Part 3 (1/2)

He sought the help of a Home Missionary whose duties covered a district of hundreds of miles, and to whom was entrusted the establis.h.i.+ng of new fields.

When his work called him to that part of Minnesota, he visited M---- L----, holding services in the little district school building, visiting in the homes and doing what he could in a brief stay to rouse and help them spiritually.

As he was able, he returned to them several times during the year.

How gladly did those welcome him who in the old homes had followed after the things of G.o.d!

In the summer he arranged to have a student missionary commissioned to the field. In due time the student arrived, spending the four months of his seminary vacation among them.

He was an indefatigable worker. Soon the little schoolhouse was most uncomfortably crowded with those who were drawn by the singing and the bright _go_ of the meetings.

Services were then held out of doors, the congregation seated on improvised benches of boards laid across tree trunks.

The student organized and superintended a Sunday-school--gathered the young people into an Endeavor Society. He formed a singing cla.s.s--a portable baby organ which he played was their only musical instrument.

He arranged games, socials, and picnics; one of the latter, a berry-picking picnic, the proceeds of which, twelve dollars, was given to missions.

So close did he bring religion to these people, so desirable he made it, that they became eager for a permanent church. A very little help was given by the Board toward the purchase of the land, and the people attended to the building.

The men quarried and hauled the foundation stone; they secured and dressed the timber, and with the labor of their own hands the little church was built before the student returned, and later, beside it, the Women's Board helping, a tiny parsonage was placed.

Then came an energetic, devoted Home Missionary to live the Gospel, day by day, as well as preach it; to incorporate Christian ideals into the daily thinking of these people, and Christian purposes into their controlling motives; to make them understand that the Gospel means honesty in business, cleanness of heart and body, health and enlightenment, and whatever makes life worthy here and now and fits it for the future beyond.

Thousands of such homely frontier missions are molding the citizens.h.i.+p which makes the very life of the Republic.

All honor to the men and women of character and ability who, as Home Missionaries, are devoting their lives to such fields--the most difficult in the world--where no picturesqueness of scenes or people relieves the strain--where sordid sin, monotony, crudity, and newness prevail, but where the returns in character-building contribute to the life of a nation whose mission is the world.

The following quaint letter was written by Rev. Aratus Kent, a Congregational Missionary at Galena, Ill., to the Congregational Home Missionary Society under date of April 9, 1844:

”When I came to Galena (in 1829), there was not any church or clergyman within two hundred miles, and I used to say that my parish extended from Rock River to Wisconsin. Now I can count within these bounds twenty-five churches and fifteen ministers.

”Let those then who think little of the influences of the Home Missionary Society blot out of being those twenty-five churches, and drive out of the state those fifteen clergymen, and disband fifty Sabbath-schools, and burn a thousand Bibles, and recall a thousand volumes of the Tract Society, and stop the monthly visit of a tract to five hundred houses, and give back a drunken father to fifty families that are now rejoicing in the peace and plenty consequent upon their regeneration.” And yet this work of vandalism is not done until you have taken back that stream of heavenly influence which has gone forth from this district to bless the heathen in our forests and the heathen beyond the ocean, and until you have recalled that company of young men who have gone away for the ministry.

”We need within this field more missionaries who can endure privations, and who, to meet their appointments, can face a prairie storm and buffet a swollen stream, and who, like their Divine Master, can take the mountain top for their study and the midnight hour for the season of their devotion.

”We want also a.s.sistance here in the West to establish literary (educational) inst.i.tutions upon the right basis, and if the professors of the East would come and see what I see, they would court the honor of contribution to establish the female seminary in Galena which was yesterday projected, and which is next week to commence its existence. This church has sustained a German colporter during the winter.”

About a little valley in the Southland stand mountains grim and forbidding in their rugged beauty--holding close within their bounds those who for generations had found their scanty living upon the sterile mountain sides and in the richer valleys, saying No! to the pressing outside world, with its progress and its change.

Many winters and summers pa.s.sed over the settlement of J----, on ---- creek, forty miles from all railroads, shut in by laurel-covered hills and pine mountains; its people, of fine pioneer ancestry and deeply religious, thrown back upon themselves through segregation and isolation, had lost much of the initiative and force that characterized their ancestors, and had crystallized along the lines of their peculiarities, as any people will under the same conditions.

Up the creek and into the valley one day there came two ”foreign”

women from the great world beyond. They were Home Missionaries, but did not use this designation for fear the mountain people might not understand that they came simply as friends to bring to the valley the _opportunity_ America gives to her children.

They found the people simple folk, ignorant, but with no touch of vulgarity. Their eyes saw no opening beyond the blue shadows of the enveloping mountains. To a few the longing to _know_, or that their children might have a ”_chance_,” hung like a star afar off, but with little hope of attainment.

A dark fatalism presided over their destinies. ”What is to be will be, I reckon,” summed up their philosophy.

About many of them appeared an atmosphere of the unconscious moral heroism that willingly gives its all to meet whatever the day may bring of privation, hards.h.i.+p, suffering, or death.