Chapter 4

In order that applied Christianity may have the power of self-help and self-care, industries are introduced. In that the people are being fitted to save themselves. All of our work from first to last is missionary, and instinct with the motive of salvation; our schools are means to an end; fitting preachers, teachers, mechanics, home makers to meet the problem and the peril. It is not by education that the question is to be solved. The missionary view is not simply the educational view. This society is not an educational society. Education is not the panacea for the ills of man. Ignorance is a great evil, but it is not the worst one; sinfulness is worse and more difficult to cure. The one who is educated may make trouble and not heal it; secular education can not meet the problem; State education can not protect against the peril, but sanctified education can, for it has in it the power of God. This society is a missionary society which, like the American Board, teaches in order to save. You can scarcely save ignorance. This means Christian schools not only full of ethics, but vital with faith. It means also the twin life of school work and church work. To put these factors apart would be a great disaster to each; nay, it would put away from the only society that can effectively, and we believe effectually, meet this problem, the chief factor in the solution of the impending and serious question. Education alone is not equal to this question, and those who have won the ear and the sympathy of those who need to come under the power of the gospel, who have been their friends and teachers, who have their confidence and trust, are the ones to take this gospel to them and show them how to take it to others. The schools reach parents, the schools reach pastors, the schools reach the people, the schools are intertwined with all the church life that has any hope in it. This is the missionary view. When this people in the wilderness cried out in their distresses, "Who will speak for us?" the Association spoke for them. When they needed sympathy, sympathy it gave. When they needed instruction, it went to them in the name of Christ. In his name it stood for the Negro. In his name it stood by the Negro. In his name it stood with him. It stands there to-day. It is his friend and counselor. When the Negro is cast down, the churches will hear one voice and they will wish their own society to be found faithful in this.

With this charter as a missionary society for schools and churches, we present to the Negro race continually the personal hope of souls not only, but the hope of the race. When they think that the progress is slow we tell them that Christianity is sure. When they tell us that they can not wait, but must organize and retaliate, we tell them to wait upon God. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." We ask them to remember that a quarter of a century, or a century, is a short time in the history of a people. We point to a million--a round million--of Negro children in the schools to-day. We are teaching them to be men. We are saving them to be Christians. We teach them not to remain down and not to be put down. Being men, they are to stand like men, but like Christian men, to conquer prejudices by worthiness, to meet race hatred with only a stronger purpose to command respect, not to render evil for evil, but contrariwise, blessing; not blow for blow, but to go on upbuilding themselves, deserving their rights, and remembering that a great element in the solution of this problem must be an intelligent faith in God. With this missionary view we stand firm. We have learned that the Southerners of our own race, even when they hold their prejudices against our principles, respect those who stand in a Christian way for their principles; and that these principles will never be accepted in the South by our holding them loosely, or in suspense, or in any sort of abeyance. They respect us when we teach our people that they have all the rights of manhood and womanhood; that they are to respect themselves and to be worthy of self-respect; that they are not to consent in their own minds to any assertion of superiority based upon the tint of the skin, and that they are never to feel guilty for being black. We are teaching the colored people to hold honor with themselves.

What this Association and other missionary forces have done and are doing--this Association more than others--will be the balance of power to prevent the dreaded conflict of races; _the balance of power_ to settle the question; How can the two races live in the same section with mutual respect for each other's civil and Christian rights? This may take time. Christianity takes time. It is ours to take Christianity to teach that the beginning of Christianity was the death blow to wrong principles and evil practices of men, however well intrenched and fortified these forces may be.

It is this which gives us courage to grapple with centuries of wrong and to undertake the slow reduction of these evils. When Christianity came, the era of conscience came, and in His gospel is the power of intelligence and moral determination that shall not be overcome of evil, but shall overcome evil with good.

"Men bound with right are strong: Right bound with right in Christian faith Will conquer a world of wrong."

The missionary schools and the missionary churches are, we believe, the only safeguard against the conflict of races. They are the guardian against this national peril. This being so, the churches must speed them more and more. They must not hinder them nor tie their hands. The guarantees of this peaceful solution are in the hands of the churches. Multiply and hasten the Christian energies. Multiply the Christian prayers that we may be workers together with Him of whom it is written, "He shall not fail or be discouraged."

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REPORTS OF COMMITTEES.

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REPORT ON EDUCATIONAL WORK SOUTH.

BY REV. WM. BURNET WRIGHT, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

It is an ominous fact that in the South illiteracy is steadily increasing. It is an encouraging fact that in the region surrounding our chartered and normal schools illiteracy is steadily diminishing. The colored people are multiplying more rapidly than the means of educating them. If the supply of school accommodations to-day exactly equalled the demand, so that every colored child of suitable age was provided for in some school, there would be at the time of our next annual meeting 255,500 children asking to be taught their letters to whom we should have to say, We cannot teach you. But the supply does not yet nearly equal the demand.

In respect to education, the South is a dark sky rapidly growing darker, but flecked with patches of lighter shade, which are gradually growing brighter and larger. Such a bright space frames each of our chartered and normal schools. Fisk University, Talladega College, Tougaloo University, Straight University, in New Orleans, and Tillotson Institute, at Austin, Texas, are doing work which vindicates each year more distinctly the strategic sagacity which located them. In these institutions alone nearly two thousand students of both sexes are being trained to be light-bearers to their race. Besides these, each of which is essentially a normal school, and includes a normal department, eighteen distinctively normal schools are sustained at different points of strategic importance. Two new schools have been established during the year. Good work has also been done among the mountain whites. The income from the gift of Mr. Daniel Hand has enabled the Association to enlarge its school accommodations, and to assist more than three hundred students, who, without it, would have been unable to attend schools of any kind.

The committee would emphasize among special needs of the work, funds for a girls' hall at Tillotson Institute, and for the endowment of a theological school for training colored pastors. Two facts are pre-eminently gratifying. The first is that in nearly all the schools of the Association some kind of industrial training is provided, and that the influence of such training is conspicuously shown in improved ideas of home life and comfort among those connected by family or other ties with our students. The second fact is, that in all our schools the students are taught that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that consequently the separation between religion and morality, which is the supreme danger of the Southern black churches, is perceptibly diminishing.

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REPORT ON CHURCH WORK.

BY PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR, CHAIRMAN.

The mission of the American Missionary Association is shown to be a _specialty_ and a _unit_ by its church work. It is the work of a specialist among Christian organizations that alone could have produced these churches. To meet the demands of an exigency which could not be met by the pre-existent ordinary agencies, this child of Providence was born of God and the times. For the accomplishment of ends for which no means had been found, its methods were providentially chosen by a process of spiritual selection. Its agencies are the accretions of the Divine purpose in its progress toward the salvation of the undermost, and the edifying of the whole body of Christ. To the production of its unique Christian institutions the exclusive devotion to the study of the peculiar conditions of these entirely distinct communities was necessary. There have been generated by this devotion and acquired through the experience of nearly half a century a knowledge and skill which claim for this Association the recognition of the world as its foremost expert in the successful application of Christianity to the solution of the most difficult race problems of modern civilization.

And yet in the accomplishment of this great achievement, loyalty to the common faith and to our own polity, as well as to the teachings of experience, demanded only the new application of the old prime factors of God's own choice, the _local church_ with its evangelism and Christian nurture.

In the work of this Association these two great agencies are uniquely one. The pastor is often teacher and evangelist. The sanctuary is school-house and mission station. At twenty-three points on the field God has made of these twain--the church and the school--one. The church is the unit of this unity. For while the church is generally the offspring of the school, the school finds both its profoundest reasons for existence and its highest consummation in the needs and ends of the church. In it the work both of the teacher and evangelist co-ordinates and culminates.

It will not be so very long before these schools and colleges will find their chief sources of supply in these churches, which although now so dependent, must ultimately be depended upon to maintain and develop their own institutions. Even now it is to be remembered that the appeal of this evangelizing church work meets with the wider and more popular response from the giving constituency of the Association, while the educational institutions are more dependent upon the larger gifts of interested individuals.

Moreover, it is the church which opens the springs of the family life from which the schools must draw their scholars. And it is the church which creates the environment necessary to the Christian homes, to which the graduates are sent back again to live their lives, and from which, as the heart's fulcrum, their saved lives can best lift up the lost.

These little church groups of evangelized and educated families are at once the prime sources and the constituent elements of the new Christian civilization which already heralds the coming of the kingdom to those neglected, outcast peoples, to secure whose human rights, Christian privileges and church fellowship is the first, loudest, longest call upon the Congregational Churches of America.

Therefore, in the name of this Association, whose heroic type of missionary and teaching service makes our whole membership and ministry the more attractive and ennobling; in the name of its schools which became churches, and its churches which are schools; in the name of their 8,400 professing Christians, and their 15,000 Sunday-school scholars, and the 1,000 converts of the year; in the name of the races of three continents to whom the Father is sending these our brethren as we are sent to them, we pledge the fidelity of the American Missionary Association to the two-fold agency of its one work, the discipling of these races by the evangelizing church, and the Christian nurture of its schools. And we re-echo the call which the National Council makes upon our churches for the $500,000 required by the exigencies and opportunities of this year's work for the neediest and most helpless of all our fellow-countrymen.

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REPORT ON MOUNTAIN WORK.

BY REV. D.M. FISK, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

The formal report of your committee can without injustice be brief; not because the field considered is narrow, or the work unimportant as a missionary movement, but from the fact that a certain unity pervades both, making it possible to comprehend in one view even the diversities of a population of over two millions, and an area of above one hundred thousand square miles.

The official summary of the year's work, on which we report, once again sets before this Association the situation and its involved problem; a situation full of contradictions, a problem at once serious but not hopeless.

Here is the amazing spectacle of a self-isolated people, begirt with the active life and thought of our eager times, yet sharing neither. Here is an empire that is content to live in the past: having rich resources it neglects to develop them; a productive soil but niggard crops. Amidst a veritable Lebanon of forestry it has shanties for homes; with coal deposits that are the envy of the world, its shivering women in stoveless hovels attempt to defend themselves about their domestic toil with coarse homespun shawls and slat-bonnets. In an age that has harnessed mechanism, beast, and steam to the plow, scythe, sickle and flail, these owners of mountains of iron and mines of power still indolently vex a grudging soil with tools of such barbaric simplicity that their intrusion is scarcely more than a provocation to weeds.

Here is needless poverty in the lap of potential wealth, thriftlessness in the face of every seeming stimulus to diligence. Here is a diversified landscape that should inspire and a climate that should invigorate, but in place of vivacity and health we find apathetic endurance and intrenched disease. Scrofula and its parasite kin are domesticated in the debilitated blood, and pills, calomel, and death jointly contend for the prolific cradle, and even when temporarily defeated succeed in transforming childhood into unlovely age, without the long interval of intermediate active, zestful manhood.

And yet, pitiful as is this exhibit of deficiency, these Highland dwellers are none the less men and our brethren. Slavery robbed them of their lands half a century ago, and roughly shouldered them off into the mountain wilderness dowered with the pauperizing maxims of oppression, notably the indignity of toil, and their shrewd native mother-wit has been left to rust to dullard loss in the absence of schools worthy the name; worse still, their natural devoutness has been warped by unworthy shepherds, till superstition, bigotry, and gross immorality have taken fierce possession of many a society, hearthstone and heart. If to-day the schools are inefficient and some of the preaching blasphemous; if self-satisfied idleness has turned over this mountain realm to want and the slavery of low living, and (as ever) made woman at once the servant and the victim of its barbarism, it is but another historic count in the awful indictment of human selfishness. And all these crying deficiencies are but make-weights with our conviction of responsibility to this mountain flock of God, that often has been misled and unworthily sacrificed.

The only problematical element in this matter is the measure of our faith in God and man and all-prevailing truth. Wherever the ground has been broken by faithful men there is a crop to show as returns for invested toil. More than a thousand children are now under Christian instruction in our schools. Our pupils are in hungry demand as teachers, even to a minimum of years that to us would seem absurd (15 and 16 years). Over twenty churches are holding up a reasonable religion, as a life rather than merely a profession. New fields plead for mission work. Our already planted churches and schools are stimulating other denominations to redoubled diligence in church planting. Courage is in the tone and look of our frontier workers. The officers of this Association feel in an aggressive mood. The question resolves itself into one of faith and contributions. What, my brethren, shall be our answer?

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REPORT ON INDIAN WORK.

BY REV. ADDISON F. FOSTER, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

The committee on the work of the American Missionary Association among the Indians respectfully report that they gratefully recognize the good hand of God in the work already done.

Since the American Missionary Association took the work, the expenditures have increased from $11,000 to $52,000, the out-stations for direct evangelistic effort from seven to twenty-one, and the churches from two to six. This last year, the Association has established three new out-stations: the Moody station among the Mandans, fifty miles north of Fort Berthold; the Moody Station No. 2 among the Gros Ventres, twenty-five miles north of Fort Berthold; the Sankey Station among the Dakotas at Cherry Creek. It has just put up a mission house, with a room for church worship, at Rosebud Agency. It has organized anew church at Bazille Creek, some distance out from Santee; a branch church at Cherry Creek, on the Sioux Reservation, and is just forming a church at Standing Rock, for which a building is now completed.

This record is certainly gratifying and shows that the Association appreciates the emergency, and is striving to meet it, so far as the means put in its hands allow. But your committee feel also that never before was there so great an opportunity as now brought before the Christians of this land, and especially our own denomination, for work among the Indians.

The relations of the Government and of the churches in Indian work are now unusually harmonious and kindly. The present Administration is thoroughly in sympathy with missionary operations, and will do nothing to impair their efficiency. We believe it to be sincerely actuated by a desire to promote the best welfare of the Indians, and ready to co-operate with all good people in efforts in this direction. It aims to educate every Indian child. We desire to see this done, and believe that when the Government assumes, as it should, the primary education of all Indians of school age, we shall be called on to turn our efforts to a much larger work for direct evangelization.

Our opportunity is enlarging further by the breaking down of the old pagan prejudices of the Indians. The testimony of all the workers on the field is to this effect. The Indians are desirous of living as white men. They are rapidly losing their distinctive Indian ideas and are imbibing the notions of their white neighbors. This is seen in their burials, which now are not uniformly, as of old, on scaffolds, but are more and more interments. It is shown in their feeling and behavior when death comes into their households. They no longer fill their houses with hideous outcries, but instead seek the missionaries to inquire about the life in the other world.

A further opportunity is to be noted in the fact that the Dakota Indians have specially fallen into our care. Our chief missions are located among them, at Santee, Rosebud, Oahe, Standing Rock, and outlying stations. But the Dakota Indians number 40,000 in all, or about one-sixth of all the Indians in the country. We have mastered the Dakota language; and a Bible, hymn-book, dictionary and other books are printed in that tongue. We have, then, special ability to carry on mission work among them, and are bound to utilize it to the full. The time is ripe for immediate action. It must be taken without delay if taken at all. The opening up to white settlement of a large strip of land though the center of the great Sioux reservations is to bring the Indian into contact with the influence of white men as never before. It is impossible that that influence shall be altogether good. The contact of the Indian with the frontiersmen of our own people has resulted most deplorably in the past, and we cannot hope for much better results now. Rum and licentiousness are sure to work untold harm to the Indian unless they are met by the gospel. This opening up of Indian territory to white settlement lays, therefore, a most imperative and immediate obligation on Christian people to protect the Indian from ruin by giving them the gospel.

We are satisfied that nothing but the gospel will suffice. Education alone can not save, and may simply give new strength to evil habits and influences. It must be a Christian education; schools should be simply preliminary and altogether subsidiary to the most energetic and wise presentation of the gospel. The uniform policy of the American Missionary Association in all departments of its work has been in this direction, and we gladly recognize the fact that its Indian work has steadily progressed with the idea of evangelizing the Indian.

We know very well that the Association is laboring for 8,000,000 Negroes and for 2,000,000 Mountain White people and for 125,000 Chinese, as well as 262,000 Indians. We know that the proportion of the Indians is comparatively small. At the same time we urge that this disproportion is to a large degree counterbalanced by the special opportunities we have considered. The Indian problem is before us for immediate settlement. It admits of no delay. Care for these few Indians now, Christianize them now, as we may, and the Indian becomes as the white man, and our missionary efforts will then be released for other fields.

In this special emergency we feel strongly the necessity laid on the Association for an enlargement of its administrative force. Since the death of our lamented brother, Secretary Powell, the force at the New York office of the Association has been short-handed. We hope that the earnest efforts which are being made by the Executive Committee to find a suitable person to become another Secretary of the Association may be at once successful. An emergency is upon us, and we say this with the conviction that the demands of the Indian work are now so imperative as to require a large portion of the time and thought of such a Secretary. It is a necessity that such a Secretary should frequently visit the field and be in constant communication with the workers.

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REPORT ON CHINESE WORK.

BY REV. E.A. STIMSON, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

This is the smallest and least conspicuous department of the work of the American Missionary Association, but the one that stands in the closest relation to ourselves, and the one also that can show the largest returns. The Chinese in America are few in number, but they are scattered everywhere, as if God intended in them to put the spirit of our churches to a crucial test, and, where that test is endured, to give to his servants a prompt reward and an unanswerable confirmation of his promises and of their faith.