The Rev. Dr. John Hall says: “The churches of New York cost $3,000,000 per year; the amusements $7,000,000; the city government $13,000,000. It is not an extravagant demand that the churches should have more money.”
Ella A. Giles, in The Nation, furnishes a description of a seminary for colored girls in Atlanta, Ga., under the auspices of the Baptist Home Missionary Society. Here is a testimony she jotted down in one of their meetings: “Dis chile didn’t do no teachin’ in vacation,” said a big mulatto woman, with great pomposity. “’Twan’t ’cos she didn’t know ’nuff, ’xactly, nor ’cos there wasn’t heaps dat needed to be teached. On every side ignorant niggers is as thick as flies. But my preferment was doin’ suthin’ else fur my blessed Savior. Needn’t think I didn’t work for Jesus, my young sisters. I tell ye I worked mighty hard! I visited heaps o’ sick niggers, an’ I ’low I wan’t lazy. Don’t win ye no crown jes to go an’ look at sick folks, unless ye do suthin’ fur um. I feel like as if my stomach was light and freed from bile, ’cos I nussed the sick, an’ puttin my shoulder to the wheel, didn’t look back like Lot’s wife and turn unto a pillow of salt, but minded my blessed Lord an’ Savior an’ visited the sick—fur to please Jesus. I likes dis yeah school. Laws! I’s mo’n fifty years ole or thar-’bouts, an’ till I kum yeah I nebber know’d dat workin’ fur Christ meant nussin’ sick folks an’ goin’ to see the widowers an’ childless in affliction, an’ keepin’ unspotted from de world.”
One cold day in December, from the City Hall steps in New York City, the Rev. Henry Kimball gave away two cheeses, cut in pound chunks, two barrels of crackers, a barrel of turnips, a barrel of hominy done up in brown paper pound packages, and five bags of Indian meal. One hundred and twenty women, seventy little girls, and a colored man came to get their baskets filled. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
At a meeting of naturalists held recently in New York, Prof. D. Cope, of Philadelphia, alluded to the small provision that is made for original research in this country, and the stress that is on almost all original investigators to throw themselves away as teachers in order to gain a livelihood. It is important that we have original investigation in science, but capitalists must furnish the money to defray the expenses. But because a man or woman turns to teaching rather than investigation, they do not throw themselves away. Teaching is as high and honorable a calling as investigating nature’s laws.
A new feature lately introduced in the public schools of New Haven is called “newspaper geography.” The pupils are in turn required to find on the map places referred to in the paper.