The Belleville Avenue Congregational Church of Newark, N. J., and the Congregational Church at Mount Carmel, Conn., have already accepted our proposition to send 100 copies of the Missionary for the year to one address for $30.00. Other churches and neighborhoods are canvassing for it; who will go and do likewise? We want readers, and those who pay something for the magazine will read it. A letter, enclosing his subscription, from a Presbyterian minister, says that he can secure the information he desires in regard to the Southern field and work from no other source.
We welcome with special pleasure to our table, the first number of the Fisk Expositor, published at Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., from which we give an extract on another page. It is an additional witness to the devotion and enterprise, with which our professors and teachers are working in all directions, to extend their influence for the information and enlightenment of those among whom they labor. This is another of a group of such publications, among which are the Southern Workman, of Hampton, the Southern Sentinel, of Talladega, and the Straight Occasional, of New Orleans. They are full of information as to the work of these institutions, and of valuable discussions of topics of interest and importance to the colored people of the land.
SMALL GIFTS.
We cited in the Missionary for January a number of large gifts from wealthy men and women, to relieve from debt the Missionary Boards of various churches, as worthy examples to some of the men of liberal heart and means who are in especial sympathy with our work for the lowly. We still have hope that such, alone or in combination, will do great things for us, and make us glad, in freeing us from accumulated but already diminishing indebtedness.
Meanwhile, to enable us to carry on our constantly increasing work, it may not be needless to address this word to those who cannot give large sums from a large store of good, but who, out of their moderate incomes and limited means, have been in the habit of sending us smaller amounts.
Dear friends, after all, it is on you that we depend. If you will look through our list of receipts from month to month, you will see how large a proportion of it all comes to us in little sums—a few dollars here and a few dollars there. You must not fail us, then. We cannot afford to give up the large contributors, perhaps; still less the small ones. Sometimes, when it has gone abroad that such an one has given his five, ten or twenty thousand dollars, the givers of five, ten or twenty dimes are checked for a while in the flowing of their generosity. Because there was a heavy rain yesterday, the dews will not form to-night. The suggestion of plenteous supplies goes abroad because of one large receipt, and the small sums seem so very small to the givers as they compare them with the large ones.
But, after all, good friends, a deluge of beneficence only comes once in a great while. Our bow of promise of unfailing resources is formed upon the drops of your steady giving. Forty days and forty nights the Deluge lasted; but, for forty years, each morning, “when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small, round thing...on the ground”—it was the daily bread of Israel. So your gifts—if they be only “small, round things,” the dimes and quarters, the ancestral dollars—are the gifts to which we look for the maintenance of the great host which we are trying to lead from the bondage of ignorance and sin to the liberty of intelligence and Christ.