REVIEW AND OUTLOOK.
A Paper read at the National Council at St. Louis, Nov. 13th.
BY REV. M. E. STRIEBY, D. D.
I intend, without preface, to review the work of the American Missionary Association for the last three years, and to give an outlook on its future duties.
I. The Review.
1. We have paid our great debt. This had clung to us for years, like the shirt of Nessus, scorching while it clung. At the last Council we were enabled to announce that we had rent away about one third of the hateful garment, during the next two years we tore off the remainder, and since then we have walked forth, financially, “Clad in raiment pure and white,” as becometh saints who should “Owe no man anything.” It may happen to us in the future that our books will sometimes show a balance on the wrong side; but we hope never again to be beguiled into putting on one of the large, iron-clad garments we had so long and sadly worn.
2. We have received the munificent gift of $150,000 from Mrs. Stone. Not long since, our elder and honored sister, the American Board, had laid on her table a loaf so large that there was danger that it might be like the “Cake of barley bread” which the Midianite saw in his dream, that “tumbled into the host and came unto a tent and smote it that it fell, and overturned it that the tent lay along.” But with the whole church, we rejoice that the loaf has been to the Board, by its great wisdom and God’s blessing, not as the cake of the Midianite, but as his dream, an augury of victory and enlargement! Our gift, great as it was, is only as one of “the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table,” most gratefully received and all needed at once, with no danger of surfeit. Our children are not only hungry—they are crowded into close quarters, and some of them have to be turned out of doors. At the Atlanta University, with accommodations for only 40 girls, 62 are packed in. At Tougaloo, barracks of slabs are erected, and outbuildings and garrets are turned into dormitories, and still the pupils come, so that the teachers inquire if they may put three in a bed and twelve in one large room. Our reply is: “Take all that you can accommodate consistently with good health and morals, and send the rest away.” These are specimens, perhaps the most striking, but from nearly every school comes the call for more room. Never before have we had such overcrowding; never before have we been obliged to turn away so many. Mrs. Stone’s great gift will meet the want in five of our larger institutions and no more; and that only for shelter, while the increased number will make an enlarged call for bread. Mrs. Stone provides the homes: who will furnish the endowments for more teachers and the scholarships for more pupils?
3. We are just completing the Tillotson Institute, Austin, Texas, with its large and commodious building and beautiful campus of eight acres, near the capitol—an outpost in that vast State of the Southwest; thus extending our permanent institutions from Hampton Roads, Va., to the banks of the Colorado, Texas, and supplying eight of the largest Southern States with schools of higher grade, each of which sends out annually its score or fifty well-trained teachers.
4. It is a matter of much gratification to us that while we have been paying our debt and extending our lines, we have been able to maintain, and even to enlarge, the work already in hand among the Freedmen. Three years ago our teaching force in the South numbered 150; now there are 200. Then our pupils were 5,404; now 8,052.
One illustration of the usefulness of these schools is seen in the great army of scholars taught in them and by their pupils. We believe, from a safe estimate, that half a million of names have been enrolled, in the aggregate, in our schools and the schools of our pupils, since this Council last met, and still the cry is for more teachers. This roll-call of the school-room gives no idea of the added work in the Sunday-school, the temperance cause, the prayer meeting and in the homes of the people. As to the kind of work done in our schools, and Theological departments, I point to the modest and gentlemanly Second Assistant Moderator of this National Council.