The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 09, September, 1889

Various

The American Missionary – Volume 43, No. 09, September, 1889

American Missionary Association

PRESIDENT, Rev. Wm. M. Taylor, D.D., LL.D., N.Y.

Vice-Presidents.

Rev. A.J.F. Behrends, D.D., N.Y.

Rev. Alex. McKenzie, D.D., Mass.

Rev. F.A. Noble, D.D., Ill.

Rev. D.O. Mears, D.D., Mass.

Rev. Henry Hopkins, D.D., Mo.

Corresponding Secretaries.

Rev. M.E. Strieby, D.D., 56 Reads Street, N.Y.

Rev. A.F. Beard, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.

Recording Secretary.

Rev. M.E. Strieby, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.

Treasurer.

H.W. Hubbard, Esq., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.

Auditors.

Peter McCartee.

Chas. P. Peirce.

Executive Committee.

John H. Washburn, Chairman.

Addison P. Foster, Secretary.

For Three Years.

J.E. Rankin,

Wm. H. Ward,

J.W. Cooper,

John H. Washburn,

Edmund L. Champlin.

For Two Years.

Lyman Abbott,

Chas. A. Hull,

Clinton B. Fisk,

Addison P. Foster,

Albert J. Lyman.

For One Year.

S.B. Halliday,

Samuel Holmes,

Samuel S. Marples,

Charles L. Mead,

Elbert B. Monroe.

District Secretaries.

Rev. C.J. Ryder, 21 Cong'l House, Boston.

Rev. J.E. Roy, D.D., 151 Washington Street, Chicago.

Rev. Rev. C.W. Hiatt, 64 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio.

Financial Secretary for Indian Missions.

Rev. Chas. W. Shelton.

Field Superintendents.

Rev. Frank E. Jenkins,

Prof. Edward S. Hall.

Secretary Of Woman's Bureau.

Miss D.E. Emerson, 56 Reade St. N.Y.

COMMUNICATIONS

Relating to the work of the Association may be addressed to the Corresponding Secretaries; letters for "THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY," to the Editor, at the New York Office; letters relating to the finances, to the Treasurer.

DONATIONS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

In drafts, checks, registered letters, or post-office orders, may be sent to H.W. Hubbard, Treasurer, 56 Reade Street, New York, or, when more convenient, to either of the Branch Offices, 21 Congregational House, Boston, Mass., or 151 Washington Street, Chicago, Ill. A payment of thirty dollars at one time constitutes a Life Member.

NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS.—The date on the "address label," indicates the time to which the subscription is paid. Changes are made in date on label to the 10th of each month. If payment of subscription be made afterward, the change on the label will appear a month later. Please send early notice of change in post-office address, giving the former address and the new address, in order that our periodicals and occasional papers may be correctly mailed.

FORM OF A BEQUEST

"I bequeath to my executor (or executors) the sum of – dollars, in trust, to pay the same in – days after my decease to the person who, when the same is payable, shall act as Treasurer of the 'American Missionary Association,' of New York City, to be applied, under the direction of the Executive Committee of the Association, to its charitable uses and purposes." The Will should be attested by three witnesses.

EDITORIAL

ANNUAL MEETING

The next annual meeting of the American Missionary Association will be held at Chicago, Ill., in the New England Church, commencing at three o'clock Tuesday afternoon, October 29. Rev. R.R. Meredith, D.D., of Brooklyn, N.Y., will preach the sermon. On the last page of the cover will be found directions as to membership and other items of interest. Fuller details regarding the reception of delegates and their entertainment, together with rates at hotels, and railroad and steamboat reductions, will be given in the religious press and in the next number of the MISSIONARY.

A meeting of exceptional interest is expected, and we trust our friends will be present in large force.

THE TREASURY

It will encourage the contributors to the great work entrusted to us, to know that the friends of the A.M.A. are enabling us to make a very hopeful report up to this date.

If those who have not shared in the work of the Association as yet, this year, will make a corresponding effort with those who have done so, we shall have reason to hope that we can go to our Annual Meeting in Chicago, owing no man anything but love and good will.

But those who have waited are many, and we are waiting and depending on these. Those who have not taken their contributions have the power to convert our hopes into realities.

We appeal, therefore, to the pastors whose collections for this fiscal year have not been taken to take their collections and forward them to our treasury before the close of September.

AS TO "METHODS"

We have been thinking that the methods of Christ were divine as well as his truth, and that when the Christian world will use Christ's methods in the propagation of truth there will be a great advance upon some features of the present. Dr. Parkhurst has some very suggestive sentences in this line of thought in a sermon on "The Regenerative Force of the Gospel." His words are: "Christ never patches. The Gospel is not here to mend people. Regeneration is not a scheme of moral tinkering and ethical cobbling. In the Gospel, we move into a new world and under a new scheme. The Gospel does not classify with other schemes of amelioration."

This accords with our thought of the methods of Christ. The way to meet that which is wrong, is to meet it as a wrong. We shall not do well to ameliorate it. If we may not expect those who have been "raised" amid prejudices and ignorance to be leaders for the absolute rectitude of things, those who have not lived where this excuse is available should be the leaders. If some do not lead, none will follow. Where principles were at stake, Christ never gave way to prejudices. He never yielded to that which was in itself wrong. If those to whom he ministered could not come up to his standard, then he waited, but he never compromised. That which is right should not yield to that which is wrong.

It may take a right hand. It may take an eye. But "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off," and "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out." He would not "cut it off" by amputating the finger and gradually disjointing it up to the mark; and plucking out the offending eye is not to bandage it so that it temporarily does not see the evil to which it is attracted. No, the Gospel is not a system of repairs. It is not here to temporize, but to make all things new, and it strikes at the heart of evil and not at its surface.

It was not Christ's method to ignore an evil which confronted him. He did not evade or get around issues. He met them. He answered them. He was an "incarnate conscience" in the land. He knew what was in man. His followers cannot fail when they walk closely with him in the path which he has made plain.

FIVE QUESTIONS

1.—If the Georgia Association had been without any colored members in it, would the Georgia Conference ever have been formed?

2.—If the Georgia Association had been without any colored members, would the Georgia Conference have declined to unite with it, on some one of the terms submitted by the Georgia Association?

3.—If the Georgia Association had been without any colored members, would this curious and ingenious scheme of "co-ordinate and equal bodies," "to elect delegates" to visit each other now and then ever have been concocted?

4.—Is it worth while to "darken counsel with words" as to methods, when it is evident that the purpose is, not to form any union which would be other than humiliating to a colored man, and contrary to the heretofore held principles of the Congregational Churches?

5.—Why these arguments to show "how not to do it," when to do it would be so simple and so evidently Christian?

N.Y. Independent.

A MID-SUMMER LEAF OF THE A.M.A. CATECHISM

Q. When are Home Missions properly so called?

A. When they are ordained to save the unevangelized people of the land in which they dwell.

Q. When are missions properly called Foreign Missions?

A. When they are missions to foreigners in a foreign country.

Q. Are missions among the Indians in this country, Foreign Missions?

A. They are not, though the Indians have been treated as foreigners, which has been the source of great wrongs and many sorrows.

Q. Are missions to the Chinese in this country, Foreign Missions?

A. They are not, though the Chinese are refused the privileges accorded other foreigners. The missions of the A.M.A. on the Pacific Coast are most fruitful and hopeful, and, since these foreigners return to China, there is an interblending of Home and Foreign Missions here, that is full of promise.

Q. Are the missions of the A.M.A. in the South, Foreign Missions?

A. They are not, though they have been successful in exciting interest for Africa among the students of their schools. Some of these are now foreign missionaries; others are preparing to go; but the missions of the A.M.A. in the broadest sense are Home Missions, for they minister to white and black as to citizens of a common country, who alike need the Gospel. The A.M.A. is planting white churches (so called) every year, and has added several this year, though none of them would refuse membership to a man because he is black, and is planting colored churches (so called), none of which should be excluded from State Associations merely because of color.

Q. Should the missions of the A.M.A. be called Foreign Missions because its schools and churches cannot win the co-operation of the Christians among whom they live?

A. They did not at once win the co-operation of Christians among whom they went, but confidence has been growing with the years until the cases are exceptional where they do not have the co-operation of enlightened and broad-minded Christians. In most cases, the schools and churches of the A.M.A. have won both confidence and gratitude throughout the South. Southern men are among the trustees of its institutions, and everywhere its Field Superintendents and Secretaries are greeted with cordiality. A prominent editor of a Southern political paper—white and democratic—testifies this month: "Yours is the most practical missionary work ever undertaken by a Christian body, and should have the hearty and unstinted support of all Christians." The cases are few where good will does not exist between its teachers and ministers and the white people among whom they live.

Q. Does not social ostracism show that the white teacher is engaged in a Foreign Mission?

A. Social ostracism is gradually giving way among the more intelligent Christian people. Nothing, however, dies so hard as prejudice, and nothing is so cruel; but missions do not cease to be Home Missions, because they may be where there is sinful prejudice and dense ignorance.

Q. What would be Foreign Missions in the South?

A. Missions in the South which would treat an entire race as foreigners and aliens because in God's wisdom he has seen fit to make them black, would be foreign to the spirit of the Gospel: "For He is our peace who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us. Through Him, we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the general household of God, and built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord." Missions in the South which exclude pastors and delegates from Associations and Conferences, would be foreign to the Gospel. Missions in the South founded upon an aristocracy of skin, would be foreign to the spirit of the Gospel. Missions which would preach against caste in India, and perpetuate it in America, would be foreign to the methods of Christ, and to Christian methods in foreign lands.

Q. Does the A.M.A. believe in mixed churches of white and black people?

A. The A.M.A. does not regard it as at all probable that such churches will exist to any great extent. Race tastes and race affiliations will make for churches essentially white and essentially black. "But to close the door on any Christian is in so far to make it an unchristian church. To go into the South and establish white churches from which, whether by a formal law or by an unwritten but self-forcing edict, men are excluded because God made them black, is to deny one of the fundamental tenets of Christ. There is no need to attempt to corral all men of all races in one enclosure, but for any church, especially a church of the Puritans, to enter upon a missionary work in the South and initiate it by refusing to fellowship a black man because he is black, is to apostatize from the faith in order to get a chance to preach the faith." The doors of every Christian church ought to stand wide open to men of every race and color, and in all representative bodies these churches should be one.

Q. Is this the position of the Roman Catholic Church in its Southern work?

A. It is: The Roman Catholic Church would not for a moment recognize any color-line in its assemblies or priesthood.

Q. Does the A.M.A. believe in the social equality of the races?

A. The A.M.A. has never seen any social equality anywhere, and believes and teaches nothing about it. It believes in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

Q. Is the A.M.A. agitating the color-line question?

A. It is not. It always has proclaimed its principles for the interests of the oppressed, and always has championed the cause of God's poor, pleading for the right because it is right.

Q. Why is the A.M.A. in the South doing its work in schools and churches among white and black?

A. Because the Lord has said; "Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."

THE CARS, THE CHURCH, THE COURTS

Our esteemed brother, Rev. G.C. Rowe, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church, Charleston, S.C., and his associates, on their return from the meeting of the Joint Committee on the union of the Georgia Association and the Georgia Conference, were forcibly transferred to an inferior car on the Georgia Railroad. They were not driven from the train, they were allowed to ride, and the car in which they rode was connected with the cars containing the white passengers. They were simply separated from the others and that only because they were colored persons.

The reception these honored ministers of Christ met in the Joint Committee was very much of the same sort. The white brethren did not deny them their place in the church—nay, the two bodies, white and colored, were to be connected together, but these colored brethren were to be kept separate and that only because they were colored persons.

An appeal will be made to the courts, but the interesting question is: which will be first to recognize the equal manhood of the colored man— the cars, the courts or the church? Would it not be a shame to the church and a dishonor to the Christian name if the church should be the last?

Speaking of the race problem, in his baccalaureate sermon at Vanderbilt University, recently, Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, of the Methodist Church, South, startled his hearers by the following vigorous declaration: "It is a travesty on religion, this disposition to canonize missionaries who go to the dark continent, while we have nothing but social ostracism for the white teacher who is doing a work no less noble at home. The solution to the race problem rests with the white people who live among the blacks, and who are willing to become their teachers in a missionary spirit."

THE WORK OF THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION AND FOREIGN MISSIONS

BY REV. FRANK B. JENKINS

The American Missionary Association has done both home and foreign missionary work. There is nothing in its constitution or traditions to prevent its doing the same again.

Providence, however, seems to indicate clearly that its work at present be within the United States. While in this sense it does home missionary work, the peculiar conditions of the people among whom it mostly labors require largely the methods of foreign missions. It must supply the school, as well as the church; industrial training as well as that which is intellectual and moral. It must create a native ministry and develop native workers of all kinds. In fact, it would be hard to find on foreign mission fields a single kind of activity which is not duplicated in the fields of the American Missionary Association.

Home missions aid foreign missions by creating the conditions of more income and more missionaries for foreign fields. The work of this Association has done this already to some extent; without doubt it is to do it to a far greater extent in the future.

In taking people from the ignorance and poverty of slavery and savagery, it could not be expected to form them at once into large givers or efficient workers for foreign fields; but who can say, after the marvels of the past twenty-four years, what the future shall show, when the coming millions shall arise and, out of gratitude for what they have received, give of their increasing means and send forth their sons and daughters to tell the glad story of freedom, truth and love.

It has been a favorite idea of many that the Negroes of America should evangelize Africa. Perhaps some have been disappointed that so few of them have gone to Africa as missionaries; but such, I am sure, have failed fully to consider the facts. A people who had received only the degrading tuition of slavery could not produce at once many who should have the reliable qualities and the intellectual and moral training needed for the responsible and, to a large extent, the unsuperintended work of a foreign missionary. Then, every capable preacher, teacher and leader has been needed in a hundred places at home. They could scarcely be justified in leaving their own brothers and sisters in heathenism and without the truth within their reach, to go to the heathen abroad.

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