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."
* * * * *
REPORTS OF COMMITTEES.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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?
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
These strange little men from "the land of Sinim," mysterious, silent,
capable, incredibly industrious, money-making, with their pig-tails and
their felt shoes, their "pidgin English" and their unintelligible
"turkey tracks," their wooden countenance and their "bias eyes," their
opium, and their "ways that are dark," who, in spite of restrictive laws
and brutal personal treatment, are filtering in everywhere, until they
may be seen crouched in the corner of any street car, and are a familiar
object in the village street--why are they here? here just now and here
so persistently? It is no mighty immigration of men, such as De
Tocqueville liked to dwell upon. It is no conquering host, no familiar
immigration. Whatever may once have been the attractive force of the
California gold fields, washing soiled linen can hardly be regarded as
satisfying a national instinct, or thumping through the long hours of
the night upon an ironing table a soul-filling amusement. Much may be
said of "the golden fleece," but these are no modern Argonauts. They are
money-making as our friends the Jews, but no "high emprise" or "grand
endeavor" fires their calm pulse, and much as has been written of the
coolie system and the "Six Companies," nothing has been adduced which
seems adequate to explain the movement.
The fact is, God is in it. He is crowding these heathen upon our
churches in these missionary days of an opening world, first of all to
prove our Christianity. Do we believe that all men are brothers? Do we
believe that the Holy Ghost who renewed our hearts can renew these? Do
we believe that the Lord who died for us, died for the world? Do we
believe--not that the world--but that this particular heathen as he
stands before us in his blue blouse, or sits at our side with his
reading-book, is as dear to our heavenly Father as you and I are? Do we
believe that we are to go to him with the gospel to find a way for the
truth into his heart, to bear his burdens, to win him by love, and that
without him we ourselves can not be made perfect? Do we believe, in
short, that God has brought him here to our door that we might learn
that if we have not a religion that will save, and will make us eager to
have it save a Chinaman, we have not a religion that will save
ourselves?
Seven hundred and fifty of these men already members of the churches
connected with our mission on the Pacific Coast! and who will say how
many more on the rolls of our churches from St. Louis to Boston! What
are these Chinese converts, the fruitage of our Sunday-schools and
prayer-meetings, our personal labor, but God's blessed seal set upon our
Christian faith! Here is the evidence. Ours is the conquering faith of
the world. It will save every man, for it has saved these men, no less
than you and me.
But this is not all. China's day has come. We hear from beyond the sea
of the new railway, the awful floods, the burning of the "Altar of
Heaven," and the strange stirrings of the mind of that mighty people,
the oldest, and judged by its persistent life, the strongest now on the
globe. Merchants tell us of its limitless trade: diplomatists speak of
its astuteness and of its new navy, second only to that of England;
scholars wonder at a nation of heathen with whom learning determines
rank, and where the "boss" and the fixer of elections are unknown.
Missionaries write of the throngs that gather in strange cities to hear
them preach, of the new gentleness and courtesy everywhere shown them,
and of the increasing number of young people pressing into the mission
schools.
In the midst of all this, when the Lord's voice is heard calling us to
lift up our eyes and look on the fields now white for the harvest, comes
word from our solitary watchman upon the watch-tower in Hong-Kong that
when he returned to his post, as he did last year, perplexed and
down-hearted, because not one Christian in all America heeded his call
and went with him to his field, to his surprise and joy the Lord has
been preparing his own servants in the person of Chinese emigrants
coming home from America, bringing with them not money only and
knowledge of the wide world, but the new-found faith; graduates of
laundries, but also of our Sunday-schools, members of our churches,
filled with an eager spirit to tell their parents, their brethren, their
neighbors, of Jesus Christ. Ah, dear friends, God's ways are not as our
ways. Let us not be slow to catch his thought and walk where he leads.