SUNDAY-SCHOOL WORK AT TOUGALOO.
MISS JOSEPHINE KELLOGG.
The Sunday-school of this Institution has always—under the present management at least—been considered one of the most important, if not the most important means of grace and spiritual enlightenment. The power of sustained attention and consecutive thought is greatly lacking in all untrained minds; hence the superiority of the hand-to-hand question-and-answer method of the class-room over the sermon as a means of informing the mind and clearing away the rubbish of superstition and the misapprehensions of meaning, derived from the ignorant preachers who have been in many cases the only previous expounders of the word, and resulting also from a very vague and limited understanding of the language of the Bible, the preacher—even the teacher.
It would be impossible for one new to the work to even grasp at the distorted images and superstitious misconceptions connected with religious subjects in the minds of the more ignorant colored people without the free interchange of personal conversation. So for years the Sunday-school has been placed at the head of the Sabbath services here, and given the forenoon, the review by the Superintendent occupying the time of a short sermon, with the lesson for the day, already explained and impressed by the several teachers, for its text. Later in the day class prayer-meetings are held, and here young Christians learn to take up the cross of bearing testimony for Christ, and making audible prayer for themselves and others. Many of the scholars feel these meetings to be very valuable.
At the close of the school year a Sunday-school Convention is held, and it is urged as a duty upon all Christian students who go out to teach that they should organize and conduct Sabbath schools in connection with their day schools.
We have recently received two donations of library books, so that we now have enough to go once around, and we loan them out each Sunday. We also generally have papers to distribute, sent us by kind and careful Sunday-school scholars in the North who make their papers do double duty. If some school changing song-books would send our school a hundred or more well-preserved copies of those they lay aside, it would be a gift highly appreciated.
One of our neighbors is a good Mother in Israel, who has always taken a warm interest in this institution in all its departments and appreciated its uplifting influence upon her people. She belongs to one of the branches of the Methodist Church, and felt that she wanted something done for the improvement and revival of interest in the schools of that denomination in the vicinity. Accordingly, she worked up a S. S. Convention among them last Fall, and invited Mr. Pope and some others of us to go and help to make it profitable. We could not get off until after dinner and might as well not have gone at all. Soon after our entrance a young man introduced a resolution that superintendents and teachers be compelled to be at their schools at the hour set for opening. One of the preachers rose and said that teachers could not be compelled, and moved as an amendment that they be acquired to come promptly.
Then ensued along, windy, wordy controversy on "compelling" and "acquiring." Seeing no prospect of a conclusion we withdrew. The good auntie who had invited us followed us out in deep humiliation. I said, we are sorry to go without contributing something to the interest of the meeting, but this is such a waste of time, there is no coming to the point. "That's jus' so, dear," she said, "but that their ign'rance. Ign'rance does waste time, honey. Ign'rance can't come to a pint." That last sentence struck me as a piece of epigrammatic wisdom.