OUR OPPORTUNITY.
We find it in Kentucky. Our Executive Committee recently sent their Field Superintendent to that State for a bit of inspection. As a sample of opportunity we refer to the deeply interesting article in this number from President E. H. Fairchild. The A. M. A. has taken up that school and has assumed the support for six months of Miss M. R. Barton, a student of Berea, from Illinois. That school-house, which is the only one in Jackson County that has windows in it, will give out a good deal of light among those mountain people. At Cabin Creek, our old ante-bellum battleground, in the foot-hill country, the people are building an “Academy,” with the money subscribed on the condition that there shall be no respect of color. The A. M. A. has been asked to lend there a helping hand. At Williamsburg, the county seat of Whitley County, a town sixty years old, where a church has never yet been finished, though three have rotted down during the process of building, Rev. A. A. Myers has returned to his old A. M. A. work, and has inspired the people to build a church edifice 40×60. He works with his own hands by the side of the citizens. He gets the base-ball club to give an hour a day to the digging and rolling of stone for the foundation. The First Congregational Church has been organized, and now the same people are bent upon getting up a high school, having turned to this Association for help, which will be gladly rendered, negotiation being already on foot to secure the teachers, who the citizens say must come from north of Mason and Dixon’s line. This town, with fine water power and rafting facilities on the Cumberland, has already attracted several mills and wood-work factories, one of which is to make oars for the market in Europe. The railway that is to cross the mountains to Knoxville will soon reach this place. Out of the mountain country still further back of this, it is said, went Dick Yates to be the War Governor of Illinois, and also its present Executive, Governor Cullom, and other notabilities. At another county seat, which can scarcely be reached on wheels—horseback being the almost exclusive mode or travel; Mr. Myers and his wife having come seventy miles in this way to the recent Berea Commencement—at this place, Beattyville, the A. M. A. is to aid a recent colored graduate of Berea, O. W. Titus, to run his, the only colored school in the county, through the school year. In these mountains is our opportunity.
In the First Congregational Church of Atlanta, Ga., Pastor Kent having led his people into a system of giving, found that the first response for the American Board, with envelopes, brought in $68, from two hundred and two contributors. This was preceded by five missionary sermons, illustrated from a large missionary map, and by a rousing Sunday-school missionary concert. “Do you wonder we are jubilant?” exclaims the pastor. “It is interesting, but not at all surprising, to observe how giving promotes spirituality. Our prayer meetings are full of interest lately, and this increase seems to date from our recent determination to put our hands to the work of the Redeemer beyond our own confines. It is delightful. The idea of ‘the world for Christ,’ is getting hold of them, and I am confident it will prove the most direct route to self-support. Several have expressed to me the conviction that they must not only give for the world, but that they must do more for the home church.”
CHANGE OF ENVIRONMENT
BY PRESIDENT WM. W. PATTON, D.D.
This is a phrase with which the physical philosophers have made the public ear familiar. The advocates of Darwin’s views have assured us that all the variations of animal form may be explained by the relations of life to environment. “Natural selection,” as the key to the development of different species, denotes simply the effect which accompanying circumstances have upon life, health and the exercise of particular organs. “The survival of the fittest,” a companion phrase, means merely the fact that those forms of life endure which have the most favorable surroundings. And no one can doubt that in the chain of causation, which links things together in this world, there is a continual and most important interaction between all life and that which environs it.
But may we not ascend, in our reasoning, from animal life to human thought and character, and find the same law operative? As human health, form and vigor are found to vary with phenomena of climate, such as heat and cold, moisture and dryness, and with geographical location among mountains and valleys, or on broad plains, by the sea-coast or in the interior, so do we not notice that mental and moral development depend upon the outward circumstances amid which one lives? Our natures are plastic, and easily take the impress of objects with which we come continually in contact. Education is not merely that from books, but that also which is received from all manner of surrounding influences, as they exist in the home, in social intercourse and in the community at large. We see whole nations continue, century after century, on the same low level of barbarism, because no change occurs in their outward circumstances to bring new forces to act upon them. Our Indian tribes are an illustration. They live, out on the western plains, precisely as their fathers did for ages before them; and thus they will live so long as the modifying influence of civilization does not reach them, and bring a change of environment.