The plea is urgent because the need is urgent. Will not all friends of this great work, pastor and people, now heartily unite in one special Christian endeavor to raise this American Missionary Association Jubilee Year Fund?
Charles L. Mead,
Samuel Holmes,
Samuel S. Marples,
William H. Strong,
Elijah Horr,
William Hayes Ward,
Lucien C. Warner,
James W. Cooper,
Joseph H. Twichell,
Charles P. Peirce,
Charles A. Hull,
Albert J. Lyman,
Addison P. Foster,
Nehemiah Boynton,
A. J. F. Behrends
Executive Committee of the
AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION.
Our Industrial Work.
We publish in this number of the Missionary an article copied from The Talladega College Record, giving a detailed account of the industrial work carried on in that institution. We invite attention to it as showing the wide range of those industries, and of their thorough and systematic arrangement.
The School and Church.
As is the school and church in any nation or community, so are the people. The Chinese for ages with universal education, such as it is, and the religion of Confucius, are a superstitious, stagnant, and an unheroic race. Europe in the middle ages, with no schools and an ambitious hierarchy, became ignorant and war-like, oppressed in Church and State. In these United States, their abundant educational facilities and a free church have developed largely the most intelligent and free people on the earth. But we said "largely," for there are[pg 115] millions of people in this nation that are still in the lowest grades of ignorance and superstition. There are four millions of colored people who can neither read nor write, and have not yet escaped from the degrading effects of centuries of slavery. There are among the mountaineers of the South two millions of people, descendants of a noble race, who have for more than a hundred years been largely without schools or intelligent churches, and they have fallen far below the intelligence and enterprise of their fathers. Our American Indians, though comparatively a handful, still need our care. More than half their school population is without education or industrial habits.
It is among these unfortunate races that the American Missionary Association is doing its great work. It comes to them with its schools and churches--its schools religious and its churches intelligent--and throughout the wide range of its work, lifting them up in knowledge and the industries of life, and in all these directions it has accomplished great results, planting wisely with good seed, and is beginning already to reap large and continually enlarging harvests.