Talk about women’s work for women. Here, for a score of years, have been from 150 to 200 gifted consecrated women, of whom the world was not worthy, sacrificing youth and beauty, going for a time into places where men could not stand, with their names cast out as vile, yet lifting up their lowly sisters and starting scores and scores of young men on into a religious life and into the ministry of the Lord Jesus. As converts multiplied, many of them took to the old churches, and not a few desired to have the way which their dear teachers represented. And so, gradually there came on these churches, each one a miniature republic, and each, in almost every case, an outcome of the school process.
In that early time, not a few of the best tried friends of the Association grew uneasy at the slow progress of the church work, only in late years to admire the wisdom of the administration in not picking the pear before it was ripe. The M. E. church going South had only to open its doors to receive 200,000 of the old-time Methodists, with their clinging immoralities and their corrupting ministers. Grandly has that patriotic church wrestled with its problem. But ours has been a call to a different task.
In five years after the close of the war, besides the three John G. Fee churches in Kentucky, which had flung themselves upon the serried ranks of the slaveholders, compelling a vast region to behold what sort of stuff this Puritanism was made of, the Association numbered eleven churches among the sable brethren, whose teachers and preachers usually joined with them in fellowship. In ten years these had come to number forty. And now, eighteen years after the war, the total is eighty-nine, an average of five for each year. Nor are these merely nominal or skeleton churches. Their average membership is sixty-five, while that of all our churches west of the Mississippi is thirty-five. Nearly every one has its own place of worship and its own pastor. Their own ministers have had to be grown, converted and trained up from the alphabet, while multitudes have been prepared in our schools for service in the old-time churches, the small number that we have taken (a half hundred, besides several foreign missionaries) serving only as the toll for grinding the grists. A high wisdom was that which was displayed by the early workers in seizing upon the strategic points, so that one can now hardly go to a principal city of the South without finding there a fully-working Congregational church, such as those at Washington, Hampton, Charleston, Raleigh, Savannah, Macon, Atlanta, Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham, Meridian, Jackson, New Orleans, Austin, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Louisville. So it seems that this work has gone on in every State of the South, for in Florida, which might seem an exception, the noted church at Jacksonville was organized by one of the actuaries of the A. M. A., and nourished by another. Nor have these churches been left to the weakness of an isolated independence. For the better training of them, and for the consolidating of their strength, they have been organized into regular State associations, which have sought to introduce the methods of the North, which in their varied services often come to an intellectual and spiritual glow that astonishes us, and which come to a consciousness of their national fellowship when they each elect their delegates to the annual meeting of the A. M. A., and to the National Council, one of their own members having served at the last triennial as an assistant moderator. These State bodies now number eight, which nearly cover the whole South. So, then, the physical geography of the land is quite well mapped out, Congregationally. There remains much space for filling.
No view of the Congregationalism taken into the South by the A. M. A. will be complete without considering the pervasive influence of all of these churches and institutions of learning, that have come to be a power universally recognized. Almost every member going forth from them is, in some sense, a representative of the Congregational idea, though he does not himself take the name. In all the South, among the whites as well as the blacks, these principles have been made known, so that the way, in great part, is prepared for carrying on there a spiritual propagandism that shall yet recognize the essential feature of this past dispensation, which, at the North, has been up-borne by sympathy and prayer, the consecration of substance and the offering of sons and daughters, and which, at the South, has bravely stood, this score of years, for this sublime act and testimony, in sacrifice enduring hardness, ostracism and scorn, viz., the features of the brotherhood of man in Christ Jesus, the real unity of all Christian believers, irrespective of race, color, or social condition.
The Congregationalist.
GENERAL NOTES.
AFRICA.
—The French government will shortly submit to the Chamber a project for the construction of a railroad from Soukarras to Tebessa.
—Dr. Schweinfurth will soon come to Halle to confer with Dr. Riebeck upon the results of their exploration of Sokotora.