The American Missionary, Volume 34, No. 12, December 1880Various
Religion
The American Missionary, Volume 34, No. 12, December 1880
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
8. To pay that debt and to carry on our work, with its
enlargements, its endowments and buildings, we have, in these three
years, received into our treasury _six hundred and twenty-seven
thousand dollars_. If we add the sums received by our affiliated
schools ($283,132), the amount is _nine hundred and ten thousand
dollars_; and if we add to this the _one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars_ received from Mrs. Stone, now rapidly to be expended,
the total will be _one million and sixty thousand dollars_! The
churches seem to have had confidence in us, and to have appreciated
our work. For this, through you, we wish to thank them, and to ask
continued confidence and the means to carry on the enlarged work
that opens before us.
II. The work before us.
When we turn from what we have done to what we have yet to do, we
are overawed at both its vastness and its pressing urgency.
1. Whatever other danger threatens this republic, or calls for
the labors of its Christian people, that arising from the three
colored races is, I do not say the greatest, but the most obvious.
The vast influx of European peoples does indeed, awaken serious
apprehension, for they bring with them infidelity or Romanism; yet
thus far no overt peril has arisen from this source, for they have
so spread themselves among the masses that their influence has
gathered to no focal point. But the Indian has been an irritant
throughout the whole history of our occupancy of the land, and
in all parts of it. Blood has flowed freely in the track of our
wrongs against him, and will do so until we act like Christians
and he becomes one. The Chinamen on our Western coast are few,
and yet how their coming has shaken the nerves of the nation!
What other set of immigrants, so few in number, has excited so
much irritation--not on their part, but among ourselves about
them? But the great disturber--yet the utterly unintentional
disturber--of the peace of this nation, is the negro. For nearly
half a century the storm has raged around him, as around Elijah
in Horeb--the wind of tempestuous discussion in pulpit, press
and Congress; the earthquake, rending asunder trade-interests,
religious denominations, dividing even the nation itself into two
hostile sections; the lurid and awful fire of war, with its blood,
carnage and desolation. Last of all came “the still, small voice,”
and God was in it. But how little has it been heeded. The wind is
scarcely lulled; the earthquake is quiet but the dreadful chasms
remain; the fires are smouldering, but now and then a darting flame
of Ku Klux outrage or a Chisholm murder reveals the pent-up heat
below! Then as to the _anointing_! Elijah anointed the kings and
the prophet--giving thereby the grace to do the Divine behests,
whether of vengeance or mercy. We have _enacted_ the Freedman into
a king where all are sovereigns, and a prophet where all the Lord’s
people are priests, but we have not given him the knowledge or the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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