The American Missionary. Volume 44, No. 06, June, 1890

OUR CHURCH WORK

A letter from Rev. F.R. Sims of the Medway Congregational Church, McIntosh, Ga., reports that seventy persons have been added to that church on confession of faith, within the last four months.

From Knoxville, Tenn.:—Our attendance at preaching services has been large and attentive. On the second Sabbath of March the members and friends made special efforts for collection and raised $30. There has been a happy increase in the Sunday-school and the prayer meetings.

From Dudley, North Carolina;—It gives me much pleasure to write you that the Lord has abundantly blessed us in our work at this point.

For three weeks a revival, with much success, has been going on in my church, the Lord has been with us disturbing the slumber of the sleeping Christians and bringing sinners unto repentance. We have ten converts and ten more seeking the Lord. We are all very much encouraged and are now looking forward for a brighter and more encouraging future.

From Macon, Ga.—At our last communion we baptized and received four into our fellowship on confession of faith. They were all young people who are in school and full of promise. Others are expected to unite with us next month. There have been seventeen additions to the church in the last eleven months. There has been some real progress made by the church in all directions. I find in our church meetings a much more gentle spirit between the members than when I first came here, and I feel that this outward improvement is due to inward spiritual growth. I can see this growth in the prayers and testimonies of the weekly prayer meetings.

REVIVAL AT WILMINGTON, N.C

PROFESSOR GEORGE A. WOODARD

The revival which took place in this church the latter part of the winter was, in some respects, a model one.

At the close of one of the Wednesday evening prayer meetings, our pastor spoke to us with the view of ascertaining if the church were ready for special work; then he appointed another prayer meeting for Friday night. With faith, and resting upon the promises of God, the work was begun the next week. At first the attendance was small; but, as the meetings continued, the interest increased, and it became necessary to move into the large hall of the school.

It was evident throughout that God was in the work and that the Holy Spirit was striving mightily with sinners. A deep, quiet emotion pervaded the meetings, in strong contrast with the revivals held in many of the colored churches of the city, where the excitement becomes intense, and the confusion great. Their meetings are often continued until long after midnight, in a crowded, unventilated room, whereas ours never closed later than ten o'clock.

As a result of our revival, although other revivals were going on amongst the colored people at the same time, upwards of forty were born into the Kingdom, for some of whom, many, many prayers had been offered up; and all was done in answer to prayer. Among these were several cases of interest, two of which I will mention. One is that of an intelligent young man employed by the leading dentist of the city, for whom he does the mechanical work, which previously had to be sent North. Although of excellent character, he was a skeptic, reading the writings of Ingersoll, Paine, and others. For years, our teachers had taken a special interest in him laboring with him and praying for him, that he might come into the light He was induced to attend these meetings, and was finally led to believe that these things are so and to accept of the Saviour. He has gone earnestly to work to bring in other young men, teaches in the Sunday-school and is ready for any Christian work.

The other is that of a brawny brick mason, a great sinner, who, while earning excellent wages, often failed to bring home sufficient to feed and clothe his children; and when remonstrated with by his wife, would answer; "They are your children, you take care of them." All is changed now. He gets up early Sunday mornings, assists in getting the children ready for church, where the family, all neatly dressed, can be seen regularly every Sunday; and in the prayer meeting his voice is usually heard.

As a further result of this revival, the church has been greatly quickened, the members have been brought closer together in brotherly love, and God has given a fresh outpouring of his spirit.

On Easter morning, when a special communion service was held, twenty-nine of the new converts were received into our church, amidst the most touching and impressive services. But the revival has not stopped with the special meetings. After every Sunday evening service, an after-meeting has been held, in which several have been led to give their hearts to God. All of these meetings have been marked by the earnestness with which the church has labored for the salvation of those who were yet without, and more fervent prayers never ascended to the throne of grace.

FACTS ABOUT BALLARD SCHOOL, MACON, GA

The opening of the New Year saw manifestations of the Holy Spirit in our midst, and during the week of prayer there appeared to be a deep interest among the pupils. Our prayers seemed to take a new meaning, and we felt that they were about to be answered.

Nothing but God's Spirit could have laid the burden of souls upon so many hearts at once, or have bidden us speak to different ones, while our movements were almost unknown to one another.

In the meetings that were held in the different rooms, and those conducted in the High School, which were attended by some of the pupils from other grades, a large number expressed a desire to become Christians; and there were about sixty who gave their hearts to Christ. We rejoice greatly over the work of the Spirit, and have the assurance that "there is joy in the presence of the angels of God."

The study of the Bible is an important feature in the school work. One hour each week is set apart for it. A visitor, passing from the lower grades up, on Friday afternoon, would find Bible work going on in every room. The work of the little ones is largely memorizing. The older ones have a systematic course. The outlines of Bible history are first carefully studied, then the more important events and characters in detail. Work in map-drawing is done in connection with all the lessons.

A short time ago, a middle-aged woman applied for admission to our school. She had been teaching for several years, but wanted to prepare herself for the teachers' examination by taking a short course of study. She was permitted to try the sixth grade examination and failed; then the fifth with like results; finally she was placed in the fourth grade, where it was discovered that she did not know the multiplication tables, and evidently had never heard of division. Her knowledge of spelling would not exceed that of an average third grade pupil, and she is called one of the best colored teachers in the county from which she came.

In the Industrial Department nearly two hundred and fifty girls sew from a half hour to an hour every day. Excellent work is being done and they are very much interested, some of them begging for the privilege of sewing at other times than those designated for that purpose. The industrial teacher finds difficulty in keeping the supply of work equal to the demand.

Friends have kindly sent us donations of work, and much more will be acceptable. Sheets, pillow cases, underclothing or patchwork, basted ready for sewing, will be very thankfully received. The work in the sewing classes includes patchwork, the making of dresses, all kinds of other garments, and quilting.—From the Ballard Record.

A DREARY PICTURE OF PLACE AND PEOPLE

BY AN A.M.A. WORKER

The country is low and flat, with here and there a small elevation on which is a house or log cabin. For miles and miles the country is dreary and monotonous. The swamps have a funereal aspect as one looks upon the live-oak and cypress, hung with long Spanish moss swaying to and fro in the gentle breeze.

Back in these pine woods are hundreds who have never seen the railroad, a boat, carriage, or even a mail-bag. Sometimes a few will go to the little obscure station on Saturdays and stand gazing at the train as it goes thundering by, and many comical remarks are made, as: "Dat am de train 'pon which no darkies nor crackers kin ride; dat am all de heben dat dem buckra want and am gwine ter git."

Most of the people own their homes, which are poorly constructed of pine poles with clapboards to cover the cracks, through which the dampness and cold winds make it uncomfortable for the occupants, who are seated before a clay chimney and a great lightwood fire. Very few of the houses have any windows. A lightwood torch furnishes the light by day and by night. Some of them are improving each year, but the most of them are satisfied with a roof, and a few acres under cultivation.

The country people seem to be naturally religious, as they are all church members, are so from childhood, and are great believers in the "sperit," which must be the evil one. They are not denominational in the sense in which enlightened people are. The church which allows the greatest number of privileges, and the minister who will just be preacher and make the most noise and have the greatest number of "big meetings," are the most popular. They have a burial service, and several months or a year after, they have a funeral service, which is always a big time.

Cæsar is considered the best preacher that has ever been in –. He comes once a month, and cannot read a chapter; "nor need you expect me to get the one-thousandth part of the ingrejience out of this text," is his introduction to every sermon, but he can get up steam enough to be heard half a mile. One of the preachers wanting to be known as a licentiate, said in meeting: "I want you to know that I am a licentious preacher,"—which is the truth.

Our work has done an amount of good, even among those outside, and our schools and the two churches have done more good in the country than all other work combined. The recent fanaticism in the county did not get one believer from our church.

REPORT FROM MOUNTAIN SCHOOLS

Our year's work is rapidly drawing to an end. The older scholars are doing well and are remaining with us through the year. They certainly are gaining in this direction. They become very restless as soon as it is "put in crap time." They sigh for the fields and "shovel plow," and often look from the school-room windows with a longing for the log cabin and the ground surrounding it. In many cases we have to be very persuasive to have them remain, yet they seem thankful for the advice and remain. The older scholars seem to manifest an earnest ambition to obtain situations through the summer, so that they may procure clothing and help pay their tuition. We try as far as possible to obtain situations for our girls. The better class of the people will come to us for help, feeling that our girls have been educated in the home and kitchen.

In our temperance meeting last Friday, I asked the question, "What would you do if you were forced to take whiskey?" A little girl rose and said, "My father asked me to take some and said 'you must.' I said, 'I can't. God would not be pleased.' He said, 'Well, I 'lows how you're 'bout right." What a happy girl she was. She knows if she will keep on refusing, he will give up strong drink. Our greatest hope is in the children.

A poor woman had some articles of clothing to take home with her. I offered to wrap her parcel in newspaper. She said, "If you don't care, I would like to have that ar paper." She never has a piece except what is given her by some kind person. She utterly refused to have the parcel wrapped. The people use the papers to keep the cold out. I have seen pieces of paper four inches square and parts of letters pasted on the boards. We save all the papers we receive, and have assisted in making many poor homes comfortable.

There is a good Sunday-school in a neighboring town. The people listen very attentively, and seem to be thankful for the Sunday-school and church services. The average attendance for the last five Sundays has been forty-two. The thought of leaving this school during the summer is a cross. There are fathers and mothers who are present every Sabbath. The children show the need of a good school.

FROM MISS M.A. BYE

Our Christian Endeavor Society interests me very much, as I have given more time and thought to that than to anything else outside of school work. It has increased in numbers, and the members have for the most part gained a great deal in interest and courage, and this term quite a number of associate members have become Christians. We are working now to send a delegate to the St. Louis Convention, and I anticipate great pleasure in watching the effect upon our delegate of the enthusiasm of the Convention and the sight of the city, and think it will be worth the year's work to be with him, for we hope to send one of the boarding boys.

THE KING'S DAUGHTERS SOCIETY

About a year ago, ten or fifteen girls might have been seen sitting in their teacher's room, at Tougaloo University, while she spoke to them of forming a society. The members of this society, she said, were to do all the good they could in every way they could.

Now, of course, we want a name for our society. If we are going to do all the good we can, we are worthy to be called followers of Christ, and as he is a King, we call ourselves "King's Daughters." When our society began, we had but eight or ten members, but at almost every meeting there was some one who wanted to join. The meetings were carried on every Sunday evening, and some one of the members was appointed to lead the next meeting. During the week we try in every way to do something definite to please our King; to go to no place in which we would be ashamed to have our King see us, and to keep no company with which we would be ashamed to have him see us. Our society continued to grow and prosper, and finally the young men concluded to organize a King's Sons Society. During the summer the two societies held joint meetings. New members were continually joining. As the meetings were new to us when we first began, they were not as interesting as they grew to be at a later date; but generally the time was all occupied. Some one would read a portion of Scripture and offer prayer, after which a story would be read or told by one of the members, who had prepared it during the week. Then we would tell how we had kept our pledge, or in what way we had been helped by being King's Daughters. Sometimes, when we had broken our pledge, we would leave off our badge for a week.

The first Sunday in every month we have what we call our consecration meeting. The President calls the roll and each one answers by giving a verse of Scripture, or her experience as a King's Daughter. The third Sunday in every month we elect the officers who are to serve during the next month. These consist of President, Vice-President, Secretary, a sick committee, whose business it is to visit and help any who are sick, and a committee on invitation, whose business it is to find out who would like to join our society. They report the names at the next meeting. Sometimes we have a question-box into which we put questions regarding the society. These are written on small slips of paper and read by one of the members. If they are directed to a particular one, that person answers them; but if not, any one in the Society answers them.

During the school year of 1888, we made a box of clothing to send to the Indian mission school in Dakota. We would meet every Saturday evening and sew until we had made enough to fill our box. Whenever one of us finished a piece we would write our name and pin it on. One of our girls wanted to sew a little on every article, so as to have her name on all of them. Well, when we had finished our box of presents, we each wrote a letter and put into it. We intended to make this a Christmas present, but severe snow-storms prevented it from reaching its destination in time. They received it about a month after Christmas, and the things were divided among the Indian girls. Some of them wrote to us, thanking us for the presents which they had received. After our society grew to about twenty or thirty, we were divided into tens. Each ten had a name given it, such as the Truthful Ten, the Judge Not Ten, the Do Without Ten and the Polite Ten. Most of us find it hardest to be Judge Not Tens and Truthful Tens.—From the Tougaloo Quarterly.

THE INDIANS

OUR S'KOKOMISH MISSION

BY DISTRICT SECRETARY J.E. ROY

The S'kokomish Reservation is at the extreme southwestern corner of the Puget Sound, where the S'kokomish River empties in, and is three miles square, with five thousand acres, embracing rich bottom land and mountain timber land, the river and the sound furnishing the best means of transportation to the market. On the place I measured the stumps of red cedar that were eight, ten and twelve feet in diameter. The waters at hand are of the best for fishing. As we—Mrs. Roy was with me—were going up from the river where we had been set across after a ten-mile mountain drive from Shelton, we saw a Mr. Lo lugging a three-foot salmon into the missionary home; and at Olympia, the capital, and another point on the sound, the fishmonger told us they did not sell such fish by the pound, but by the piece, twenty-five cents each. When, in 1855, this reservation was set apart by the treaty, it was for the three bands of this tribe and for the Clallams up at the entrance of the Sound, who, because of variance with one of the other bands, never left their ancestral habitation to go to the selected spot. The people belonging to the Reservation now number about six hundred and twenty.

The handling of the Indians here was one of the first fruits of President Grant's Peace Policy, by which the agencies were assigned to the several missionary societies, which were to nominate their respective agents. This was one of those which were assigned to the American Missionary Association. In 1871 the Association nominated to this Agency Edwin Eells, Esq., the eldest son of Rev. Gushing Eells, D.D., who was one of the mission band that crossed the Rocky Mountains in 1838, under commission of the American Board, to be associated with Dr. Marcus Whitman's series of Indian Missions. Here is an illustration of the wisdom of that policy, which has secured a highly successful management in all the secular, educational and religious affairs of the Agency, and one that has been continued on through the changes of governmental administration, and also one that has resulted in repeated promotions, until now Agent Eells has charge of five of the seven distinct Reservations in the State of Washington. His present headquarters are at the Puyallup Agency, near Tacoma, where he has just completed an eight thousand dollar building to displace an old one, for the Government Boarding School. In all these five reservations, lands have been secured in severalty to the Indians, and largely through his persistent devotion to their welfare. For two or three years his father had care of the S'kokomish Mission under the American Missionary Association, and in 1874, his brother, Rev. Myron Eells, was appointed to the same work, in which he still abides. Besides the preaching, the care of the Sunday-school and the prayer meetings and the pastoral work, in which he gets around among his people as often as once in a month, he has also the charge of the Indian Church among the Clallams, near New Dunginess, the brethren of that station, in the pastor's absence, maintaining stated worship. The people at S'kokomish have gotten beyond Government payments; they live on their own allotted lands, in cabins or frame houses, wearing citizens' dress, and doing business as white men do it. One of Pastor Eells's first Sundays at the mission was noted for the celebration of Christian marriage on the part of seven or eight couples who had been living together under their heathen way of taking up. So they have been shuffling off their polygamy. While we were there, a man of middle life came to the pastor's house with his first wife, to be married to her after the Christian form, having made a satisfactory pecuniary arrangement with the second, who was a sister of the first. In this case there were no children to complicate settlement. After I had addressed the church upon their duty of doing more for the support of their pastor, even as I had betimes had to do before in white home missionary churches, the several responses were as decorous and assuring as could be desired.

As another advantage of this Grant plan, the Government School and the Mission are found to be in entire harmony, the principal, Mr. Foster, and his assistants and the industrial teacher all being Christians and caring for the moral advancement of their pupils. Nor does the missionary administration come in any way to overlie the governmental. From the herd of cows kept for the service of the boarding school, neither is one set aside for the pastor's family, nor is he allowed to buy their milk. He gets his supply from outside. Nor does the preacher use from Uncle Sam's wood pile. He buys from the Indians.

Some may wonder how a man in such a field can keep from drying up. Come with me into this missionary study. The first thing that strikes you is a growth of English ivy, from its root in the earth outside creeping through a crack in the siding and climbing up one corner and then around the upper corners of the four sides of the room. That evergreen wreath is a symbol of the fresh intellectual life in that study, which has all the air and fix of a workshop. On the shelves, besides the ordinary outfit, there is an extensive geological collection, which in its classification and nomenclature shows scientific investigation. Then there is a fine cabinet of Indian relics and curios, appropriate to the calling of the incumbent: and there is a supply of Indian literature, historic and scientific, out of which this student is transmuting the essential elements of the Indian problem of the Pacific Northwest. And so it is a small library of his own that has thus been elaborated. The first is a "History of Indian Missions on the Pacific Coast," published by the American Sunday-school Union; and the second is "Ten Years at S'kokomish,"—1874-1884—published by our own Congregational Sunday-school and Publishing Society. These books would make an enrichment of any Sunday-school library, giving the very essence of romance and of heroism along with Christian instruction. The others are monographs, among them the following:

"Marcus Whitman, M.D.: Proofs of his Work in Saving Oregon to the United States, and in promoting the immigration of 1843;" "Justice to the Indian;" "Indian Traditions as to Religion;" "Hand of God in the History of the Pacific Coast;" "Papers on the Anthropology of the Indians of Washington," as published in the Smithsonian Report of 1886-7. Another such monograph he now has ready for the press—"God's Hand in the Missions to the Indians beyond the Rocky Mountains," a paper read at the recent fiftieth anniversary of the organizing of Dr. Whitman's church. And beyond all this literary work is the occasional supply of destitute white congregations round about, and service as a Trustee of the Pacific University in Oregon, and of the Whitman College, at Walla Walla, Washington. Surely in literary work, to the names of Jonathan Edwards among his Stockbridge Indians, and John Eliot among his Naticks, and S.R. Riggs among the Dakotas, and not a few others, maybe added this of Myron Eells among the S'kokomish.

THE CHINESE

JOTTINGS

BY REV. W.C. POND, D.D

If I were to attempt to place before the readers of the MISSIONARY, in such setting as would be needed for a comprehension of them, all the interesting minor facts and scenes that pass under my observation in our work, there would be no room on its pages for anything else. Let me give a few examples of these.

A young Chinaman is being examined with reference to baptism, and is asked why he decided to turn from the worship of idols. "God is true" is the reply, a very simple reason,—a trite one possibly; but there was something in the tone and emphasis of it which thrilled me. I saw the emptyness of heathen worship at a point from which I had never looked at it before. A God that is true, that can be absolutely trusted! Where will you find one in any heathen Pantheon? Conceive now a thoughtful, honest man passing from the timorous worship of such gods to the rest and comfort and courage which come from knowing and trusting Him who is true, and you will begin to realize what that simple answer meant.