The time has now come when our church work can be greatly enlarged. Our schools have been doing their work, and scattering all through the South those who have learned what pure religion and spiritual worship mean, and they are ready and longing for something better than they find within their reach. We can now push our work as fast as the churches of the North will furnish the money. We most earnestly appeal for the means to enable us to greatly develop, during the coming year, this department of the work.
CHURCH WORK AMONG NEW SETTLERS IN THE SOUTH.
Wonderful and more wonderful tales are now reaching the world of the unlimited resources of the South. They are a new discovery even to the South itself. These stories of lumber and mineral wealth are turning the tide thitherward. Towns and cities are beginning to spring up as they have in the West, and both great need and rich opportunity call for immediate missionary work. This new population is mostly, as yet, from the North, though many from Wales, especially miners, and from other countries of the old world are beginning to come in. In the new towns they find no churches, in the old towns few whose ideas and customs can satisfy their minds and hearts. Here is a great opportunity. We can aid these people to establish churches which will emphasize that interpretation of the Gospel which we believe to be Christian.
In Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee we have already aided in establishing such churches which have connected themselves—and gladly so—with the regular State organizations of Congregational churches. No direful results have followed. No fanaticism is in it. It is simply doing the thing that is right and Christian. May such churches continue to multiply in the "New South" and help to make it new indeed.
STATISTICS OF CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH.
| Number of Churches | 136 |
| Number of Missionaries | 113 |
| Number of Church Members | 8,438 |
| Added during the year | 989 |
| Added by profession of faith | 734 |
| Scholars in Sunday-school | 14,735 |
THE MOUNTAIN WORK.
Notwithstanding all the interest that has been manifested in our mountain work, we feel sure that the churches do not realize the magnitude of this field, the pressing needs of this people in the heart of our country, the wonderful opportunities before us, and the heart-stirring results already secured.
[pg 312] Large portions of seven States—three or four hundred counties—with a population of between two and three millions, claim our attention and call for our work. Here is a country of untold natural resources. Here is a people of good blood. Men of power have come from among them, and shown of what they are capable. Side by side with the Northern soldiers these mountaineers fought for the Union, or suffered in prisons rather than fight against it. Where our schools and churches have been established, men and women of worth and ability have stepped out and become strong helpers in building up new institutions. But away from these institutions and out of touch with the life of the towns, we find a class of people whose condition in itself is a Macedonian cry. Their windowless, stoveless, comfortless log cabins; their so-called schools, in which on the roughest benches conceivable, and without a desk, a slate, or a blackboard, with a teacher with unkempt hair, ragged and dirty clothes, possibly bare feet, who perhaps can scarcely read, the children study at the top of their voices—blab schools they call them—have for their course of study the spelling book alone, and are taught that a word is correctly spelled when all the letters are named, no matter in what order; their so-called churches, with perhaps a monthly meeting during the summer months, without Sunday-school, prayer meeting, or any form of church work, without morality as a requisite of church membership, with an illiterate ministry—a large number of the ministers cannot read even, and what is worse in many cases are drunken, impure, and in every way immoral; their children so easily gathered into day-schools and Sunday-schools, and so responsive to the work done for them—all these things appeal to us with pathetic power. Perhaps no missionary work ever showed greater results in so short a time than those obtained in these mountains.
We have here in two States eleven schools and twenty-two churches. Earnest calls have come to us to begin work in North Carolina and Alabama. We feel sure that if the churches could hear these appeals they would bid us respond. We have promised to begin work the coming year in these States, and we must look to the churches to furnish us the means. New lumbering and mining towns are springing up in this mountain country, and immediate missionary work is their only hope. A single one of these new towns, scarcely half-a-dozen years old, has had already more than a hundred men shot in it, and this awful work still goes on. This marvelously rich mineral region is sure to be filled in the near future with these mining towns, and unless the Christian work keeps pace with this kind of growth, this large territory will become notorious for bloody scenes as no portion of our land has ever been. Now is the time to preempt the country for Christ, by planting at strategic points the church and the Christian school, and through them to send forth to every part the pure, restraining and elevating influences of the gospel. God's call to us to do this work is loud and clear. Can we be faithful to Him and refuse to obey?