We notice in the list of officers of the First State Sunday-school Convention of Louisiana, the name of Rev. W. S. Alexander, President of Straight University and pastor of the Central Congregational Church of New Orleans, as one of the Vice-Presidents and also of the Executive Committee. He was chairman of the Committees of Credentials and on the Constitution. Dr. Roy was also present. Certainly there is no cause for a complaint of lack of recognition of those engaged in our work in the midst of such examples as these.
The question how to interest the Sunday-schools in missionary work has met with a new answer in the cordial reception and use of our Jubilee Concert Exercise. Five large editions have been exhausted, and now a second Exercise has been prepared (No. 2), in which a number of questions are to be answered by as many persons as there are letters in the alphabet, covering the main facts of our various work. Five Jubilee Songs are inserted to be sung by a choir, and place is left for short addresses. We commend it to our friends, who will receive as many copies as they need for use, gratuitously, by applying to Dist. Sec. Pike.
It is with profound sadness that we record the death of two of our most esteemed co-laborers in the administration of missionary work. The Rev. Charles P. Bush, D. D., for many years associated with all our churches, especially in the Middle States, as the District Secretary of the A. B. C. F. M., has not only enjoyed the confidence, but won the love, of pastors and people on every hand. We shall miss him greatly. The Rev. Robert L. Dashiell, D. D., the Secretary of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, has been a tower of strength not only to the broad missionary enterprises of that denomination, but, by his genial sympathy and wise counsels, has added to the efficiency and courage of his brethren in the work outside of his own organization.
We much regret to learn of the death of Miss Dell Safford, formerly a teacher under this Association. For six years, she labored faithfully and conscientiously among the Freedmen in Talladega and Selma, Ala. She was patient and untiring in her efforts for the real good of those under her instruction, and her interest in them did not flag even after she left the field, but showed itself especially in the care she exercised over one of her pupils, whom she had brought with her that he might receive the benefits of a Northern education. After leaving the service of this Society, she removed to Wisconsin. But a cold taken in the spring, when she was already overworked and worn, could not be controlled, and consumption followed. She died at the last very suddenly of hemorrhage.
One of the most hopeful signs of the times in the missionary field is seen in the increasing demand and the corresponding supply of missionary intelligence. The Missionary Herald has enlarged its space between the borders, and fills it with valuable matter. Its strong point is, as it has been, its full and valuable letters from the front. The Foreign Missionary of the Presbyterian Board has been of late renewing its youth, and coming up, until it has become the most suggestive and vivacious of all the periodicals of the kind which meet our eyes. But nowadays, when intelligent people read the doings of all the world every morning at their breakfast tables, and are no longer satisfied with the village or the county news, they must have something which shall give them broader views of the great field of missions, which is the world, than they can obtain from the organs of special societies.