Is there any work, North or South, at home or abroad, that requires more versatile gifts or breadth of training than the work of this Association? Here are a few lines from the letter of a missionary in Alabama, which illustrate the many-sidedness of this work:
"I have organized a Woman's Missionary Society. I have an industrial class for girls, and give them instruction in sewing, in housework on the principle of the kitchen-garden system, without the practice, as I have not the articles to use for that purpose. Then a lesson from the Bible, also, comes in, and some amusement in the way of puzzles. The girls are pleased to belong to a society of King's Daughters. I have a class for instructing the women in darning, patching, button-hole making and so on. We have a Society of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in which I have the Department of Social Purity.
"You will be able to believe that my time is pretty fully occupied. I rejoice that I am able to be here, for I am never so happy as when I am engaged in this beloved work."
Is not here a splendid field for missionary work for the King's Daughters throughout the land? Why cannot the loyal daughters of the King, at the North, support such missionaries as this in their self-sacrificing work for the down-trodden daughters of this same Divine King in the South?
PROTESTANT AND PAPIST: AN OBJECT-LESSON.
In the communication below, an esteemed friend finds in our Annual Meeting at Providence an object-lesson in the Christian recognition of the colored man, which he very properly sets over against a like example in the convention of colored Roman Catholics recently held in Washington, D.C. Our friend is right. The American Missionary Association stands square on that subject. We only wish that everybody else, even at the North, stood with us on that plank of our platform.
"In THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY for February, 1889, I read extracts and notices from Catholic sources with regard to the universality of that church organization that 'knows neither North, South, East or West, that knows neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek, Barbarian nor Scythian,' and emphasizing the fact that a colored priest had celebrated mass in company with two white clergymen.
"I am thus reminded of the Annual Meeting of one of the most prominent national organizations of a religious nature in our land. A few months ago in the city of Providence, in one of the finest churches of that or of any city in our land, before as refined and cultivated an audience as could have been convened in our country, addresses were made by colored men who sat in the pulpit with some of the most distinguished white clergymen in the country. If one is an object-lesson, is not the other quite as much so?"