The Superintendent, scouring through Georgia, came across Rev. Mr. Thomas, a choice man, who has charge of two colored Presbyterian churches at Union Point and Woodstock, under commission of the Northern General Assembly, and who got all his schooling—three years—at our Lewis High School in Macon, Ga. So the fruit of our tree of knowledge, is falling over into other church lots, and we are glad of it. Such fruitage is a great encouragement to the teachers of our minor schools.
A Bible Example of Reconstruction.—It was after the return from Babylon. Civil and the moral reformation went hand in hand. The first Governor, Zerubabel, who was a grandson of a former king, had the high priest, Joshua, to lead in the worship, and the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, to preach and to teach. The next Governor, Ezra, instituted for the instruction of the people an extensive system of Bible-readings. “So they read in the Book, in the law of God, distinctly and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”
The next Governor, Nehemiah, was a reformer. He put down the practices of taking heathen wives, of violating the Sabbath, and of exacting illegal interest. No improvement has as yet been made upon that style of civil reconstruction. Religion and education, the church and the school, must go along with the re-ordering of the State. So we find our work at the South in the line of a Divine pattern. The Bible gives us its ideal of dealing with freedmen by taking into its sacred canon the five books of Moses for the emancipated Israelites, the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah, for the restored captives.