SECRETARY: Rev. W. C. Pond. TREASURER: E. Palache, Esq. * * * * * A GENTLE GROWL. I love to look over the columns of religious intelligence in the _Congregationalist_, the _Advance_, the _Pacific_. I say to myself: “How well the churches are doing! How happy all these ministers must be! How little they have to annoy, to worry, to depress! How much to make them glad and even jubilant!” Yet, a few days pass, and possibly one of these very ministers knocks at my study door, to talk over, confidentially, the pains, the difficulties, the heavy burdens of his work; a root of bitterness which he has tried in vain to remove, now springing up to trouble him; finances going all awry; sad cases calling for discipline,—the duty imperative, and the church, though stung to the quick with a sense of its dishonor, too timid to come up to its task. Of course, such things ought not to go into the papers nor any other but the good and glad things. We can make others sharers of our joys, but we shrink from asking them to bear, with us, our pains. “Well, that is all right,” I say to myself, and so it is. And yet those who sustain a missionary work have a _right_ to see it on _all_ sides. God be thanked that I have had so much to report that was cheery, stimulating, hopeful; so little that was otherwise. I wonder if our friends and helpers—readers of the _Missionary_—think that, like the harvest fields of California, so our Gospel work is bathed in perpetual sunshine? or do they know that here, too, we have our darkened skies, our tempests untimely, our frosts premature? “Well, it won’t hurt them if they don’t see the shady side,” I say to myself again. “Yes, but am I _truthful_ in the matter?” I reply, and so even conscience puts me up to make a gentle growl. There is nothing very bad to growl about; no more probably than I need; far less than I deserve; but there is something, almost always, on which if one allowed himself to brood, he could soon get up steam to scold hard. And I am not thinking just here of the greater trials of our work, as when some riotous outburst of anti-Chinese prejudice sends these people at sunset to their several retreats, and seems, for the time, to knock our schools prostrate; nor of the sore trials from false brethren among our Chinese Christians—starting discords in the little flocks—or by their vile conduct bringing reproach on the Gospel that they have proclaimed. Those things, I am grateful to say, belong to years past; and, besides, we don’t growl at the great trials—it is the comparatively little things that put us in a scolding mood.