—The Southern Presbyterian General Assembly reported as contributed for the evangelization of the colored people, during the last year, $416.75, to which the Reformed (Dutch) Church added $359.25.
—The _Christian at Work_ describes a colored church, south, of which it says: “It was an aristocratic institution, as it seemed, and a failure. The preacher read his sermon, the singing was operatic, and the whole thing a ludicrous burlesque. White people go to an unhealthy extreme, often, in suppressing emotion, but for the colored folks to imitate this folly is death outright.”
—The same correspondent says of a missionary to the freedmen, whom he chanced to meet: “I said to him, as we were taking our leave, ‘It takes a good deal of grit and grace to stand the pressure here, don’t it?’ ‘One can get _very near the Lord here_,’ he replied; ‘indeed, he has to get very near Him to do any good.’”
—A Louisiana correspondent sums up a letter to the _Congregationalist_ thus: “In spite of all drawbacks, the tendency of the colored churches in Louisiana is upward. The Sunday-schools are well attended, and properly taught. The church members are orderly and industrious citizens, respected in the communities in which they live, and ready and willing to contribute, to the full extent of their means, for any Christian purposes. Take them altogether, the progress of the colored churches has been sufficiently rapid to gratify any one who prays that the beams of the Sun of Righteousness may illumine the dark corners of the earth.”
—“There is no teacher so wholesome as personal necessity. In South Carolina a few men and many women cling absolutely to the past, learning nothing, forgetting nothing. But the bulk of thinking men see that the old Southern society is as absolutely annihilated as the feudal system, and that there is no other form of society now possible except such as prevails at the North and West. The dream of re-enslaving the negro, if it ever existed, is like the negro’s dream, if he ever had it, of five acres and a mule from the government. Both races have long since come down to the stern reality of self-support. No sane Southerner would now take back as slaves, were they offered, a race of men who have been for a dozen years freemen and voters.”—_Col. Higginson in the Atlantic._