We fear that a fact, stated by Mrs. Hill in our last number, has not been fully taken in by our readers. Writing from Marion, Ala., of her work among the children, she said, incidentally, and most of us read it without comprehending it, “The girls’ sewing-class has sent $38 to the Mendi Mission.”
The “Girls’ Sewing-Class!” “Thirty-eight Dollars!” Sunday-school workers of New England, think what that means! We venture to say there is scarce a Sunday-school connected with one of our churches in New England where the same amount of money would cost a girls’ sewing-class one-half the self-denial and labor that is represented by this $38 for the Mendi Mission. And it came from a colored girls’ sewing-class!
Some time since, a request came from a teacher in one of our institutions to the Sunday-school of the Second Congregational Church in Rockville, Conn., that it should raise $70 for a promising young man who, for lack of it, must leave his studies. The matter was brought before the school and laid over for consideration. On the next Sabbath, a class of young men, every one of whom was earning his own living, stated that it would assume the responsibility for the whole amount. To raise this money did not hurt them; on the contrary, it did them as much good as it did the one who received it. What if this same spirit should become epidemic in our schools!
The Sunday-school at Kenosha, Wis., when its pastor read to it President Cravath’s article in the October Missionary, entitled “What shall we do?” promptly responded by sending a check for $50. Pastors, Sunday-school superintendents and teachers, it is not a difficult thing to do, but a most easy, and as blessed as easy, to enlist your young people in this beneficent work; beneficent not alone in relation to the ignorant negroes, but to your own young people. The needs of our work are great, but the need that our Sunday-school children and young people be educated out of narrow, selfish views of life, is even more urgent. Let this double education go forward steadily and by organized effort; thus shall sower and reaper rejoice together, and it will be difficult to tell the one from the other in their mutual joy and benefit, for both are reapers of such sowing.
The Selma, Ala., Daily Times notes the fact that our Field Secretary, Dr. Roy, preached in the First Presbyterian Church of that city in the morning, and the Rev. H. S. DeForest in the evening, of a recent Sabbath, and says that more than usual interest was manifested in both services. Also, in a kindly notice of the Fifth Annual Convention of the Congregational Churches of Alabama, convened in that city, it says: “This church is doing a great work for the education and religious culture of the colored people in Alabama, and the other Southern States.”
Dr. R. S. Rust, Secretary of the M. E. Freedmen’s Aid Society, in his Twelfth Annual Report of the work of that Society, speaks with a just pride of the twenty distinctive colored schools established in the South, with an aggregate of 2,510 pupils: of these, 453 are classed as Biblical, 20 law, 60 medical, 74 collegiate, 270 academic, 1,020 normal, 242 intermediate, and 371 primary.