American Missionary Association.
We have reached the half-way turning point of our fiscal year. With March the first six months of our year ended. Our mission stations are all manned. Churches and schools, with all their multitudinous outshoots of work, are taxing the energies, abilities and devotion of our workers. Never in the history of this Association was the work more manifestly blessed of God, or more imperative in its calls for vigorous prosecution. Our schools are crowded. Multitudes of students are turned away because there is no room to receive them. The calls pour in upon us from every quarter for more dormitories and recitation buildings—for more help for worthy and needy students, for more missionaries, preachers and teachers, to go into regions most destitute and urgent for relief. Whole counties are reported in which there is neither a church nor a school; whole sections of country in which there are thousands and tens of thousands of people for whose souls no one seems to care. Revivals are reported in connection with nearly all our churches, and the evidence is overwhelming that great harvests are waiting the reaping in almost every direction. What are we to do? What would the churches have us do? We are their servants; we report to them the outlook; we send out to them the call; we impatiently await their authoritative response. That response must be in money.
Our financial situation is this: At the present writing we have paid out $14,555.84 more than we have received the current year. This, with the debt coming over from last year, makes us $20,339.55 in arrears. It is impossible either to arrest or cut down the work at this point in the year so as to secure relief. But even if we could, would we be justified in doing it? Our total receipts last year were $335,704.20. Our appeal for the current year is $350,000. Our total receipts up to March 31st were $127,605.47. Our readers can very easily figure out for themselves whether any blame can rightfully be charged to those who have the management of the Association in hand, and also whether, in view of the facts, the thought of curtailment should be cherished for a moment.
On the basis of our receipts last year, we should have received by the end of March $167,852, and on the basis of our appeal, $175,000. It will be seen, therefore, that in the prosecution of the work we have not exceeded the appeal of this year, nor even the scale of last year. Here, then, presses our problem. Summer is not a good time for collections. The necessity for special appeals, such as we have been obliged to make during the past few years towards the end of our fiscal year, has been as irksome and disagreeable to us as it has been to our friends. It is on this account we now raise the question: Cannot an effort be made during the next two months to so increase the contributions to the A. M. A. that the summer will find us delivered from possible embarrassment? It will necessitate earnest work on the part of our friends; but with such an important field urgently calling for the enlargement of missionary work, with so many evidences of the Divine approval resting upon it, and with so much ability in the possession of our friends, may we not hope that the churches will lay hold of the problem and solve it at once?
Suicide Postponed.—There is an old story with such a good moral that we recall it to the minds of our readers. A man of large wealth, living in Paris, became so tired of a monotonous life that he determined to commit suicide. On his way to the spot decided upon, it occurred to him that he might as well give away the money that he had with him, which was quite a large amount. He found so much pleasure in bestowing this upon the poor people whom he met, that he concluded to postpone the suicide until he had had time to enjoy some more of the same beneficence. It is needless to add that, instead of disgracing himself by suicide, he became a public benefactor.
SELECTED.
Righteous Indignation.—“I have just been reading my American Missionary for April. I am terribly stirred up by it—am under a dreadful temptation to covet money that does not belong to me. I am poor and I have to pay for my board and my room, and cannot get without stealing the wealth that is so foolishly spent by others.
“The treatment of the Chinese, too, is an abomination. I am naturally high-spirited, and, although in my 83d year, do not feel more meek and quiet than in my early years. It cannot be that the blessed God whose ‘mercy endureth forever’ can look with favor upon our nation. Alas! alas! what can be done?”
SUBSCRIBER.
One of our missionaries writes: “A man who has a family of ten children, and next to no school privileges, came fifteen miles with a daughter of sixteen years to see me about getting three children into school. A good man, and deeply interested to educate his family. But I had to turn him away for lack of room. Such instances are constantly occurring. The only way the young people on these mountains who live remote from school can be educated is to hire rooms and board themselves.” There is a plea in these words for the erection of dormitories to accommodate needy and worthy students. Such dormitories would not cost much, perhaps not over $500 each. But the current funds must be used for our current work. Gladly would we tell our missionary to put up a few dormitories and let these pleading ones be cared for. But we have no money to appropriate. Can any of the readers of the Missionary help us out? Only we must raise the caution, that the help given at this point should not be allowed to interfere with gifts to our general work.
Secretary Beard has taken hold of the Southern Department of our work with a great deal of earnestness. He has just returned from a somewhat extended apostolic visitation of our churches and schools. Many of our readers will remember Dr. Beard’s enthusiasm and zeal for French evangelization, but he stands ready to confess that the necessities underlying the work of the American Missionary Association far exceed any that he has ever felt for mission work before. We knew it would be so. It is simply impossible to convey a full idea of the far-reaching needs and to set forth the imperative claims of the great work in which the A. M. A. is engaged.
The friends of the Indians have watched with much solicitude the action of the recent Congress on the numerous bills before it relating to Indian affairs. It is a matter of great rejoicing that the most important of these, the General Allotment Act, has passed. This allows the Indians to take their lands individually by allotments and patents, and makes the allottees citizens of the United States. This bill is far-reaching, and covers in a measure the objects aimed at by some of the others which failed. Among these last is the Sioux bill, which proposes to divide up and dispose of parts of the Sioux reservation in Dakota. In another column will be found an excellent article, by Rev. A. L. Riggs, showing the loss, and yet the incidental benefits, that may arise from the failure of this bill. We will only add, that some of the provisions of the Sioux bill can indirectly and after some delay be carried out under the General Allotment Act.
The failure of the Mission Indian bill is a source of unrelieved regret and indignation. These Indians, whose sad story is told so pathetically in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona,” are still left unprotected, and their lands are still exposed to the incursions of unscrupulous white men. It is to be hoped that the nation will demand of the next Congress that justice shall be done to these Indians.
Lincoln Memorial Church, Washington, D.C., has hitherto carried on its work in the Lincoln Mission building. This building is held in trust by the Lincoln Industrial Association to sustain educational, industrial and religious work. This association was in no way connected with the church; it had several local enterprises under its auspices in the same building in which the work of the church was carried on. Thus the growth and usefulness of the church were greatly hindered, as it had no control of the building and the various enterprises carried on in it. It was clear that a church representing a higher type and standard of Christian life and worship than the average church of this community was greatly needed in this growing section of the city. It was also evident that if the Lincoln Memorial Church should supply this demand, steps should be taken to so adjust the property and renovate the building as to make a permanent church home and to promote the most hopeful growth of the work by putting all the departments of work carried on in the building under the management of the church. Secretary Beard and Superintendent Ryder, of the A. M. A., and the pastor and officers of the Lincoln Memorial Church held a conference, October 29, with the Board of Directors of the Lincoln Industrial Association to consider the most practical plan of putting the control of the property and all departments of work, educational, industrial and religious, carried on in the building, under the auspices of the Lincoln Memorial Church.
After the subject was fully discussed the following resolution was unanimously adopted by the Board of Directors of the Lincoln Industrial Association: “Resolved, That the Lincoln Industrial Association hereby declares itself in full sympathy with the desire of the Lincoln Memorial Church that the entire property, together with all the auxiliaries in Christian and industrial work, be put under the direction of the Lincoln Memorial Church here organized, and to that end any additional action necessary will be carried out.”
When the action of the conference was presented to the church it was voted that the church accept the trust and that steps be taken immediately to repair and improve the church and parsonage and all other parts of the building, as far as practicable, so as to make the building more desirable as a place of worship and center of Christian work, and a home for the pastor’s family. A building committee was appointed and an appeal was made to the public and friends for funds for the immediate repair and improvement of the building.