A Christian Church, worshipping God according to Bible rules, is a light of untold worth in any country. This feature of our work is encouraging. Even those who hate and persecute us gradually adopt our views and modes of worship.
KENTUCKY.
A Vacant Church—The Seed Wafted—The National Problem.
REV. JOHN G. FEE, CABIN CREEK, LEWIS CO.
I am here, in the field of my early ministry, on my regular quarterly visit. Twenty-four years since, I left this for my present home in Berea, Ky.
Most of those who, as parents, heard me with trembling twenty-five years ago have passed away, and those who were then boys and girls are now fathers and mothers. These, by time, thought and observation, have had their early impressions ripened into convictions. The sympathies and convictions of these are for loyalty to the union, liberty to man, and a gospel of impartial love. They take no stock in the issues of mere denominationalism. They assent readily to the proposition that manifested faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, as a personal Saviour from sin, is the faith of the gospel. On this faith the church was organized in 1847, as it then separated from all slave-holding bodies. Some of the members are still there. They have been without a regular pastor ever since the year 1860. They still keep up a Sabbath-school, and part of the time a prayer-meeting.
What they now need is a regular pastor—one who can visit the families, and preach at least once in two weeks. I hope such an one may be speedily found. This, together with the congregation in Bracken County, would make a most interesting and promising field. The effort to plant churches here thirty years ago was not in any sense a failure. And the second temple can be made much more glorious than the first.
Emigrations from these fields have been useful also. Five families went more than a hundred miles into the interior to help build up Berea; eleven others, young men and young women, have gone out there as students in the college. Other families have gone to other States to exert there an influence for liberty, justice, and a gospel of impartial love. Many of these were “mere children,” and, having had their birth in times of trial, they were not mutes in the fields where, in the providence of God, they were cast.
In view of the debasing effect of slavery in the South, and the communistic element in the North, I am often asked, “What is to be the result of this effort to establish republican institutions on this continent?” I answer, there is no hope but in sanctifying the hearts of the people by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This will direct aright the intellect, the wealth and the activities of the nation, make the people a law unto themselves, and for good. Let us pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers into His harvest.