Читать книгу The American Missionary. Volume 50, No. 04, April, 1896 - Various - Страница 3

As is the school and church in any nation or community, so are the people. The Chinese for ages with universal education, such as it is, and the religion of Confucius, are a superstitious, stagnant, and an unheroic race. Europe in the middle ages, with no schools and an ambitious hierarchy, became ignorant and war-like, oppressed in Church and State. In these United States, their abundant educational facilities and a free church have developed largely the most intelligent and free people on the earth. But we said "largely," for there are[pg 115] millions of people in this nation that are still in the lowest grades of ignorance and superstition. There are four millions of colored people who can neither read nor write, and have not yet escaped from the degrading effects of centuries of slavery. There are among the mountaineers of the South two millions of people, descendants of a noble race, who have for more than a hundred years been largely without schools or intelligent churches, and they have fallen far below the intelligence and enterprise of their fathers. Our American Indians, though comparatively a handful, still need our care. More than half their school population is without education or industrial habits.

It is among these unfortunate races that the American Missionary Association is doing its great work. It comes to them with its schools and churches–its schools religious and its churches intelligent–and throughout the wide range of its work, lifting them up in knowledge and the industries of life, and in all these directions it has accomplished great results, planting wisely with good seed, and is beginning already to reap large and continually enlarging harvests.

We print in this number of the Missionary two articles written by Secretaries of the Association, which give reliable statements touching the deplorable needs of some of these people, and yet of the cheering transformations made in their condition by our schools and churches. We invite attention to these two articles.