The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 10, October, 1881Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 10, October, 1881
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
But this sowing has in some respects given way to reaping, even in
the lifetime of those who watered the ground with their tears. Now at
Berea is a college in some respects unlike any other in the land. Here,
three hundred in all, are seen white and colored students in about
equal numbers. Here is a sort of Mecca for the colored people of the
State, and a door of hope for many in the mountain region, who, though
white, have had but few religious and educational privileges. Here is a
college ably manned, with the confidence of the North, and growing in
the regard of the South, sending forth its streams of blessing in every
direction. If the tears of sorrow were many, the tears of joy and
thanksgiving to God have been much more abundant.
* * * * *
TENNESSEE.
MISS ALICE E. CARTER, NASHVILLE.
Among the men of Tennessee, the great and crying need seems to be the
very practical knowledge of some trade; the range of their individual
usefulness is so often limited to gardening, grooming, rock-beating and
shoveling.
The talent for gardening is a dormant one in winter; rock-beating
cannot be followed in the coldest weather, and it is easy to see that
the other ranks may at times be filled to overflowing, and those not
fortunate enough to get in, are out of employment.
What a noble enterprise for someone to found an industrial school for
colored boys, which shall draw in the bright-eyed ragged boys, now
lounging on the street corners or quarreling in the alleys, learning
nothing except evil, daily!
To help a few such boys, though temporarily, I hold in my room,
one evening in the week, a little reception. Good stories, earnest
conversation, plenty of books and papers to look over while here, are
the means put forth to help those who come. When they go away they
carry with them text-cards and old numbers of _St. Nicholas_ from my
very primitive “circulating library.”
My cottage Sunday-school is a very interesting undertaking. Compassion
for the pitiful little street waifs, too small to find their way to
the remote city Sunday-schools, led me to try to make a bright spot in
their day. It was a simple thing to gain permission of a woman, with
four tiny girls, to hold Sunday-school in her cottage, and the simplest
matter to fill the small room with children. To walk through the alley
and say “Come” to any ragged, deformed or dirty little child was all
that was necessary. How well our Lord understood the willingness of the
people of the “highways and hedges!”
Each Sunday the little ones come with ludicrously solemn faces and
decorous manners; and sitting on the beds, or a board between two
chairs, and on the hearth before the fire-place, are as happy as can be.
Not one can read; not one knew the name of Jesus, except one boy whose
father’s oaths made him know it; yet all know and love the story now.
The teaching is necessarily by dictation, and my great wonder is that
the little minds remember so much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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