TO THE LADIES OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES.
Dear Friends: Permit me to call your attention to the urgent needs of the American Missionary Association in its department of Woman’s Work.
Many earnest Christian women are personally engaged as missionaries at the South, and among the Chinese and the Indians. They give instruction in home duties, improved housekeeping, family government, the best use of money; they gather children into Sunday-schools, teach in day and boarding-schools—bearing with them always the blessed Gospel truth, the foundation on which we build.
We need your aid in the support of these missionaries and missionary teachers, who will thus become your representatives in the field. Laboring with a lowly and despised people, they are cut off in many instances from social privileges, and your Christian love and remembrance will give strength and good cheer.
We need scholarships to aid worthy and needy students. Our boarding-schools are doing a great work for girls, and often a young girl is saved to a useful life by supplementing her meagre funds and retaining her in school. We need supplies of clothing for distribution by missionaries in getting the young into school and Sabbath-school; also furnishing of bed and table linen for mission homes and boarding halls. Already our matrons are asking supplies of this kind.
We are indebted to the ladies of many of the Congregational churches for valuable aid rendered, and now that the way is opened for more direct communication with you, may we not hope that all will become co-workers with our noble band of missionaries in seeking to instruct and benefit the women of races so ignorant and degraded as those with whom we labor?
We invite special correspondence in regard to the various fields and the aid that can be given. Surely so important a work, not limited to schools, but extending to the family and the church relations, cannot be accomplished until woman reaches forth her hand to sister woman in uplifting helpfulness.
Yours truly,
D. E. Emerson, Secretary.