How all loyal hearts will rejoice in the good news that comes from brave Lawrence's sick room! He is slowly improving, and there is strong hope of his recovery. Thank God!!
A large public meeting has been held in Jellico, Tenn., in which the "law-abiding citizens," expressed their intense condemnation of this "brutal, but cowardly act of shooting Prof. Lawrence." This body of citizens voted to prosecute the scoundrel Chandler, who did the shooting, and raised the money at once to carry forward that prosecution! Good for Jellico, say we all!! Will Iowa permit Tennessee to surpass her in the execution of whiskey murderers?
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"The Pansy Society," consisting of a company of seven girls and boys, sent to the New England office of the A.M.A. $13 which they had themselves earned! What society of young people will be "next"? Here is a work, especially a children's and young people's work, for establishing schools, planting Sabbath schools, sending missionaries into homes to teach the Ninety thousand mothers in a single Southern State who cannot read! In a company of fifty children, the A.M.A. teacher asked: "How many of you ever knelt at your mother's knee, or at all in your home, and prayed?" Not a single hand went up in all that company! "Children's work for children;" "Mother's work for mothers," are watchwords of the A.M.A., that should awaken enthusiastic response and greatly increase the benefactions of all toward this effort to Christianize the homes of our land!
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*ATLANTA UNIVERSITY.*
BY MISS E.B. EMERY.
This is a marvelous institution. It is a reproduction of New England, and that the finest; therein lies its supremacy and its offense. The Glenn Bill, designed to ruin the institution, has had the usual effect of such devices; it has improved decidedly the fortunes of the school. Nothing advances a cause like persecution; the peculiar advantage and irresistible power of the University are more manifest than ever, and in the space of a few months it has gained a reputation over the country, and won a place in the hearts of all good people, which twenty years of ordinary work could hardly have done; still, we must not be blind to the fact that this is really due to the twenty years of hard work, prayer and self-sacrifice.
When the books of Heaven are opened, it will then be seen how much of silent self-sacrifice, how much of grand living and grand doing, is set down to these Southern missionaries. Much called inglorious now, will be glorious then, and "the last shall be first."
The anniversary exercises of the University commenced on May 24, by oral examinations, which continued two days. They were in all departments, classical, normal, preparatory and industrial. The classical department, though small, as in all these institutions, has always been very high in Atlanta; the chief advance, however, the past few years, has been in the normal and industrial divisions, and this appeared in the fact that all the graduates this year, numbering thirteen girls, were in the normal department. The work is done by teachers from the North, experienced in the best normal methods, and nothing on the Southern field can be more vital and important. Three-quarters of the students going out from these higher institutions devote themselves to teaching, and when the North has some realization of the dense ignorance of the Southern black population, the need of this will readily appear. In the State of Alabama are 80,000 colored voters who cannot read, and though the children of a small proportion of these voters do learn to read, the greater number do not, and cannot till the Northern churches open their eyes to facts, and do more to remedy this monster evil. And this ignorance of the blacks means not only ignorance, but grossest immorality. Alabama in this respect is an average State; Georgia is a little better, others much worse.