In 1878 Miss Moore started on a journey of exploration. In Atlanta Dr.
Robert at Atlanta Baptist Seminary (now Morehouse College) gave her
cheer; so did President Ware at Atlanta University. At Benedict in
Columbia she saw Dr. Goodspeed, President Tupper at Shaw in Raleigh,
and Dr. Corey in Richmond. In May she appeared at the Baptist
anniversaries, with fifteen years of missionary achievement already
behind her.
But each year brought its own sorrows and disappointments. She wanted
her Society to establish a training school for women; but the
objection was raised to this on the score that such an institution
would overlap the educational work of the American Baptist Home
Mission Society. Down in Louisiana of course it was not without danger
that a white woman attended a Negro Baptist Association in 1877; and
there were always sneers and jeers. At length, however, a training
school for mothers was opened in Baton Rouge. All went well for two
years; and then a notice with skull and crossbones was placed on the
gate. The woman who had worked through the cholera still stood firm;
but the students had gone. Sick at heart and worn out with waiting,
she left Baton Rouge and the state in which so many of her best years
had been spent.
Bible Band work was started in 1884, and _Hope_ in 1885. Just how live
the idea is to-day may be seen from the recent experience of one of
the representative colleges for young men. With a crowded Sunday
schedule, and with all the distraction of concerts, rhetoricals, and
athletics, with Y.M.C.A. meetings and required chapel services, with
church and Sunday School, thirty men voluntarily meet each week after
the required Sunday evening service for the study of the lessons in
_Hope_. This little paper, beginning with a circulation of five
hundred, has now reached a monthly issue of more than eighteen
thousand copies; and daily it brings its lesson of cheer to thousands
of mothers and children in the South. In connection with it all has
developed the Fireside School, than which few agencies have been more
potent for the salvation and uplift of the humble Negro home.
What wisdom has been gathered from the passing of fourscore years! On
almost every page of her tracts, her letters, her account of her life,
one finds quotations that for proverbial pith may be equaled only by
the words of Franklin or Lincoln or Booker Washington:--
The love of God gave me courage for myself and the rest of
mankind; therefore I concluded to invest in human souls. They
surely are worth more than anything else in the world.
Beloved friends, be hopeful, be courageous. God cannot use
discouraged people.
I am very thankful to-day that there has always been some one
weaker than myself along some line, some one that I could really
help and comfort.
The good news spread, not by telling what we were going to do,
but by praising God for what had been done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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