Various - The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 11, November, 1889

The "King's Daughters" are also a useful agency in the field work of our Association. A little Indian girl writes interestingly of the "King's Daughters" of whom she is one.

Just as we are going to press, (October 18th), we are startled by the telegraphic announcement of the sudden death from typhoid fever of Prof. Edward S. Hall, one of our Field Superintendents. Mr. Hall had been one year in the service of the Association, and had already shown himself to be a man of varied and remarkable capabilities—not only skilled in the management of schools, but familiar in an unusual degree with the practical work of building and repairing school and church edifices. His services have been invaluable to the Association, and it will be difficult to supply his place. As a man of noble Christian character and consecration to the work entrusted to him, he had won our highest esteem.

Rev. Larmon B. Lane, M.D., died at his home in St. Charles, Ill., Sept. 15, 1889. He was born in Tallmadge, Ohio, June 21, 1821. He studied medicine at Cleveland Medical College, and afterward attended Oberlin College and Theological Seminary, graduating in 1848. The following year he was sent by the American Missionary Association as missionary physician to Siam, where he labored faithfully, ministering to soul and body six years. In 1855 a severe hemorrhage compelled him to give up the missionary work. After a short rest he began his work of preaching the gospel. He had successful pastorates in Illinois and Ohio; afterwards he practiced medicine in Geneva and St. Charles, Ill., at which latter place he died. He was successful as a physician and continued to the end a loyal servant of Christ, was deacon, treasurer and Sunday-school Superintendent, besides being always ready to do with his might what his hands found to do.

The American Missionary Association finds its commission in the words of the Master, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature."

It does not choose its fields of labor because the people in them are black, or red, or yellow, or white; but because they are those for whom Christ died and to whom he commanded the glad tidings of salvation to be preached. In the fields to which it providentially has been called, it seeks to bring the gospel to every human being who has it not in its purity as an uplifting power.

In nineteen States and Territories we are laboring—six in the West and thirteen in the South. In ninety-four schools and one hundred and forty-two churches we have been directly teaching and preaching the gospel during the past year. In them have 456 missionaries wrought with holy purpose. 12,132 pupils have been taught in our schools; more than seventeen thousand have received instruction in Bible truth in our Sunday-schools; 782 conversions have been reported. $3,160.14 have been reported as given in our mission churches for benevolence, and $21,658.57 for their own expenses—again over last year of $660.03 in benevolence and $2,322.62 in church expenses. Besides all this and all that in various ways has failed to be reported to us, have been the vacation work of our students, the large work of our previous graduates, the indirect results of many kinds, and the unknown results and influences of great power and far-reaching importance which have gone forth from our institutions and missionaries whose only possible record is in God's Book of Remembrance.

In the South, we are directly reaching three classes—the colored people, the mountain whites, and the new settlers from the North and from the old countries. Indirectly we are reaching many more. The schools we plant often incite others to plant schools; the houses of worship we aid in erecting cause others to be erected. A single neat, but inexpensive building for a country church of colored people has been known to occasion the building or repairing of at least nine church buildings of neighboring white people. The incontestably good results of our work among the colored people are slowly but surely undermining race prejudice. In spite of all the race trouble during the past year and the increasingly bitter utterances of some papers and some public speakers, during no other year in the history of our country have so many manly words in favor of the Negro been printed in Southern papers, and sounded from the pulpits and platforms of the South. It was in a Southern University and before a Southern audience that a Southern man, a Bishop of a Southern church which took the name Southern when it declared for slavery, this year uttered these words:

"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."

Cruel and unreasoning is prejudice, but when the public platforms, and especially the pulpits, begin to yield in their utterances to the sway of logic and humanity, by and by public opinion will feel their force. Our institutions and our missionaries have compelled the respect of the Southern people. This year many expressions of it have been heard.

During the past year we have directly sustained five chartered institutions in the South—Fisk University, Talladega College, Tougaloo University, Straight University and Tillotson Institute. Every year that passes emphasizes anew that these are most wisely located, so that each is a center of far-reaching power, and supplements the work of all the others.

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