Recognize that the Lord Jesus stands before you in him. You prove your
own faith; you "do it unto" your Lord; you forward the plan of God when
you take him by the hand and gently entreat him for Christ.
For the same reason you will give your money to support the work of this
Association. No work has been more devoted, more upheld by prayer, more
Christlike, or, we may add, more deservedly successful than that under
the lead of our representative, Dr. Pond, on the Pacific Coast. He has
already surrounded himself with a band of trained Christian converts,
who would be a joy in any field, and who are making themselves felt for
good far and wide. Their influence reaches to Chicago, St. Louis, and
even Boston and New York. It is ours to see that the Christian city they
find here is not less Christlike than that which met them when they
landed on our shores, and that the hoodlum of our Eastern cities no more
represents the spirit of our churches than does he of San Francisco and
of Oakland. Let us be careful to show that our hand will be as promptly
raised to protect the helpless Chinaman from insult on the street as it
will be to lead his soul to Christ. Let us insist upon it, as Americans
and as Christians, that no distinction of race or of color shall stand
between any man and his rights, either in the State or in the Church.
Then may we hope that all--white and black, Chinaman and American--will
care less for rights and more for duties, and, in the joy of a true
brotherhood, will labor together to bring in the day of the Lord. In any
case, let us, with all our multiform machinery, our conventions, our
societies, our churches, be not so busy "saving souls" that we have not
care to save men and women.
* * * * *
REPORT OF THE FINANCE COMMITTEE.
BY F.J. LAMB, ESQ., CHAIRMAN.
Your committee beg leave to report that they have had under
consideration the matters committed to them. They have been attended by
your Treasurer, and they have examined his reports submitted,
particularly the detailed statement of receipts and expenditures for the
year closed; also statement of trust funds of the Association; also
statement of resources and liabilities, and of the income of the Daniel
Hand Educational Fund for the same period. These statements come to us
duly vouched for by the standing committee of auditors elected by the
Association. A summarized statement of receipts and expenditures has
been printed and distributed at this meeting, which accords with the
detailed report. Other reports show that the invested funds of the
Association, aside from the Daniel Hand Fund, are $230,875.78, being
$500 more than in the previous year. From the statement of resources and
liabilities, we find that the various colleges, schools, stations,
buildings, and property constituting what may be termed the plant of the
Association, amount, at their estimated value, to $745,849. This is a
large sum, but the investment yields no pecuniary return to the
Association. It represents the fixed property with which the Association
carries on its work, and the figures may serve in some measure to
apprise us of the magnitude of the work being carried on by the
Association.
The Daniel Hand Fund is a separate and distinct trust, and its income
cannot be used for the general work of the Association, and may demand
some further notice before this report is closed. The general condition
of the fund is found on the printed abstract already mentioned.
We find the system of keeping the accounts clear, convenient, and well
adapted to exhibit from month to month the exact pecuniary condition of
the Association, and the restrictions upon drawing money from the
treasury well calculated to insure safety in that respect, and we find
the management of the Treasurer's accounts and office in all details
satisfactory and deserving our commendation. Comparing the gifts and
work of the Association for the last year just closed with the previous
year, and the recommendations of the Finance Committee a year ago, we
find that the year 1888 closed with a deficit of over $5,000, that the
amount of receipts for that year had been $320,953.42; that the Finance
Committee then recommended that the friends of the Association should
raise for the year $375,000 for its current expenditures. It is a source
of great gratification to find that this recommendation has been nobly
met, and $376,216.88 have been received during the year just closed, an
increase of over $55,000; that the deficit of the former year has been
supplied, and that the Association commences the current year with a
fund in the treasury of $4,471.67. This we deem substantial indorsement
of the Association and its work, by the churches, Sunday-schools,
missionary societies and its individual friends. This report might stop
here with congratulations for the prosperous year just closed, but the
duties so well done, and work so well performed, must simply furnish the
Association a standing place and vantage ground for a greater work on
its part, and grounds for greater sacrifices and gifts by its friends
for the year to come.
The National Council, representing the Congregational churches of the
whole nation, lately in session at Worcester, by a unanimous vote
recommended that the churches and friends of the work of this
Association raise for it for current expenditures for the year now
commenced the sum of $500,000. Is this magnificent sum too much to ask
for the year now auspiciously begun? Happily for your committee, we are
saved the necessity of elaborate or studied examination of the needs of
the work that has been done by the papers read and to be printed and
addresses delivered from the platform during the meetings up to this
time. You are thus informed more fully than we could hope to inform you
what these needs are and their urgency. But we may say that of the
8,000,000 Negroes in the South it is estimated only 2,000,000 can read
and write. Add to these the millions of poor whites in the mountains and
the red men of the West and the Chinese in our land, and we are fully
justified in asserting that the work of this Association equals in
magnitude any work of the church, and involves issues of Christianity,
and patriotism touched by no other work of our age. It is estimated by
the officers of the Association that through its schools and colleges
and the teachers furnished by them, who are instructing the children in
the South more or less every year, perhaps 175,000 are being reached and
instructed. Assuming that as many are reached by other missionary and
benevolent societies, we see the tremendous need that can not be
ignored. This burden is laid peculiarly and urgently on this society and
its contributing friends. Can we meet this duty with less than $500,000
for the current year? Your committee say, No. Perhaps you will be ready
to acquiesce. But let us see what this means. It means that every living
donor who contributed last year must increase his contribution 50 per
cent., or the number of donors must be largely increased. A large amount
was received last year from estates and legacies, namely, $114,020.41.
This resource is a variable quantity. The Association can not _depend_
on any increase from this source. Its confidence must be in the living,
who can give if they will.
Your Committee deem it proper to call more particular attention to the
magnificent gift of Daniel Hand to the Association. It is quite likely
that some may suppose, and some may have measured their gifts last year
in the belief, that the income of this fund was applicable to pay
current expenses of the Association. But this is not so. The Daniel Hand
Fund is appropriated to special work, which, although connected
generally with the work of the Association, is yet not a part of that
ordinary work for which this fund we recommend to be raised is to be
expended. Hence all friends of the Association must make and measure
their gifts to it understanding that the sum we propose must be raised
without any aid from the income from that million dollars constituting
one of the grandest gifts of our time. Shall this $500,000 for the
current work of the Association for 1889 be furnished to it? This is
God's work. The churches here represented and the friends of the
Association have the money. It can not be put to any nobler Christian
use; the needs demand it, and we recommend that $500,000 be raised for
the Association for its current work for the year now begun.
* * * * *
REPORT ON SECRETARY STRIEBY'S PAPER.
BY REV. G.B. WILLCOX, D.D., CHAIRMAN.
The paper by Dr. Strieby impresses your committee as an admirably
comprehensive and discriminating statement of the policy and work of the
Association. As to the reconstruction of our educational and missionary
societies, to the suggestion of which much of the paper calls attention,
and from which he dissents, we should do well to make haste slowly. Some
time in the future it may become practicable. But we discover no finger
of Providence pointing toward it at present.
If the thought were to reduce our societies to which these interests are
intrusted to two, calling for but two annual collections where we now
have three or four, it needs no prophet to foresee the effect of that on
the amounts collected. If the suggestion is of the reconstruction, not
of the societies, but only of the work--if it proposes that our
educational and missionary enterprises be so divided that no one society
shall to any extent conduct both--it has certainly an attractive look.
But is it more than a look? The educational institutions of several of
our societies were born out of the inmost life of those organizations
and lie on their bosom for nourishment to-day. To ask the American
Board, for example, to turn over its colleges and schools to some other
society, for that, of course, is involved in the plan suggested--would
be like asking one of our Christian mothers to send her babe to the
foundlings' home. Some of us are old enough to remember that the
venerable and now sainted Dr. Anderson was at first vehemently opposed
to the schools planted by the missionaries in India. It was confounding
things that differ. The work of a missionary society was not to manage
schools. The schools were discontinued. But the Board soon discovered
that it was doing its work with but one hand. The schools came back and
came to stay. Now we conservatives are rather jealous of our progressive
brethren calling for a reconstruction of the American Board. We know not
whereto this thing may grow.
If the colleges and schools of the American Missionary Association were
secular, if they had no vital oneness of life with its churches, there
might be room for the plan suggested. But they are as thoroughly
Christian in their aim as the churches. The churches are as
indispensably educational as the schools. As Dr. Strieby remarks, the
teacher is often the pastor. The pastor finds a great part of his flock
in the school. The teachers teach in his Sunday-school. The
prayer-meeting depends on them for its success. The unseen shuttles of
mutual sympathy, flying back and forth incessantly, are weaving the two
together, and working out the one pattern of the Divine life in souls,
that covers both. The plan proposed would, at least to the eye,
disentangle all complications. It would lay out the work in the
Year-Book with clean-cut precision. But vital things are not always
improved by vivisection. It would doubtless simplify our apprehension of
the organs of a _man_ to lay the lungs on one side of the table, the
heart on another, the liver on a third, and the brains on a fourth. But
how far it would enhance the vitality and usefulness of the man is
another question. There is an organism which is often, and without harm,
in that fashion distributed. But it is a mannikin--not a man.
The one most formidable evil among our colored countrymen is their
deplorable ignorance of the connection between religion and morality--or
rather the fact that religion, on its outward side, is morality. The
sable deacon who, when confronted with a list of his sins as dark as his
countenance, replied triumphantly; "Well, bredren, I'se broke ebery
commandment ob de ten--but bress de Lord, I'se nebber los' my 'ligion,"
was no monster of iniquity. He was only saturated and sodden with the
delusion which submerges Pagan, Mohammedan, and Papist alike, and throws
no little of its froth over Protestant, too often, that duties toward
God and toward man are not blended, or even dove-tailed together. But
they are weights in opposite scales. Be only devout in your penances or
your hallelujahs, and your life among men is of little account. Now,
that notion can not be corrected in such a people as that one with which
we have to do in the South by an occasional Sunday sermon. In the
day-school it must be reiterated morning, noon, and night in various
applications, line upon line and precept upon precept. And so, on the
other hand, teachers, as well as scholars, must be reminded by pastors,
with a little Puritan iron in their blood, of their Christian, as well
as educational obligations. One member of your committee who has had
practical experience in the Southern work reports that some teachers,
occasionally even now, need to be reminded of the Christian service that
the Association, as well as the Master, expects from them. But divide
these different functions, put the churches and Sunday-schools under
other auspices, and, self-evidently, that temptation would be so much
the worse. We must have groped out of the morning twilight toward the
millennial day much further than we have before any such plan can be
reduced to fact.
Dr. Strieby speaks in the paper of his clerical friend of twenty-five
years ago, who thought the work of the Association would be transient.
It reminds us of Mr. Seward's remark that three months would end the
civil war. We are in for a long campaign. The sad fact is not to be
blinked that, with the enormous increase of the colored population, the
illiteracy among them is greater to-day than at the close of the
rebellion. We have need to sing at times:
O, learn to scorn the praise of men:
O, learn to lose with God.
As Dr. Goodwin grandly told us yesterday, our work is under the Master's
order. Success is no concern of ours. But success, because it is His
concern, is sure. Every losing battle in His service turns in time to
victory. We remember in Count Agenor de Gasparin's "Uprising of a Great
People," how spell-bound, awe-struck, he appeared to be before that
magnificent ground swell of the loyal nation, rolling on, as a traveling
mountain range, to sweep the rebellion as drift-wood before it. The
eight millions of the freedmen and their children are rising. If, for
the present, there are refluent waves that sadden us it is God who
brings in the tide. "And when I begin," saith the Lord, "I will also
make an end."
* * * * *
REPORT ON SECRETARY BEARD'S PAPER.
BY REV. H.M. TENNEY, D.D., CHAIRMAN
The committee to which was referred the paper of Secretary Beard
respectfully report that the "Missionary View of the Southern Situation"
therein presented impresses us profoundly with the fact that the
sincerest piety is the most exalted patriotism. It commends itself to us
as worthy of the most serious attention of the thoughtful of both races
in the North and in the South. The gravity of the Southern problem, as
set before us, is little less than appalling. The colored race now looks
back over a quarter of a century of freedom and recognized rights. The
traditions and customs and conservative ties of slavery are broken with
its chains. The ideas, aspirations and manly instincts of liberty have
taken hold upon the colored people and are becoming controlling. The
intellectual progress of the many, the political and national prominence
of the few, the acquisition of wealth, and the marvelously
disproportionate increase in their numbers, serve to awaken the colored
race to self-consciousness and a sense of power. It is beginning to
demand its rights and to be impatient of their resistance and
suppression. The Samson of the past, bound, shorn and blinded, stands
to-day with fetters broken, with locks grown long, and with eyes yet
dim, but with the dimness of returning vision, as one who sees men as
trees walking. And whether he shall be carried on to complete
emancipation, intellectual and spiritual, a true manhood, or goaded to
madness, and driven to bow himself against the pillars of our national
and social temple, and pull it down to the common ruin of us all, is the
question of the hour. A race so situated, were there no other factors in
the problem, would be a peril to any people, and would call for the most
helpful effort and self-sacrificing zeal and Christ-like patience.
But the white man in the Southern situation is as serious a factor in
the problem as the black man. In a different way, the incubus of slavery
has rested as heavily upon him as upon his black brother. The illiteracy
is not all on one side. If we put ourselves in the place of our Southern
white brothers, and remember what human nature is, apart from the grace
of God, we may not greatly wonder, in view of the heritage of the past
and the real difficulties and perils of the present, that there is an
intensity of race prejudice, and a bitterness of caste spirit, and an
increasing hostility to the rising colored population which registers
itself in outbreaks of violence and bloodshed, in the defiance of law,
and in crimes against the ballot-box. We may not be greatly surprised
that there should be intelligent men who regard the education of the
colored man as a calamity, and deny his rights, and call for his
disfranchisement. The white man of the South needs emancipation and
Christian elevation as well as the black. We are the debtors of Christ
to both races. Leave these two races to themselves without the gospel of
Christ, and the conflict between them is inevitable, and it can be but
terrific and protracted, and a dark blot upon the Christian name and
civilization. Dr. Beard has well said that the problem can not be solved
by historic precedents. All talk of slavery or peonage for the inferior
race, or migration, or extermination, or amalgamation, is idle and
morally repugnant and politically dangerous.
The problem set for our solution by Almighty God is just this--as stated
in this missionary view of it: How, being free, two races as dissimilar
as are the white and black races, now equal before the law, can live
side by side under the same government and live in prosperity and peace.
This problem must be solved, and it must be solved aright. And we may be
sure that the ultimate solution of blessing for both races does not, and
can not, lie in any retrograde movement toward the old darkness and
bondage, but forward in the direction of the larger light and truer
liberty of Christ. If the colored race, as a race, seems to have reached
a point when "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," its hope and
ours lie not in a return to ignorance and degradation, but in pressing
on to that larger knowledge and truer wisdom, the beginning of which is
the fear of God, and the fullness of which is a hearty recognition and
cordial acceptance and discharge of the obligations and trusts of a
Christian manhood and Christian citizenship. The condition of the
colored race, indeed, is but a necessary stage in its upward and onward
march. It is no other than we have always had reason to expect would be
reached. That the mile-stone of to-day marks so great progress is cause
for profound gratitude. The new features of the situation and the fresh
difficulties are those, and those only, which are incident to progress.
There is but one solution for the Southern problem, and that is the
solution for which this Association has labored from the beginning, and
which this paper urges. Christianity in its highest forms, an
intelligent Christian manhood, is that solution. It is an impressive
thought that it is the mission of this Association, more than all other
institutions and agencies, to develop that Christian sentiment among the
colored people, and indirectly among the whites, which shall create a
_balance of power_ which shall save the races and the nation from that
conflict which without it seems inevitable. This fact is a trumpet call
to us to press the work of the Association in its schools and colleges
and churches with renewed vigor and devotion.
And we would especially emphasize the necessity of preserving the unity
of the educational and religious work of the Association to this end.
Every teacher must be a missionary as truly as every preacher. And this
unity of purpose and effort must be felt. Church and school, as in the
past, must continue to stand together in the minds and labors of the
people that there may be no exaltation of education at the expense of
religion. In the dark days of slavery, it was faith in God that
sustained the Negro, that inspired his songs, and that made him strong
to endure and patient to wait. And it was by the power of God that he
was at last set free. Never did the colored man need that faith in God,
and in an overruling and guiding Providence, more than now, when the
goal of liberty and equality is so nearly attained, and yet strangely
delayed. Nobly do the leaders of the race realize that faith, and seek
to lead their brethren into it.
It belongs to this Association, by all the agencies at its command, to
teach this people to be patient and to wait upon the Lord, to endure
hardship, to leave vengeance with the Lord, and, accepting the
responsibilities of liberty and citizenship, to gird themselves to meet
them in the spirit and in the strength of a grand Christian manhood.
This the history of this people warrants us in expecting from them. To
this manhood, struggle and work we welcome them, and in it we pledge
them our Christian support.
Let this be the temper of those who hold the balance of power between
the races in the South, and in no long time the slumbering conscience of
the Southern white will respond. The noble utterances of the
Southerners, who already demand that the Golden Rule shall be applied to
the race problem, prove that it is already waking to life and power. It
will be felt then that it cannot be safe to sin against God, to despise
even the least of his children; that it must be safe to follow in the
way where he leads, to do his bidding, and to give equal rights to all,
and to treat all men as brethren. And thus the missionary view
prevailing, and the missionary solution accepted, the perils and
conflicts of to-day will disappear as the storm-cloud passes, and the
difficulties of race relations now anticipated will adjust themselves in
God's way, and in God's time--the way of Christian manhood and
brotherhood, of righteousness and of peace.
* * * * *
ADDRESSES ON THE PRECEDING REPORTS.
* * * * *
ADDRESS OF REV. WM. BURNET WRIGHT, D.D.
When that Egyptian King, of whom we all know, was carving those
memorials of his greatness which, even as brought to us by the magazines
of late, have interested us all so much, and when Egypt was the most
superb power in the world, slave women, of whom the mother of Moses was
one, were lamenting by the Nile. But the people then to be pitied were
not the Hebrews, but the Egyptians.
As I think of the future of my country, my anxiety is not for the black
race.