JANUARY, 1880.
No. 1.
American Missionary Association.
SALUTATIONS.
We extend to our friends the salutations of the season, and rejoice that we can do it with more of gratitude and hopefulness than we have been privileged to do for many years. Like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, we have passed through the Slough of Despond, and the heavy load of Debt has fallen from our shoulders; but, as in the case of the Pilgrim, this is no signal to us, or our friends, for rest in the Arbor, but for addressing ourselves to the real Christian life-work before us.
1. In this we have many things to encourage us:
(1.) The renewed prosperity of the country puts it into the hands of our friends to aid us in the needed enlargement of the work before us. We are grateful for the help given in the dark days of business stagnation, and we hope that with the reviving industry and commercial activity, gratitude to God and love for His cause will stimulate the friends of the poor to increased liberality.
(2.) There is a more full realization of the importance of our work. Never before since the war has the North so well understood that the only real solution of the Southern problem is in the intelligence and real piety of the Freedmen. Every day’s developments make this the more plain. In like manner the rights and wrongs of the Indian never forced him upon public attention with a more imperative demand for answer. So, too, the right of the Chinaman to a home and legal protection on the Pacific coast, has never become more clearly defined or more intelligently recognized. Constitutional enactments and hoodlum mobs have only set forth his wrongs more sharply and made our duty more plain. Africa looms up with more distinctness as a field of Christian labor. Not only triumphant exploration and crowding missionary enterprises stir the Christian heart, but the very difficulties and disasters arouse new zeal. Our hopeful endeavors to introduce the colored man of America as a missionary to the land of his fathers adds a new element of hope and activity.