Revivals How and When, is the title of a very timely and useful volume by Rev. Wm. W. Newell, D.D. The following subjects with others are discussed: Why use the word revival, Evangelistic meetings, Household revivals, Bible class and Sabbath-school revivals, Revival preaching, Fixed laws for the promotion of revivals, Temperance revivals, When should we have revivals. Dr. Newell speaks from a rich experience of many years and enforces his views with copious incidents and pertinent quotations from the words of eminent men. The whole subject is discussed in a clear, comprehensive and interesting manner. The book was prepared to help ministers and laymen, and contains an abundance of suggestive and available information. There is no work more dear to this Association than revival work, and no volume has recently come to our knowledge apparently more fitted to promote it.
WOMAN’S OPPORTUNITY THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE AGE.
There is nothing like it in any land—the opportunity of the Christian women of America to labor for the uplift of womanhood the world over. The call, however, for woman’s work in America during the past twenty years seems to us to have been peculiarly urgent, and yet we think the majority of the noble Christian women in our churches have, up to this time, seen only dimly the demands upon them in this regard. How loving, pitying woman, whose labors and sacrifices are so abounding in behalf of women, should have seen with so little responsive interest the necessities for work among the colored women of this land, is among the marvels of Christian ethics.
If women, anywhere, are under obligation to help women, it seems to us the women in our churches are indebted, beyond words to tell, to the negro women in the South. Their condition is what we have made it, and remains what we will it.
But let us not convey the impression that Christian women have been wholly indifferent to the wants of their colored sisters. On the other hand, we affirm that there is not a brighter page in modern missions, than that which records the labors and sacrifices of Northern women for the lowly dwellers in the cabins of the South. We only speak, comparatively, of the great body, who need to be stirred and mastered, as have been the few who have hurried with the medicine of light and love to relieve the stricken and the despairing. These have sacrificed youth and beauty, and the hope of family love and joy, in the attempt to serve a race. With a calm and reverent step they have gone into the darkest homes of poverty and suffering to clothe the naked, to minister to the sick, to comfort the dying, and to save the perishing.
Twenty-one years ago, when this Association called for teachers and missionaries to submit to reproach, and obloquy, and ostracism for the sake of these needy ones, these rare women, in numbers beyond our ability to send, answered the call. And during all the years they have stood at our doors, as they stand to-day, saying “Send me.”
The work they have done in school building, in church building, in home building and in character building, cannot be matched in the history of this generation, certainly, and probably not in the history of the world.
When it is remembered, that in 1863 the slaves in the South did not own an acre of ground and had not a cent of taxable property—that they had no right to know a letter of the alphabet, and that there was not a legal marriage among them: but that in 1880 they were taxed for a hundred millions of dollars—that some 800,000 of them had learned to read, and that purer churches were teaching purer and better morals, one can but exclaim, “What hath God wrought!”