We publish in this number of the Missionary the annual list of our Field Workers. We wish our readers to follow them to their appointed locations, where they are now busied in the peculiar toils and anxieties incident to all who are engaged in their special callings. We say these are peculiar, for we believe that the faithful preacher and teacher carry special burdens of care and anxiety that tax not only the body and mind, but weigh most heavily on the heart. When Paul enumerates the great burdens which rest upon him, he names as last and greater than all outer "that which presseth upon me daily anxiety for all the churches."
But beyond all this, the toilers in the South, laboring as they do among the poorest and most ignorant in the land, have added trials in meagre salaries and limited means for enlargement, and especially in an environment if not hostile yet unsympathetic. The people for whom they labor are held down under a severe race prejudice, and their preachers and teachers must share the odium with them. We gladly admit that the prejudice in the South against our workers is in many places moderating, yet it remains as a trial and a hindrance felt in no other part of our land. These discouraging features occur to some extent in all parts of our field—among the mountaineers, the Indians, and the Chinese on the Pacific Coast. Poverty and ignorance are common to all, and the race prejudice that confronts the Indian and the Chinese is scarcely less than that which rests upon the Negro in the South. But these burdens our workers are willing to bear as followers of Him who spent His life among the lowly and gave as the greatest proof of His divine mission that the gospel was preached unto the poor.
But the hearts of these self-sacrificing toilers may be cheered by the sympathy and prayers of God's people and by such liberal gifts as will take away the continual fear of any further crippling of the work. We ask that in the supplications in the pulpit, at the family altar and in the closet, these consecrated men and women come in for a share in the petitions, and we ask also that in this, our Jubilee year, our treasury be remembered with so much liberality that it may be indeed for this great work a year of release.
THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN CENT SOCIETY.
REV. SPENCER SNELL.
We at Talladega are doing what we can by our pennies toward getting the American Missionary Association out of debt. The Abraham Lincoln Cent Society, which grew out of our effort on Lincoln Memorial Day last February to devise some organized plan by which we might help a little, has been the means of putting a good many pennies collected from very poor people into the treasury at New York. Besides organizing a cent society here an appeal was sent to other American Missionary Association churches and schools among the colored people asking that similar societies be organized. A number of them acted upon the suggestion, some of them sending their money here to be forwarded by the treasurer of our society to the New York office, and others sending it direct.
The members of these societies are asked to give one cent daily, weekly, or monthly, according to each one's financial ability. The object is to give every colored man, woman and child who can be reached by these societies an opportunity to do something for the American Missionary Association, which has done, and is doing, so much for them.
As the new school year begins we renew our efforts in the society here, and shall try to stimulate others in the hope that much more may be done this year than was done last year in this humble way for the great cause.
We are trying to have the colored people feel that they are members of the American Missionary Association and that the work which the Association is trying to do is their work, and that the debt which burdens the Association is their debt, which they are to share in common with the other lowly peoples on whose account the debt has been incurred.