There comes to mind as I write one very miserable home in which both the parents are ignorant. There are three rooms to the house not nearly so comfortable as the places where Northern farmers keep their horses and cattle. There is neither stove nor grate in the house, but simply some rocks on each side of the open fireplace on which they lay the green wood, by which they sit and shiver while the cold winds blow through the cracks in the floor and sides of the house. There are six children and only two excuses for beds. One of these has on it a tick, the other has a pile of dirty rags. There is not a whole table or chair in the house.
And yet, these people, like many others just as poor as they, are trying to educate their children. They believe that in Christian education lies the only redemption from this condition for them and their race, through their children, who are enjoying privileges that were denied to them.
There are not more than a dozen individuals in the church who are earning a comfortable living. More than that number did so when times were better, but now there is not much for them to do except conduct[pg 186] very poor farms, on which they cannot earn enough to make themselves comfortable.
There have been very few years in the history of the church when it did not have a revival of religion. Of late it has been the custom to have two series of special services each year--one during the winter, while the school is in session, and another during the summer vacation. Effort is made each year to have all the students converted. Of all the young people who have graduated here only two have left without being professing Christians.
The growth of the church has not been rapid, but steady. During the days of slavery the colored people were members of the churches to which their masters belonged. None of them belonged to Congregational churches, and so, when Congregationalism came to the South after the war, it was entirely new to the former slaves and to those who had been their masters.
The masses of the children and the young people still cling to the churches which their parents were taught to love. It will, therefore, be some time before Congregationalism will grow rapidly in the South. The church has no building of its own, and no parsonage, but worships in the chapel of Talladega College. The building in which the chapel is located was erected by the white Baptists of the Coosa Valley Association before the war as a college for their sons. Some of the old slaves who helped to put up the building lived to see freedom, to see the building come into the hands of the American Missionary Association, and to see their own children study and graduate in it.
MEETINGS AMONG THE HILLS AND AT A CONVICT CAMP.
BY REV. H. E. PARTRIDGE.
Perhaps nowhere is a religious meeting made more of than in the hill country of the South. There are reasons and reasons for the fact. Take a real, genuine Methodist or Baptist matron, or brother, of fifty, and they love Christ and His cause, and do not fail to associate their love for Him and the work with the gathering in His name. If it be possible, they will be in attendance when "the parson" comes round. The girls love to go; some because they, too, are learning to love the service of the Master, some because they have no other so good opportunity to see and be seen, and others because everybody else goes. Where the girls and young ladies are sure to be, there the boys and young men are apt to be; and so it comes that when the meeting, especially the "big meeting," is to be held, the people throng. And if you want to see a genuine democracy, untainted by any kind of aristocracy, you could not find it better illustrated than among the hills,[pg 187] at meeting time, in some log "church-house." No Sir Wonderful to claim best pew, no usher to give you the place he chooses. You come with your wife and, following the custom, she goes to the left, you to the right. I will not describe the service. The singing varies from a wonderful chorus of praise that lacks nothing in volume in one neighborhood, to the nasal-twanged hymn which some incompetent leader sings almost alone in some other community. The old songs predominate, but any brisk moving song of work of praise or progress easily becomes a favorite, when once it has been sung long enough so that the words and movement are mastered by a few.