Part 2

From September, 1861, on to the present time women have been prominent workers. By 1864, 169 women workers; in 1865, 261; in 1866, 264; in 1870, 450; in 1869, 2,000 different ladies had served; and to date not less than 3,000, an army of Gospelers! Among Indians, 17 lady missionaries. Among Chinese in California, 24 lady missionary teachers.

Miss D. E. Emerson has been appointed as secretary. She is experienced on the field, and acquainted with the details of office work, as clerk for the southern field.

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WANTS.

1. For current work, $1,000 for every day of the year.

2. Endowments in the several institutions.

3. A Boys’ Hall at Tillotson Institute, Austin, Texas.

4. $10,000 to add to Edward Smith’s $10,000 to build the first hall, at Little Rock, of Edward Smith’s College, for whose campus (14 acres) he paid $5,500, already greatly enhanced in price. New hall to be named for second donor.

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SAYINGS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING.

—Prof. Albert Salisbury: I do not approve the factory idea of industrial instruction.

—Dr. Withrow: Selfishness is as sure to destroy what it seeks to save as a cancer is to kill.

Never in this world was a monument made to memorialize a mere money-getter.

—Dr. Behrends: The color-line is only a section, and a very small section at that, of the race-line.

It is not in India alone that the existence of caste constitutes one of the most serious obstacles to the progress of the Gospel.

—Dr. Rankin: For Southern educational work this Society has put in millions by the side of the United States Government’s millions. The Government has given $5,000,000, this Society has given $5,000,000.

Westminster Abbey opened of its own accord to take the dust of David Livingstone. Why? Because he stretched himself on Africa, as the prophet stretched himself on the dead body of the widow’s son.

—Rev. A. H. Bradford: Florence Nightingale robbed war of half its terrors.

These Women’s Boards of Missions do more than all other means combined to keep alive the missionary spirit.

The women of our day have reversed the Apostolic injunction and are reading it, “Help those men.” We need to restore the original reading, “Help those women.”

—Rev. Isaac Hall: Speaking of the colored people’s futile efforts to solve the race problem, he said: First we thought we would go to Africa, but we couldn’t get ships enough: then we thought we would go to Kansas, but we couldn’t get cars enough; then, since we couldn’t get away, we decided we would stay; and now what are you going to do about it?

—Dr. Wm. Alvin Bartlett stigmatized the California law which forbade a Chinaman to live in an apartment with less than 500 cubic feet of air, and punished him with imprisonment in a cell with less than 200 feet of air.

The Chinese are not illiterate, but it is objected that they are too numerous. Why, there are hardly Chinamen enough in our country to be schoolmasters of our countrymen who cannot read and write.

But the Chinese worship their ancestors. Well, I would rather revere my ancestors than leave my children such pernicious doctrine as the anti-Chinese people teach. It is better to worship your ancestors than to damn your posterity.

—Ju Sing recognized the fact that all Americans are not hostile to Chinamen. “We know that there are some God’s people, and some devil’s people.”

—Nine young Chinamen, residents of Brooklyn and members of the Central Sunday-School, sang Gospel Hymns. They also sang “Pass me not, O Gentle Saviour,” done into Chinese, Jim Sing taking the solo.

—Secretary Powell: Now that slavery has gone, there must go with it blind-eyed prejudice and anti-Christian caste.

—Rev. J. C. Price, North Carolina: At the close of the war Canaan was not entered, as a recent decision of the Supreme Court tells us, but the Red Sea was crossed. Has the Negro grown? Then his chief object was to be in Gen. Sherman’s army; if not in it in the wake of it. Now he is looking about for property and education.

The colored people of Georgia alone have acquired a property of $6,000,000. In North Carolina from twelve to fifteen newspapers are edited, owned and controlled by colored people.

If God has made the Negro a man, he requires of him all the work of a man. Then let Christian people do all they can to qualify him for that work. He quotes the words of the Secretary: “The true solution of the Negro problem is not to change his color or his place of residence, but to change his character.”

—Sec. Strieby: This Society is not handicapped for this work except by its firm and well-known attitude against caste, and any other Society equally faithful on that subject would soon be equally handicapped.

—Pres. Bartlett claimed to represent an institution that from the very first has rejected the color line; a century ago it was educating the Indians, a half a century the Negro shared its privileges. Speaking of the Negro’s unquestioned piety he said: “He sees hell impending, heaven before him and the chariot swings low.”

—Dr. Gladden: No man has a right to engage in the work of governing who does not know what just government is. I protest against that kind of government.

From 1870 to 1880 the colored voters at the South increased 30 per cent.; their illiteracy increased only 20 per cent. The whites at the South are gaining in intelligence but little, the blacks splendidly. Most of the gain South is due to the education of the Negro.

How do you account for this gain? Did you ever hear of Fisk and Berea and Atlanta? The census tables have heard of them if you have not.

Any society that is as really and thoroughly Christian as this one will meet the same objection as this one.

—Dr. Taylor: “Bring an offering and come unto my courts.” In Scotland, where I was brought up, the first act of worship was to lay a piece of money on the table.

Sometimes a man assigns a debt so that what is due him is paid to another. So the Lord Jesus has assigned the debt, and we are to pay a large part of what we owe to him to the poor and needy; to the benighted and degraded; to the Indian, the Negro and the heathen that need the light.

—Dr. Dennen: Speaking of denominational antipathies, he was reminded of the brass oxen under the brazen laver standing with their rumps toward each other and their eyes directed away to their own selfish interests.

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THE CROSS OF CHRIST THE ONLY SOLVENT FOR RACE DIFFICULTIES.

Rev. J. E. Rankin, D.D., who presided happily at our annual meeting, read an interesting opening address, from which we give the following extracts:

The Cross of Christ proves man’s universal brotherhood. If He is our brother-man, we are His brother-men.

When last night we took that bread and drank that wine, what did we do? We symbolized Christ’s human brotherhood. This He did for humanity’s sake. What taint of Judaism had He? What recognition did He ever make that He belonged to any single nationality, to any single tribe, to any single class? Is He brother-man to the Jew only, because he was born of a Jewish mother? Is He any less brother-man to the Gentile? When we ate that bread, we ate that which sets forth, what? God manifest in the flesh. God manifest in the flesh of humanity. Not because we are Anglo-Saxon, and have the Anglo-Saxon Bible, the Anglo-Saxon literature, the Anglo-Saxon civilization, the Anglo-Saxon freedom and manhood, of which we are so proud, have you and I a claim to this Brother-man? It is because we are on the same human level with the other races, from which we so much differ, and above which God has given us such an exaltation. For such were we. It is because we are brother-men to Frederick Douglas, and Sitting Bull, and the last Chinaman who has been smuggled from the Celestial kingdom, because the continent is too narrow for him and us. It is because we are so low and not because we are so high, that we had a right to sit there; to eat that bread, and drink that cup. That broken bread is the emblem, not of Anglo-Saxon humanity, but of lost, degraded, fallen humanity.

The Cross of Christ interprets man’s universal brotherhood. It needs to be interpreted. It is the last thing man learns here; that in Christ Jesus the humblest man is his equal. Ask almost any man if he wants the elevation of his brother-man; if he wants his brother-man in India, in China, in Japan, in the South, or on the Pacific Coast, made his equal, and given a chance to outstrip him, in the struggle for betterment? And he will usually answer, “Why yes, of course. Do I not pray for it and contribute for it?” But, will you sacrifice your prejudices for his sake? He needs different religious influences, different educational influences, different social influences, he needs to feel that he is no longer ostracised, and that he may aspire for himself and his children, just as you may. Will you adopt him into your religious, educational, social circles? But, you reply: “That is a society question.” It is a society question. And you belong to the Kingdom of God; to the unseen society, which, by the power of His Cross, this God-Man, who took the form of a servant, is gathering out of the nations; you have fellowship with Him, in His humiliation for humanity’s sake. And yet, you propose to decide this question according to the laws and usages of a society to which you do not belong, out of which God has called you, and against whose inhumanity to man, against whose worldly pride the Cross is a standard lifted up by God himself. You are under the most sacred of bonds to record your testimony as belonging to quite another society.

In what sense, after all, are we brothers? Can society answer this question? Can anything but the Cross of Christ? The Saviour gives us a picture of what it is to be a true neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan. “Who,” asks He, “was neighbor to him that fell among thieves?” He that thought it was a society question, a question of caste; he who came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side? He that put money into the contribution box for him, or sent some one else to help him to the hospital? No; only the man that set him upon his own beast, carried him to an inn, and took care of him. A man cannot live a neighbor to man if he is not living a neighbor to God, as he is in Christ Jesus.

Before the war, there was organized a benevolent society, whose anniversary occurs the present week—a society to preach the Gospel among the heathen. Its founders said, “We cannot take money that has been coined from slave labor. It is the price of innocent blood. It cries up to God for vengeance.”

What is the history of that society? Why, the smoke of our civil contest had hardly cleared away before it began to build up the waste places of the South, heaping coals of fire upon the people there. Under its auspices, the choicest daughters of New England (as though they had been angels of God) went down there, with the spelling-book and the Bible; took their share of the ostracism meted out to the recent bondmen, for Jesus’ sake; many of them laid down their lives there. There has scarcely been a foreign missionary field in the world which has had more perils, which has demanded greater sacrifices, which has developed spirits more heroic, more Christ-like. The same spirit which led our brave boys in blue to die to make men free, led their sisters to die to make them holy. And what do you see to-day? This society has done more to stay the tide of illiteracy, to lay the foundations of permanent civil and religious prosperity than all the other agencies put together. God’s secret is with them that fear Him. The men who, for Christ’s sake, said, “We cannot set apart to God that which has come from unpaid human labor; we cannot thus have fellowship with the works of darkness;” these men God has put into the fore-front of the great battle with ignorance and degradation—the great battle in which the South begins to ask the Nation which cannot protect the black man to come to her assistance, crying out, like Caesar to Cassius, “Help, Cassius, or we sink!” They got their baptism at the foot of the Cross. Look at the queenly institutions which they have planted. Look at the thousands of the sons and daughters of Ethiopia, whom they have developed into the mental, moral and spiritual stature of true manhood; whom they have polished after the similitude of a palace, fitted for professions, for business, for home life. Look at the churches they have planted. This is their conception of the brotherhood of man, as they have been taught it at the Cross, as the Cross has interpreted it to them.

I know no difference of race, Of African and Saxon; Of tawny skin, of rose-cheeked face, Of hair of crisp and flaxen. The soul within, that is the man, There is God’s image hidden: And there He looks, each guest to scan, The bidden and unbidden.

One God in love broods over all! One pray’r to Him is taught us; One name for mercy, when we call; One ransom, Christ has brought us. One heart of meekness, lowly mind, Life’s counter currents breasting; One Father’s House, we hope to find, Within God’s bosom resting.

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THE PLACE OF MISSIONARY LITERATURE IN THE CONVERSION OF THE WORLD.

REV. GEO. M. BOYNTON.

The literature of missions has a threefold function in its relation to the conversion of the world: to inform, to quicken and to direct. It would be hard to over-estimate the importance of the history and record of missionary efforts and successes in their relation to the intelligence of the Christian people of our land and our day. If we are exhorted to _add to our faith_, virtue (manly and holy enterprise) _and to virtue, knowledge_, the exhortation must apply (next to the knowledge of God and of His word) to the knowledge of the history and progress of His kingdom in the world.

We do not call him even a fairly intelligent citizen of the United States who does not know something of the history of his own country—who does not know the general order of its great questions and great conflicts. What shall we say of one who claims to have his citizenship in heaven and yet is willingly ignorant of the great battle-grounds of Christ’s kingdom of even the near past, and so knows nothing of the questions which agitate the present day or the forces of the foes now in the field?

It is no small thing to follow the current history of the world, as it has been brought so near to us in our day, and yet with what eagerness the morning paper is looked for in every home of even ordinary intelligence; and after the half-hour’s search, how often to the question, “What is there of interest to-day?” the answer comes, “Oh, nothing.” The journals are full of manufactured news; political squabbles; stories of scandal and of crime; with now and then some event which marks a step in the world’s progress of more than ordinary consequence. It is often said that our missionary periodicals are not of thrilling interest, but I am willing to leave it to the testimony of any candid man whether they do not at least fairly approximate the secular press in interest and ability, only that men are more eager to know what is going on in the kingdoms of this world than in the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It is the _appetite_ which largely gives its savor to the food. _When our hearts are all aglow_ with love to the Master of us all, and we want to know, above all things, that he is being satisfied with the travail of his soul, _we do not count the tidings of the advancement of his kingdom dull_. If his interests are ours, we shall watch them.

One of the great requisites to giving or praying is that men should know to what their alms are directed and for what their prayers go up to God. Let the missionary press, then, give us information, and give it freely. The men and the women who read want to have, not the impressions of other people reproduced, but the details which made those impressions. They want the facts, set forth with vivid exactness, with life-like coloring. It is only now and then one of our missionaries at the front who seems to comprehend that he must make us see what he sees, and must remember that his reflections upon the things that have become familiar to him will not make us familiar with the facts. If he can stir our imaginations and make us his attendants during his day’s work, we shall be led to sympathy and support.

When the Church Missionary Society of London was making its exploration into Africa the long pages of journal written on the spot from day to day were the most thrilling pages of current history that were being written; and many of you have not forgotten the diary of our own Dr. Ladd of his journey up the Nile. Nothing should be spared to open the eyes of the givers and the prayers to what you may call instantaneous views of the workers at their work. Give us the facts in the best possible shape if you want our sympathy, our prayers, our money. Until you have done that, you cannot, if you would, call down on us the condemnation spoken to him that “_seeth_ his brother have need” and does not help him.

But Christian character needs _inspiration_ as well as information. It needs not only to know, but to feel; not only to have its eyes made clear to see, but its heart stimulated to a worthy enthusiasm. We do not get our _inspiration_ so much from great events as from great men. Souls are quickened by quickening souls. The contagion of enthusiasm spreads from life to life. That in the literature of missions, which will especially kindle missionary enthusiasm is to be found in the veins of the noble lives of the men and women who have counted their lives not worth the keeping, for their love for Christ and for the Kingdom of whom this world was not worthy, and who, in the world, were least of all men of it.

What other fuel can you find to build a fire of grand enthusiasm for the Master like the one you have in the biography of missions? Nowhere away from the sacred record can you find nobler events of Christian living and devotion. Nowhere are there grander illustrations of the spirit of Christian heroism. Nowhere more stirring suggestions of the possible attainments of Christian grace.

Nor do I recall a missionary biography which is morbid and so misleading—which sets up an introspective and dyspeptic type of piety as a model and standard. The missionary has no time to be morbid. He has made a consecration of all his energies to his Master. His life is led actually and daily by the high purpose which he has set before him. His biography is not a picture of still life. He cannot stop to take becoming attitudes, even before his own eyes. He has no time to write a journal of his supposed spiritual states. If you take his photograph you must take him in motion, as nowadays they take a horse upon the race-track, and you get him with every muscle set and every nerve charged with life.

I know no better books for men or boys, for matrons or maidens, than such books as these, in which you have such lives embalmed.

Where can you find a manlier life than that of John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop of Melanesia, his diocese the island of the sea, inhabited by blacks. The story of his patience and his pluck and cheerful confidence is enough to dispel the worst type of malarial saintship—shaky and intermittent. To see him with his senior bishop approaching a new island, rowing in his small boat as near as was safe to the breakers, and then the two pioneers of the Gospel taking a header through the waves and swimming to the land to tell the Gospel of great joy to the dusky and unclad islanders! There’s tonic in the very reading. He could be a bishop without robes or titles. God had sent him to be an overseer of lone regions and lost souls. Or what could be more tragic than the final scene of his death by the treacherous arrows of the natives, and the ghastly tableau of the still young hero of God floating out in the boat alone toward his waiting friends.

There is a biography yet unwritten of one connected with the work of this Association which, if it could be spread upon the record, would equal this in the sincerity of his devotion, in purity of his motive, in his bearing patiently when nearly all men spoke ill of him, for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s, and even friends for a time began to doubt him, in his readiness to take up the hardest thing there was to do until the end. You will know of whom I speak when I tell you that he was equally the friend of the Indian and of the negro; that he became the target of all the shafts of malice when he sought to protect the poor Indian from his worse than savage foes within the capital of the nation and on the western reservation; that he became the victim of the deadly malaria of the African coast, where he had gone to reorganize and direct the work of this Association in the Mendi Mission. I speak of one whom we all delight to honor and call reverend—the Reverend Edward P. Smith.

And there are others still upon the field, whose names may or may not be known to any wide fame with men, and women, too, who have hazarded their lives for the privilege of preaching and of teaching in the name of Christ. We cannot afford to lose the records of such positive and aggressive Christianity for their stimulus to the Christian character of those at home and those whose characters are forming yet.

Dr. Goodell names as one of the ten ways by which the world is to be saved, that we keep the home and Sunday-school libraries full of that most interesting and profitable of all our literature for the young, the books written by Christ’s soldiers upon the field of battle. I would emphasize even more than that—the books written about these heroes of the faith and their lives of earnest and joyful sacrifice. Who will not acknowledge that we need the inspiration in our day?

If the Christian world needs for its own sake the information and the inspiration which can only come from the literature of missions, the missionary work itself needs equally this means to make its opportunities known to the Christian world.

That is only in part, if at all, a Christian church which is not a missionary church as well. The salt which has lost its savor is no longer salt. It will save deception if you take off the label. It is “good for nothing,” and is to be cast into the street only to get rid of it, and not because it is good for a road.

The true Church of Christ is concerned about the progress of his kingdom, is in earnest sympathy with those who are at the front, is eager in its outlook for new opportunities of service. To such a waiting ear—and, brethren, it is waiting—come through the missionary press the tidings of opportunity, the sound of doors, long closed, creaking on their hinges as they fling open for the feet of the delaying messengers of grace. This is the telephone which summons to instant response. It sounds in the counting-rooms of our men of business, and invites them to new investments in behalf of those for whom God goes security, for “he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord.” It rings its summons in our Theological Seminaries and among our younger brethren in the ministry, and calls them to occupy until He comes. It goes into the offices of the organizations through which the churches reach the needy east and west, north and south, and says not pull down your barns, but build greater ones; for, as are the broad farms of the West to the old New England homesteads, so are the harvests to be reaped to those which have been already gathered in. It mixes in our homes, and calls on our sons and daughters to the waiting work.