Next month brings us around to another Annual Meeting. Our financial year ends with the last day of this month (September). Our books will be closed then for the year, and our balance will be struck. This is our reminder to all, either churches or individuals, who have intended to contribute to our work during the current year. Let your gifts be sent in speedily and as liberally as the Lord may have prospered you. Every cent received during the next thirty days helps this year’s showing. Do not let us go back of the standard maintained during the last three years! Our ambition is to report expenses all met and debt all gone.
The report that the yellow fever has returned to Memphis has long before this reached the ears of our friends. We hope that the evil will not be so great as it was last year, and yet its immediate effect upon our work has been more suddenly felt than then. The people flee more eagerly from a scourge the severity of which they hold in horror enhanced by the recent memory of its infliction. The church at Memphis is scattered; pastor and people have left it; a faithful janitor is caring for its and the school property. The church at Chattanooga, too, has been largely deserted, and its attendants have fled to the mountains. Of course this is but a temporary interruption. The three or four hundred dollars which was sent to us last year for the relief of the colored sufferers accomplished an amount of physical relief, and indirectly of spiritual good, almost beyond belief. We shall be glad to superintend the disbursement of any like moneys which may be sent to relieve the poorest of the poor in this their special distress.
“Oh, how great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee; which Thou hast wrought for them that trust in Thee, before the sons of men!”
As a father lays up for his children against a future need, so the psalmist felt that the Heavenly Parent had done for those that fear Him; so, in sight of the sons of men had He wrought such goodness for them. It is a great thing to realize the daily dispensing of such divine favor, but a greater to learn that Infinite Love has gone before to treasure up the riches of goodness. It was a marvel of blessing that God wrought before the sons of men in all the world for the American children of bondage in their emancipation. But more than this: He had laid up beforehand treasures of Christian anti-slavery sentiment and charity, to be disbursed among them in the lines of educational and Christianizing processes, and, with divine forethought. He had prepared a system for the administration of this relief. Distinguished among other provisions of this kind were the rise and the preparatory training in principle and method of the American Missionary Association. We know not which the more to admire, the wisdom or the goodness of such fore-ordaining. It is the privilege of its constituency to be the almoners of such bounty.
THE LITERATURE OF OUR SOUTHERN WORK.
It makes no pretension. It has been a growth from nothing. And yet it is worthy of mention. The Southern Workman, the organ of Hampton Institute, is a monthly, well filled with matter historical, scientific and newsy, and well adapted to interest the Freedmen and their friends, as also the civilized Indians and their friends. The Hampton Health Tracts, in a series of a half dozen, treat of the great essentials of health and of physiology. It was a happy hit to give the late children of bondage these first lessons in civilization. This list of tractates has also not a little of instruction for many people who pass among the enlightened class. The Fisk Expositor is an occasional issue that gathers up the history and progress of that University, which the Jubilee Singers have done so much to endow and to make famous. The Southern Sentinel is a monthly, published at Talladega College, and designed, as is the Southern Workman, to interest the colored people in all matters pertaining to education, agriculture and mechanic arts. On both, the work of type-setting and printing is all done by the colored students, who have learned the process while in school, and who make this their means of support, besides the acquiring of a trade that will secure them a respectable livelihood. The young women make capital compositors. In both of these offices not a little of job work is also done. The mechanical work upon the American Missionary was for a time done by the office at Hampton. The Straight University at New Orleans has also its occasional medium of communication with its constituency.
Eight chartered institutions issue their annual catalogues, which compare favorably with the current literature of the kind. It seems not a little strange, in these annual reports of schools among our fellow-citizens, the late slaves, to come across not only the lists of the Faculties and the long roll of students, but also the several departments, normal, scientific, classical, medical, legal and theological. Then of the six General Associations for our Southern churches, four have issued their annual “Minutes.” Those of the original one, the Central South, furnish quite a compendium of our church work. Those of Alabama are rich in records of discussions upon vital themes and of missionary activities. Those of Louisiana glow with revival reminiscences. The first of Georgia makes a dignified document that gives promise of not a little of church activity. Texas and North Carolina will soon come on to the dignity of printing the Minutes of their Associations.