A SUNDAY AT TALLADEGA, ALA.
BY PRESIDENT DEFOREST.
Our different religious services begin early in the day. At 7.30, soon after breakfast and prayers in the dining hall, the Young Men's Christian Association holds its meeting for an hour. The Sunday-school, with a large attendance and many classes occupying different school rooms, convenes at 9.15, with the regular church service following at 10.30. We are never through with this without feeling keenly the need of a larger, better and better ventilated house of worship. A new chapel is longed for each Sabbath, often through the week, and especially at commencement season when our varied anniversary exercises are all crowded into one small inadequate and inappropriate room.
Soon after dinner more than a score of students, mainly young men, with a few of our teachers, go out to seven different mission Sunday-schools, two of which are in our own tasteful chapels, others in country churches, and one in a private house, where they meet about 300 different pupils of all sorts, garbs and ages, but for the most part attentive listeners eager for instruction, as well as for the papers which Northern benevolence, through sundry boxes and barrels, enable us to supply. This mission Sunday-school work began with the first year of the College Church and has accomplished a large and growing good. Through these schools the college multiplies itself, carrying the Gospel, with opposition to tobacco and intoxicants, into needy places. These mission schools are a cordon of outposts surrounding the citadel. The most remote is five and a half miles away, and incidentally a good share of pluck is developed by those who, through cold or heat, mud or dust, regularly make their Sabbath day rounds.
Comparatively few are regularly in these mission enterprises. For those at home there is the quiet hour and prayer meetings, a gathering in the interests of purity or temperance--enough to employ the time to the early supper hour. After that comes the last public meeting of the day in the chapel, which for some time has been conducted by our Society of Christian Endeavor. The day is a full one, with large opportunities for personal growth and usefulness.
From a recent visit, I am able to write more fully of one of the meetings of the Young Men's Christian Association. The hour was early, but the room was well filled. The leader took but little time and used it well. Prayers followed, with volunteer singing; other prayers, brief and earnest, and then a quartet sang a touching evangelical hymn. Seldom have I spoken to more attentive hearers than were furnished by these fifty young men. It was an inspiration to look into their faces and to feel that in a few years they would all be scattered, if they live, to the four quarters of the world and wielding a large influence among[pg 165] men. I could but hope that that influence would be for good. Many earnest prayers followed, and when an opportunity was offered three young men requested prayers. They were tenderly remembered. It seemed to me that some of these petitions had in them the fervor of Pentecost. Two young men were received into the Association, and when the hour was through I felt that we had been sitting together in heavenly places in Christ.
And now as a Roman could not end his speech without adding Delenda est Carthago, so I cannot close without saying that if this part of the world needs Christian schools, if Christian education is the hope of these regions, then Talladega College ought to be enlarged and endowed. Some who are giving themselves to this most blessed reconstruction wish that they had money to add also. May those who cannot come themselves send on supplies.