The American Missionary — Volume 32, No. 02, February, 1878Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 32, No. 02, February, 1878
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
We cited in the MISSIONARY for January a number of
large gifts from wealthy men and women, to relieve from debt the
Missionary Boards of various churches, as worthy examples to some
of the men of liberal heart and means who are in especial sympathy
with our work for the lowly. We still have hope that such, alone or
in combination, will do great things for us, and make us glad, in
freeing us from accumulated but already diminishing indebtedness.
Meanwhile, to enable us to carry on our constantly increasing work,
it may not be needless to address this word to those who cannot
give large sums from a large store of good, but who, out of their
moderate incomes and limited means, have been in the habit of
sending us smaller amounts.
Dear friends, after all, it is on you that we depend. If you will
look through our list of receipts from month to month, you will
see how large a proportion of it all comes to us in little sums—a
few dollars here and a few dollars there. You must not fail us,
then. We cannot afford to give up the large contributors, perhaps;
still less the small ones. Sometimes, when it has gone abroad that
such an one has given his five, ten or twenty thousand dollars,
the givers of five, ten or twenty dimes are checked for a while in
the flowing of their generosity. Because there was a heavy rain
yesterday, the dews will not form to-night. The suggestion of
plenteous supplies goes abroad because of one large receipt, and
the small sums seem so very small to the givers as they compare
them with the large ones.
But, after all, good friends, a deluge of beneficence only comes
once in a great while. Our bow of promise of unfailing resources
is formed upon the drops of your steady giving. Forty days and
forty nights the Deluge lasted; but, for forty years, each morning,
“when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the
wilderness there lay a small, round thing...on the ground”—it was
the daily bread of Israel. So your gifts—if they be only “small,
round things,” the dimes and quarters, the ancestral dollars—are
the gifts to which we look for the maintenance of the great host
which we are trying to lead from the bondage of ignorance and sin
to the liberty of intelligence and Christ.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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