"WHAT PROGRESS DO YOU MAKE?"
PROF. CHAS. L. PARKER.
In our letters from different parts of the country, the above is the oft-repeated question. My answer, which is the purpose of this letter, will not deal with statistics either of church or of school, for the best work done among the mountaineers is not recorded in the church books or school curriculums; it is the work accomplished in the lives of individuals and through them. Often these individuals are never known outside their own community.
A little over a year ago, in company with a friend, I went to visit a Sunday-school in a mountain community way back in the "Ridges." The Superintendent, a man whom we had met before at a Sunday-school convention, invited us to speak. After the services we went home with him to dinner. His family consisted of a wife and five children. He deplored the fact that they had not better opportunities for education and better church privileges, so we suggested that, when the crops were harvested, he should move with his family to C—— to send them to school.
The idea pleased Mr. W——, and in course of time he came. Mrs. W—— entered the school with her children as a regular student, being in some of the same classes with her little girls. All worked diligently through the winter, enjoying an intellectual feast, of which they had hitherto known nothing. It is unnecessary to say that the winter passed too quickly with them, and the time came for "making a new crop" all too soon. They left the school reluctantly and returned to the mountain home, taking with them a spirit of progress, which will make even a rugged fastness into a blooming garden.
Last Sunday we visited the Sunday-school again, no longer a small one, for it enrolls over one hundred and fifty pupils. Mr. W—— has also organized a "Saturday class," at which the youth and grown people of the neighborhood meet after the week's work on the farm, and learn to read and write and spell. On Sunday they "meet out" at 9 o'clock in the morning for Bible study and worship, and again in the afternoon for sacred song service and church. Thus they spend the entire day. The county Superintendent has visited Mr. W's "Saturday class," and is about to recommend such movements throughout the county, as a means of keeping up an interest in education during the long period between the sessions of the free school, which rarely last longer than three months in a year. Who knows but that from this small beginning great good may grow?
Mr. W. is not a Congregationalist, nor is he a minister of the gospel, but he and his estimable wife are doing good work for Christ in their own community. This is by no means an isolated instance; all over our mountain country are schools established by the American Missionary Association, which are doing valuable work in and through their students.