Last year we had but a single church to report, of 44 members, at Good Hope Station. Since that time a church has been organized also at Avery. These two churches now include a membership of 85, and have 190 Sunday-school scholars in connection with them.
The school at Good Hope Station has been in a condition of growing prosperity, and has enrolled during the year 245 scholars, with an average attendance, as collated from the monthly returns, of 156. At Avery the school has been small, the children being frequently diverted by their parents to work of various kinds. About a dozen children have been taken into the Mission Home to be educated under permanent Christian influences. A school has also been sustained at Debia, and a preaching service.
The industrial work has been carried on with energy, the mill and property have been put in better order, some 16 laborers have been employed in the saw-mill, the coffee plantation is beginning to be productive, and we trust that this arm of the service will prove increasingly a means of education to the natives and a help in the support of the mission.
Our missionaries have not been content with merely maintaining the work as they found it, but have been exploring the interior to study opportunities for its enlargement. They found the people peaceable and friendly, and open to their approach not only, but inviting their permanent settlement. It is their plan to use native Christians for preaching at out-stations as far as they may be able.
Our missionaries have had to labor under the disadvantage of a very limited experience in organizing and carrying on either church or school work. They all went directly from the college to the foreign field. They have made fewer mistakes of judgment than might have been anticipated. We regard this experiment of African missionaries to Africa as practically solved. Their endurance of the climate and their general success in the work are evident. More and more clear to us, from year to year, is the connection between our work on the American and the African continents.
And now, while our original mission field is again becoming fruitful under these new conditions, the question is brought to us in a way we cannot refuse to consider. Shall we, in addition to this, undertake a new field upon the other side of the “Dark Continent”? The generous offer made by Robert Arthington, of Leeds, England, of £3,000, to this Association, to aid in the establishment of a mission between the Nile and the Jub, and from the 10th parallel of north latitude down almost to the equator, compelled us, early in the year, to examine the field and the possibility of undertaking it. A large committee, through books and travellers, made as thorough investigation as was in their power, and were supported by the Executive Committee, as a whole, in regarding the proposed location as offering advantages in accessibility over almost any of the new fields recently opened in equatorial Africa; but they delayed any distinct acceptance of the proffer until this fund should be swelled from other sources to not less than $50,000. In this state of abeyance the whole matter remained until a very recent date. Dr. O. H. White, the Secretary of the Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society in Great Britain, has been sanguine as to the willingness of the English and Scotch brethren to further aid us in the establishment of the proposed mission. He has already received contributions to a considerable amount for this object, and at the last regular meeting of our Committee, after careful discussion, the following resolution was unanimously passed:
“Voted, that on condition of the receipt of £3,000 from Mr. Robert Arthington, of Leeds, as offered to us by him, for the establishment of a new mission in Eastern Africa, and of a like amount from the British public, raised through the efforts of Dr. O. H. White, the Association pledges itself to devote thereto the sum of $20,000, and with the blessing of God and the assistance of the friends of Africa in Great Britain and America, to undertake permanently to sustain that mission.”
The Committee were encouraged to take this step by the fact that the debt of the Association was no more an obstacle, that several thousand dollars were already in hand from the Avery estate, bequeathed for this very purpose, and by other, as they thought, evident leadings of Providence in this direction. And now if these conditions be met, and this new work at no distant day be fairly entered on, the Mendi Mission on the West, and the Arthington Mission on the East, will support one another in their plea to Christian England and America for generous and prayerful sustentation. Our foreign work will thus be more complete than it can be with but a single mission, and we shall be able to present a wide field for the generous devotion and self-consecration of the sons of Africa now in this land.
This new field is among the real heathens, unclad, and with their native barbarism made worse by all the atrocities of a slave-hunting ground. That evil is, providentially, fast passing away. During the past year Col. C. G. Gordon has overcome the mightiest of the slave traders, and his large and desperate force. When the influence of the Arab invaders is withdrawn, with their unnatural stimulation of tribal wars and the ready market they afford for human beings, other of the native kings, under the influence of even a few Christian men, will follow the example of Mtesa, who has lately forbidden the sale of slaves in his dominions under pain of death. So the Lord has set before us an open door, and no man can shut it. Shall we not go in and set up our banners in the name of Immanuel?