American Missionary Association.
By the time this number of the Missionary reaches our readers our Annual Report for 1880 will be through the press. We shall be happy to forward it to any of our friends who will send us their name and address, signifying their desire to have it.
This number of the American Missionary contains a complete list of the names of the persons appointed for the current year to the different fields where this Association carries on its work at home and abroad. We commend the work and the workers to the great Lord of the harvest, and to all those who utter the prayer He has taught us to offer, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heaven.”
It is the belief of this Association that conversion is the proper door into the kingdom of science, as well as to the kingdom of Heaven. Our teachers and pastors, therefore, seek to bring those who come under their instruction to a knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus, in order that they may be qualified to know aright and properly appropriate all knowledge. We are glad, therefore, to be able to refer our readers to letters from the field, in this number, as evidence that revival work is going on at different points throughout the South.
Letters from our various stations at the South remind us, as we would remind our friends, that this winter is a hard one for the colored people, and that our missionaries really need more money and more clothing to distribute than in ordinary winters. We quote from one letter, which must serve for all: “As I write, the ground is covered with snow to the depth of about six inches, the first we have seen since 1876. By reason of the unprepared condition of the poor people here, living in open shanties and scantily supplied with clothing and food, this season of excessive cold is especially hard to endure.” Contributions of money and clothing to relieve this pressing and immediate want may be sent to the care of H. W. Hubbard, Treasurer, 56 Reade street, New York City.
We are glad to know that the Rev. A. D. Mayo, one of the editors of the Journal of Education, is making an extended tour of the South, and will hold Teachers’ Institutes and deliver courses of lectures in its chief educational centres. We shall await with great interest the report of what he sees and learns during his visit, and expect valuable suggestions from one who, to his wide experience as an educator shall add an accurate knowledge of the present condition of that part of the country.
At the Annual Meeting in Norwich, the Committee on foreign work recommended that a superintendent of African missions be secured at once. The Executive Committee, after careful inquiry, made selection of Rev. H. M. Ladd, a much beloved pastor of Walton, N. Y., who has written:
“I hereby accept the position, praying the Great Head of the church for His blessing upon the arduous work undertaken in His name, looking for His help, without which we can do nothing, but with which we can do all things. I shall endeavor to enter upon the work of the Association on the 1st of February.”
We sympathize with his people in their great loss and congratulate them on the valuable gift they make to the cause of the Master.
The Southern Workman, published at Hampton, Va., is, mechanically, a fair and most creditable specimen of the work done in the industrial department of the Hampton school; its editorial management proves that men good for something else are devoting their talents to negro education, while its columns show that intelligent minds giving promise of future usefulness are being trained in the school, and the paper, as a whole, gives an adequate idea of the work being done and yet to be done in such schools. Our friends who would at once have a very readable paper, keep informed on all phases of the Hampton work, and contribute something to support a most worthy enterprise, can do all this by sending to Gen. Armstrong the price of the Southern Workman.
“An Old Friend,” of Sag Harbor, New York, sends $30 for a Christmas certificate of Life Membership for one of his friends, the twenty-sixth Life Member of this Association which he has made. He has earned the right to say: “Urge others to make their friends Life Members, and thus add to the friends of the Society, and increase the number of those who will take an interest in the good work.”
Another “Old Friend” who has celebrated his eighty-fifth Thanksgiving, sends $30 as a very suitable wedding present of a Life Membership to his son’s wife, having made all his own children members.
These are happy suggestions for happy occasions.