VOL. L.
APRIL, 1896.
No. 4.
Jubilee Year Fund.
of the American Missionary Association
*It is now fifty years since the **AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION** was
organized. Its work and history are before the churches. We have reason to
rejoice in the accomplishment of the past. We are grateful to God for this
ministry of grace to His needy ones. We have come now to the
semi-centennial year of the Association. We propose to celebrate the
Fiftieth Year, and to acknowledge the goodness of God to us in the past.*
*But we find ourselves in this present time in distress. Our work has been
severely affected by the adverse times. Our mission schools and churches
are suffering. For the last three years our average current receipts have
been $93,000 less per year than during the previous three years. The work
has been cut $184,000 during these three years. If it had been fully
maintained the debt would have been three times as great as it is.*
*We are now confronted with the question of further and more disastrous
reductions, for our obligations must be met. The $100,000 borrowed for
mission work must be paid. We do not believe that the churches wish this
to be done by closing more schools and church doors against the poorest of
our countrymen throughout the Southern lowlands and mountains, amid the
Dakotas and Montana, from California to Florida.*
*The Association has come to the last half of its fiscal year. Up to this
time it has made no special plea for help. It has waited fraternally until
kindred organizations have received the aid they** so greatly needed. This
vast Christian service in the most necessitous fields of the continent is
as distinctively the trust of the churches as any of their enterprises
are. Shall it not now have the same equitable relief as has been given to
others? Has not the time now come for helping this suffering work? Will
not those who have charged the Association with this burden of service now
consecrate anew their benevolence to its relief and make this a Year of
Jubilee, to wipe out the last vestige of debt?*
*It is proposed to raise during the next six months a special Jubilee Year
Fund of $100,000 in shares of $50 each, with the hope and expectation that
these shares will be taken by the friends of missions without lessening
those regular contributions which must be depended upon to sustain the
current work.*
*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 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.
We print in this number of the MISSIONARY two articles written by
Secretaries of the Association, which give reliable statements touching
the deplorable needs of some of these people, and yet of the cheering
transformations made in their condition by our schools and churches. We
invite attention to these two articles.
The Year of Jubilee.