——.”
“Yale College, New Haven.
“——, Esq.,
“Dear Sir:—Your favor is at hand. It is true that the students are arranged alphabetically for the present term, and a colored student has his place next to your son. But, at the commencement of the next term, the arrangement will be in the order of scholarship, in which case, the colored youth will be so near the head of the class, and your son, I regret to say, so near the other extremity, that there will be no farther embarrassment on that score. Yours, etc.,
——.”
Speedy result: A note from a disgusted father, calling home a disgusted son.
AN AGED MINISTER’S ENTHUSIASM.
Having commenced my ministry among a class whom it was my lot to know as slaves, your privilege to know as freedmen, no sooner does the American Missionary cross the threshold of my house than one pair of eyes is running over its pages. The report of the Alabama Conference in the May number just received, thus closes a record that has “stirred a fever in the blood of age”: “I could not ask a happier lot than to be permitted to give my life to this field. It seems to me so unmistakably the work of Christ.” I met in the report one name with which I am familiar, and it occurred to me that if the sainted mother of him who bears the honored name were living to-day, she could not ask a happier lot “for her son than to be permitted to be a laborer in a field where the germinating seed is giving promise of an abundant harvest in due season.” I have before me, while I write, a card which that mother, as the wife of the Treasurer of the American Board, put in circulation, in her own handwriting, nearly fifty years ago. I have preserved it carefully during this long period, and it has struck me that it may still do good service reproduced in the columns of the American Missionary. I will transcribe it in substance. It is a fine specimen of multum in parvo: “Expect great things, and attempt great things. Little causes produce great effects. The poor heathen are perishing. We may be the means of saving them. What we do we must do quickly. ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ is a Divine command. ‘The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.’ ‘The liberal soul shall be made fat.’ Who would live to be ‘creation’s blot, creation’s blank, whom none can love, whom none can thank?’ Rather let the heathen rise up and call you blessed. The noblest object in the world is the surest of success. The young and the old, the rich and the poor, may aid it. The child’s penny, the widow’s mite, will be acceptable. If you have no money to give, offer a jewel, a second-hand dress, a book, or if you have none of these, your influence and your prayers.”
Let me repeat one sentence from Mrs. Hill’s card, and emphasize its application to the work in which the American Missionary Association is engaged: “The noblest object in the world is surest of success.”