The General Assembly which met in Portland, Oregon, in May, recommended, "That all churches be invited to make a special Columbia thank-offering to the Board of Home Missions on October 9, 1892, as a memorial of the discovery of the American Continent."

President Harrison has appointed Friday, the 21st day of October, a National holiday, and among other things suggests "that the people gather in the churches and other places of assembly, in order that thanks may be rendered for the divine care and guidance which has directed our history and blessed our people."

We suggest that all the Presbyterian Churches in accordance with these recommendations hold these services, on either of the dates given, and thank offerings be taken which shall be not only large enough to pay the debt but will put into our Treasury a sum sufficient to warrant the Board in answering the calls from the West, which should have been heeded long ago. Will not the churches already established in the West, some of them strong in numbers, and rich in goods, give especial heed to these calls?

We will aid in every way possible to make these "Thank-offering services" a success, by concert exercises, circulars, mite boxes, etc., if requested.

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to distribute, in the pews or in whatever way they they deem best, or we will mail direct from the office to the persons whose names they may send us.

In order to push forward the great work which is pressing upon us from all parts of the West, we must first pay the debt which has hindered almost every advance for the past three years. There were some generous pledges made at the General Assembly toward cancelling this debt, and a number of churches and individuals have sent in their contributions to this object, but the amount received thus far has been very small-less than $500 to August 1st. The pledges made were on condition that the debt be paid by Sept. 1. The debt was $67,000. If each member of the church would contribute eight cents in addition to their usual gifts, and do it at once, the debt would be cancelled. Cannot every pastor see that accomplished?

Every intelligent Presbyterian knows something about the Waldenses, their history through centuries of patience in trial and faithfulness in labors is a matter of pride and admiration to every Presbyterian. Our sympathy has found substantial expression in the financial aid extended to them in their Italian homes. Just now for the first time we find them organizing in communities of their own in our country. They have instituted a marvellous work among their countrymen in Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, and in western Pennsylvania. The courage and self-sacrifice of their missionaries are worthy of admiration and prompt assistance. They ask to be admitted to our Presbyteries and assisted by our Board of Home Missions. The amount of aid they ask is modest and the prospect for a remarkable work of grace among their people most assuring. Yet it comes in

the category of "new work," from which the Board has been restrained for two years by the condition of its treasury, shall we, can we refuse them? The Board has received less money since the meeting of the General Assembly at Portland than during the corresponding period last year.

What to do with our cities is a question not easily solved in the present financial condition of the Board of Home Missions. Any one of the large cities of our country presents all the elements of the problem. Take Chicago for example, as the eyes of all the earth are just now turned to her.

The city has grown in fifty years from 4,500 to 1,200,000, and is steadily increasing at from 50,000 to 100,000 per year. It includes one-third of the population of Illinois, and more people than Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Mew Mexico and Wyoming combined. It is the most foreign of our great cities. The indifferent or hostile part of this foreign element is swelled by the masses of our own people from rural regions who drift into irreligion. There are 400,000 Roman Catholics, 400,000 more or less Protestants, and 400,000 utterly churchless -many of them in darkness as absolute as Stanley's Wapatiti. Christians are alive to this. All the denominations are actively at work. The congregationalists

spent $39,000 last year. built thirteen churches.

The Methodists The Methodists The Baptists, later at work, expended $7,000. Our own Church, spent $18,000, $10,000 through the Board. Two became self-supporting last year. We have twenty missions, two German churches, and Italian and Syrian missions. The McCormick Seminary students, now the most numerous of any seminary, are efficient helpers, and have opened five new fields, four of which will soon be flourishing churches. Three churches have been organized. Mr. Wes

[September,

ton says: "We aim at nothing less than the full-fledged church." The plan is, a canvass, a Sunday-school and preaching service, then a church building—this last a most pressing necessity-there being now seven organizations without a shelter. The Presbyterian League seeks as its chief aim to aid these struggling congregations to acquire church property. Prominent business men are active in it. The Presbyterian Social Union is now If turning its energies in this direction. the Board is so supplied with funds as to be able to encourage the Home Mission Committee to plant churches, and the Social League is backed in the work of church building, our Chicago brethren may signalize the year of their great Columbian Exhibition with an unprecedented advance in Home Missions and church extension.

There may be nothing more in this marked activity in Chicago than is now done or aimed at by Church Extension Committees and Presbyterian Alliances in New York and Philadelphia, and St. Paul and Minneapolis, and Omaha and Portland, and Los Angeles and Kansas City, and a score besides. But here at least is

plainly indicated the line of effort through which our cities are to be evangelized.

It is by no means an encouraging fact that in the first four months of the present fiscal year, ending Aug. 1, the Board's current receipts have fallen behind those of the corresponding period a year Reago to the amount of about $44,000. ceipts in summer are, of course, always small, and receipts then are always to be expected to drop far behind the inevitable outgo. But this is a proportionate increase of shortcoming which is serious and embarrassing. Its remedy should not wait for next winter. The present deficiency, if suffered to continue for months, will cost

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thousands of dollars in interest on necessary additional loans. Many of our able and willing friends return from summer absences in September. May we not urge them then at once to see to it that the empty treasury be largely replenished? W. I.

“A pastor's wife" writes from Michigan:-We are told to despise not the day of small things. The W. M. Society of Oneida Church, Lansing Presbytery, taking heed to the injunction, after reading

Dr. S. E. Wishard's letter in the H. & P. of June 15, "Let it be done now," resolved to have the matter presented to the congregation the following Sabbath.

As a result the sum of six dollars was sent to the H. M. Board, "For the debt," ten cents a member with one dollar besides. One year ago last November, our S. S., was moved with enthusiasm on the same subject and as the result of the "penny a day" plan, for Thanksgiving month, over $25 was sent to the Home Board.

We are "a feeble folk," but if only others of our brethren and sisters would

do the same, our debt would be speedily wiped out.

For twenty-three years I have been a home missionary's wife and know some of the hardships that result from delayed. remittances from the Board.

We do not mind it so much now. Our children have gone out from us, there are only two of us, and a little grandchild to brighten our home; but we feel most deeply for the doubly burdened ones on the frontier. God grant that this nightmare of DEBT may not be theirs to dread much longer!

THE CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR MOVEMENT is manifestly the outcome of the Church's life and teaching. It is a logical result of the past, a necessity of the present,

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and a promise and prophecy of the future. It is a fresh manifestation of the growing life of the Church. As in material things inventions and discoveries are at once the outcome of progress and the conditions of new eras, so in the history of the Church new methods devised and new forces discovered are at once results of its

productive life and conditions of its greatSabbath-schools, the enlistment of women utilization of the tremendous and far-reachin organized efforts in mission work, the ing power that had lain dormant in her young men by the organization known as the Y. M. C. A., all illustrate the proposition very forcibly. And now the Y. P. S. C. E. which President Clark wisely affirms is not so much a society as a movement grows out of the very condition of the Church's life and energy. It is simply the church at work within itself and upon its environments, and it has to do with its work as well as its worship. It is not a pensioner upon the Church's bounty but a new source of revenue to the Church in its active missionary agencies. One of its purposes is to cultivate the systematic worship of the Lord in offerings. Five

er advancement. The introduction of

hundred of the local societies connected with our church are now under pledge of two cents a week for Foreign Missions. A few societies are already under similar pledge for Home Missions. It is a confidently expected that at an early day every local society will be thus directly engaged in the agressive work of the Church at home and abroad. They will teach the Church how most economically and effectively to execute its great commission, how it is possible that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all nations, beginning at JeruSalem thus fulfilling in these glorious latter days the prophecy of the Kingdom, and a little child shall lead them."

At the Chautauqua Assembly, recently, the Rev. Dr. W. S. Rainsford, of New York City, spoke in his vigorous way to a large audience on "City Evangelization." He said:

The fate of the country must be decided in its cities. The Church scarcely yet understands what the city problem is, and certainly the poor of the city do not understand the Church. To them the Church represents a club, a rich man's club at that, and her action largely warrants them in this misconception of her purpose.

During the last ten years in New York 100,000 people have moved into the city south of Fourteenth St., and sixteen Protestant churches have moved out. In other words, the Christian policy of the land as represented

[September,

istic as those richer folks whose opportunities have been larger than theirs. She must enlarge the place of her own tent; she must seek allies; seek to unite with her that great multitude of true and brave souls who, though they do not understand how to obey the first commandment of loving God, are at least nobly striving to fulfill the second of loving their fellow-men.

This is a strong, though not a new, way of putting one of the most pressing, and at the same time most perplexing problems connected with Home Missions. The rector of St. George's seems fully alive to the claims and difficulties of a work in which he and his people have always bestirred themselves. City missions. are in most cases naturally relegated in

taken one of putting the weakest regiment where the heaviest fighting must be, and withdrawing what is strongest and best among her forces from those places where the tide of battle is most fierce. Where do we want all that the strongest churches represent of beauty, space, music, hope, abundant life, in short? Is it where what is most luxurious, most cultivated and endowed with largest treasure among our people has come to dwell? Is it where the streets are widest and corner lots most expensive? Is it on the avenue or near the Park? Or is it where life is sordid, and men almost beyond repair; where there is no place for the children to play, or men and women to breathe; where the tenementhouse represents the homelessness of half a million of our people! This is the way the churches set about evangelizing the city, or at least one great city, the most difficult of all our cities, and the greatest of them, the city of New York. These are the appalling conditions forced upon us by the tenement-house situation in New York, and in lesser measure in other cities. Legislation is useless without its preparatory education, and its preparatory education is impossible without the Christian teaching of the Church. She must educate the rich; the dawning of their duty has yet scarcely begun for them. She must educate the poor, for these are becoming as material

churches and rich givers in the city itself. But such a church and such a Board as ours should surely make so large and growing a department of home evangelism as city work is and must be a more prominent and extensive part of its steady and regular activity. The Episcopal Church has somewhat outdone us here in New

York, and perhaps in some other great cities. The Board has often urged this great interest upon its constituency. When we remember that our great cities catch and hold a large part of our immigrants, and by no means the best of them, it will be seen that all the arguments which enforce increased activity on the frontier are perhaps even more weighty in regard to city evangelization.

W. I.

Rev. Davis Willson writes from Montana:

A town has been slowly but steadily develop. ing at Belgrade, a point on the Northern Railroad about ten miles west of Bozeman, and about four miles east of Weaver schoolhouse, the station where I have regularly preached since my work began here. Years ago I spoke to the owner of the ground about lots

1892.]

for a Presbyterian Church should there prove to be a town there. Last spring the school trustees proposed to buy the Hamilton church building for a school house. Many of the Hamilton people were in favor of organizing a new church at Belgrade. I found from ten to twenty members who were ready to enter the new organization. I was appointed to interview the owner of the town-site, and he guaranteed that we should have lots for a church, and $50 in money when we got ready to build. Most of us counted on selling the Hamilton building and using the funds for building the wing of a large church, which would answer our purposes for the present. It was voted to accept the proposition of the school trustees, retaining the privilege of using the school-house for church purposes, and still maintaining our church organization there. The Board of Church Erection did not endorse our action, and therefore our designs for a church building at Belgrade remain in statu quo. However we are laying We shall eventually organize our church there, and as the town grows our church will prosper, as the country surrounding is Presbyterian.

foundations.

This is given as a specimen case of church extension in the new west, both for difficulty and for persistence. Montana has never had the share of attention it needed and deserved. If our Church had put in there twice the men and means it has in the last ten years, we would now be foremost there instead of lagging behind. We have not even kept pace with

the material development of that marvelous state, and this has only fairly begun. As in Missouri, our force and plant in Mon

tana should be doubled at the earliest possible moment. W. I.

Rev. J. H. Barton writes from Idaho City, Idaho:

I made a trip through the Boise basin, preaching in the mining towns. Two of them cover a scope of country twelve miles long. In one there is a public school of over sixty pupils, and in the other one of nearly

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forty. The population is constantly increasing. We ought by all means to have a man for this field. It is ours by right, as I have been occupying it for four or five years. I am just now making another tour through the Basin, and preaching every night this week. There is no minister in this country except a Roman Catholic priest. The last Episcopal minister has just left. The people would not support him. There are many good people in all these towns and camps, and many who care little for religion who would encourage and support a minister if he would preach fairly well and live a consistent life.

I am anxious to get a man for this field, also. He could live at Idaho City and visit the other points once a month. It is not probable that a strong church could be built up here, and the field might never become self-supporting; but there are hundreds of people here without religious privileges, and the Presbyterian Church ought to do something for them.

Sometimes those of us who live in the presence of this spiritual destitution feel a little discouraged at the difficulty of getting others to come and help plant the gospel standard among these mountains. We are doing what we can, but much more ought to be done.

Idaho has never yet received its proper share of our church's attention. It is a hard and trying field, but one full of need and full also of early promise. The

development of its vast mineral and other resources has hardly begun. And so its religious culture should be soon and rapidly pushed. The late serious disorders among the Coeur d'Aléne miners show how much the people need the leaven and restraint of gospel influences.

A recent report from a synodical missionary speaks of a missionary in his field, young and active and zealous, who has an average of seven public services per week. We do not note this as an isolated case, as many missionaries are as hard worked,