But history will have a brighter page than even that with which to adorn their annals, when she comes to recount the devotion and sacrifices of the hundreds who have been sent forth under their auspices, as uplifters of the prostrate host in the South, to whom, left as they were, paralyzed by slavery, free movement and real progress were intrinsically impossible without the aid of such agencies as the American Missionary Association. As time rolls on, the romance which clings to those heroes who fought to unfetter the body of the slave, will fade beside the halo which will surround these who have labored to liberate his mind. (_Methodist Quarterly Review._) * * * * * REV. CHARLES B. VENNING. One of our most earnest and devoted missionaries at the Jamaica Mission, after severe and protracted suffering, has entered into his rest. Mr. Venning went about fifty years ago, when Negro-slavery was at its height, to work on a Jamaica sugar estate. He was then an ardent young Englishman, and easily led into dissipation and vice. But the Lord arrested him, and the course of his whole life was changed. He entered the Mico Institute, a Training College for Schoolmasters, and was a successful teacher. He then became interested in the efforts of the American Missionary Association, and desired to devote himself entirely to school work and religious teaching among the Negroes in the country districts of the Island. His name stands on the list of missionaries in our first Annual Report, and he has labored faithfully every year since—while his health would permit by active efforts, and when on a bed of suffering by example and counsel. We quote the following from the letter of a fellow missionary: “I never saw a man who so entirely devoted himself to the work as he did. He had the true missionary spirit. He not only preached the Gospel in his own church, but from house to house and in the most out-of-the-way places; indeed everywhere where men would give a listening ear. No other missionary in the Island did so much for the education of his people as Bro. Venning, and outside of the towns there could be found no people so intelligent as his. He watched over his flock with almost a painful interest—encouraged and reproved. He gathered the poor that were otherwise uncared for about his own door, gave them shelter, fed them from his own table, and clothed them from his own wardrobe.”