Читать книгу The American Missionary. Volume 50, No. 08, August, 1896 - Various - Страница 4

Of the illustrious ones who laid the foundations for the liberation of the slave, the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe leads all the rest.

What America's greatest woman did towards making freedom possible, our devoted and consecrated women teachers have been carrying out these thirty years to the full Christian conclusion. Those who read the records of the closing days of our schools in this present August number of THE MISSIONARY will be reminded how these faithful teachers are still engaged completing the unfinished work of their greater sister.

Next to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," perhaps the book which has the truest stamp of the genius of Mrs. Stowe is her "Old Town Folks." In her incomparable description of "School Days in Cloudland," in which she shows how her sympathies went out to the people of every nation and tongue who are oppressed, she compares the influences of education in New England with a country without schoolhouses, saying: "Look at Spain at this hour and look back at New England at the time of which I write, and compare the Spanish peasantry with the yeomen of New England. If Spain had had not a single cathedral, if her Murillos had all been sunk in the sea, and if she had had, for a hundred years past, a set of schoolmasters and ministers working together as I have described Mr. Avery and Mr. Rossiter as working, would not Spain be infinitely better off for this life at least? That is the point that I humbly present to the consideration of the public."

This point which Mrs. Stowe presents to the consideration of the public, is the one to which her younger sisters are faithfully directing their faith and their works among a people who up to Mrs. Stowe's day never saw a schoolhouse.

We make our tribute to the gracious memory of her whose words went out into all the world and extended to the ends of the earth: and we ask remembrance of those who under the same inspiration are living among the children of these liberated ones and are taking with them the love and wisdom of Him who was "anointed to preach the gospel to the poor, the recovery of sight to the blind, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

We are sometimes asked how this work of education, which Mrs. Stowe did more than any other person to inaugurate, is regarded by the intelligent white people of the South. We can gladly say that we have too much recognition and appreciation of our work among good people of the South to be otherwise than thankful for it, and for the fact that these good people are increasing every year in numbers and in readiness to encourage us. We have never united in more earnest prayers for our work, and for those who carry it on, even in our annual meetings than in our worship in the South with many Southern pastors, and nowhere have we heard more appreciative words respecting our work than from good people of the South who have acquainted themselves with what we are doing and how we are doing it. That multitudes are still unable to see and unready to prophesy does not count. The day of appreciative recognition has not fully come, but it has dawned, and will come by and by.