The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
There is a transition time with this whole section. New conditions are
being put upon them. They feel the outside movement of the world. A
friend of mine is now in the South who has brought up a large quantity
of lumber in a certain district, and when he finds the right man he will
plant a school there. Coal and iron are being extensively worked. My
brother here (the Rev. S.E. Lathrop) tells me that near Cumberland Gap
four hundred houses have gone up within a very brief time, and over two
thousand workmen are pushing into a section not before opened. It will
not come in an hour or in a day; but by and by, when these men face the
new life of our times, when they have once felt its pressure, and the
tremendous disparity between their manner of living and the high kind of
life of Northern homes and Northern hearthstones, they will move, and a
change will come over the spirit of their dreams. Even now, the native
preachers, who have been so hostile to our work, are coming to these,
our pastors, and asking for light on the Bible. Furthermore, our pupils
are going out and organizing county institutes, and the work is going on
everywhere.
There is a dark side to it, but I praise God there is a bright side. It
is like a dam. When the dam begins to go, it will go all at once. Youth
is on our side. In thirty years we shall not have the same problem we
have now--no, not in twenty years. Wealth is coming in. A large tract of
eleven thousand acres, containing some of the finest coal that the world
knows, is being developed. This means a great influx of population, and
this wealth is to be developed, and new material power is coming as an
auxiliary to our spiritual power. This wealth is being converted. A man
who five years ago was a godless man, and who owns to-day one-seventh of
these eleven thousand acres of coal lands, was converted. He was made a
Sunday-school Superintendent, but he could not say the Lord's Prayer;
yet he was determined that the Lord's Prayer should be repeated in that
school, and he hired a large number of small boys and gave them a dime
apiece and told them to learn the Lord's Prayer that week. They did so;
and when Sunday came, with a chorus to back him, he came on as a solo
performer.
A dear girl of my own acquaintance dressed, in one morning, fifteen or
sixteen women and children. They came around her and felt her all over,
and wondered at the complexity of her garments. I speak of this thing
because it indicates that that old apathy is breaking up, and they are
coming to look at new things and feel a new interest in the life outside
of themselves. And as this same dear girl taught from thirty to fifty of
these women, they listened eagerly, and the tears rolled down their
cheeks, and they said to her, "Oh, come and tell us more about Jesus,
for we want to be different kind of women, different kind of mothers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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