BENEFACTIONS.
—Mr. Haskell, editor of the Boston Herald, has subscribed $1,000 to Bates College.
—Mr. John P. Howard has given $28,000 to the University of Vermont, for rebuilding its main edifice.
—Amherst College is to receive about $50,000 for its library from the estate of the late Joel Stiles, of Boston.
—Mr. C. H. McCormick has added $50,000 to his already liberal gifts to the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest.
—The Boston University has come into possession of the $2,000,000 estate bequeathed to the institution ten years ago by Isaac Rich, of Boston.
—The will of the late Cornelius Sweetser bequeathed $10,000 to the Thomaston Academy, the income of $15,000 for public and school libraries, $5,000 for a Sweetser school fund, and $12,000 to the York Institute.
—St. Johnsbury Academy has received from Thaddeus Fairbanks an additional $40,000 as a permanent fund. To this a gift of $50,000 is added from the estate of Governor Erastus Fairbanks, making, with sums otherwise secured, an endowment fund of $100,000.
—The Executive Committee of the A. M. A. reported at its annual meeting that $15,000 were needed for a Boy’s Dormitory at Straight University, New Orleans, La. One individual offers $5,000 of this amount on condition that the remaining $10,000 be secured.
A volume of 420 pages, entitled “Missionary Papers,” by Rev. John C. Lowrie, D.D., is the work of a man well qualified to write on a broad range of missionary topics. Dr. Lowrie was once a missionary in India, and for many years has been the senior Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. These papers are, therefore, the results of extended observation and of long and varied experience. They, like their author, are not sensational, but scholarly and practical. We subjoin a quotation from the paper on “Less Favored Races.”
“As to passing by the degraded, ignorant and uncivilized races, in order to reach those who are in some degree intelligent, polite and civilized—well, we do not so understand the example of the first Christians. The Apostle Peter might have made a splendid argument for the Hebrews as the main people to be first evangelized, pointing to their wonderful history, their unrivaled geographical position, their intellectual force, their widely-spread settlements in other countries; so the Apostle Paul might have spent a part of his unequaled eloquence in a plea for the Greeks as the people of culture, and of the Romans as full of energy. But how little do we find in the first missionary records of ethnographic, political, commercial, conventional ideas as motives for evangelizing labor. We ought to understand, moreover, the lesson of our own Anglo-Saxon history; where were men and women to be found who were less attractive than the early inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland? The same Gospel that brought them to their present standing can change the people of Africa and make them intelligent, cultured, devoted Christians.”