The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-07-13
THE HOME MIss1oN WORK
Of the National Congregational coun-

land Oregon, this week, the review of the work of the Congregational Home Missionary Society of New York was feature of special interest. It's state secretary, the Rev. J. B. Clark D. D., of New York, and in part was as fol- lows:
 By a happy coincidence the first meeting of the Congregational council in the far west marks the completion of full centennial of American Home Missions. Upon the 18th of June, 179S, the idea was born It was a Congre- gational idea and Connecticut was it's mother
 To the honor of that grand old state it should be often recalled that the Con- necticut Missionary society organized on that day was not designed primarily for the benefit of Connecticut. It was a national organization. In the lan- guage of it's charter 1t was to Chris tianize the heathen of North America and to promote Christian knowledge in the new settlements within the United States. But there were no heather in Connecticut save few Indians and
 Connecticut had long outgrown the character of a new settlement. Hence it happened that of the S240000 sub scribed by the churches of that state to their society in the first twenty years, not a dollar was expended in Connecticut except for the few Indians named; and of it's more than three hun- dred missionaries not one except Fath- CT Anson Gleason, of blessed memory did a stroke of missionary work in the | state that commissioned and supported l them.
 In the wilds of New York and Ohio they went. Among the heather of New Hampshire and Vermont they labored The new settlements of Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin received them. They penetrated into Kentucky and Tennes- see and made their way down the Mis- sissippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Any where and everywhere in the United States except in Connecticut!
 | These New England farmers were statesmen. They were not blind to the moral wastes of their own common wealth, but they had a keener vision for deadlier peril, the peril of outside barbarian. They were haunted with a prophetic dread of new states growing up and coming into the Union without | churches and schools, without Chris l tian homes and a Christian Sabbath. Hence these wise men of the east inau- gurated a missionary policy which they l embodied in @ phrase of their own ln- vention and often heard on their lips, '"The welfare of the regions beyond" For a hundred years this policy has been on trial and who shall say that 1 the result has not justified the wisdom of it's authors? 1 Coming to life in Connecticut in 179S, | inherited by the American Home Mis- sionary society in 1926, it has pushed l it's way across the continent, pre-emp- ting and preoccupying one region be- yond after another until in forty-one of our forty-five states and in all our ter ritories it's churches and schools, its colleges and seminaries, it's Christian civilization in many blessed forms to- day fill the land with sweetness and ir- radiate it with light. Under this wise and generous policy the Pacific coast has become another New England, the old west and the new west the north west and the south itself have been sown with home missionary seed and laugh with ospel harvests. And to-day just one hundred years from the birth of this grand idea, and three thousand miles away from the place of its nativ- 1 ity, the national council of Congrega- | tional churches, four-fifths of which are of home missionary origin, assem- ble on this spot to rejoice with the sow | CT and the reaper and to ask with grateful wonder what and where would | be our Pilgrim faith and polity in America but for this honored society l that has swept them across the conti- nent from Plymouth Rock to the Gold en Gate?
 | It will be quite obvious that the home missionary problem of the twentieth century Is materially different from that which confronted the fathers in 1798.
 1. First of all, the pioneer stage of this work Is largely accomplished. Our national domain is divided up and to a considerable extent is settled. No more new states are to be carved out of the American desert. A boundry line may here and there be changed but the raw material of new states and territories is exhausted. A government re- serve or an Indian strip may here and there be opened for settlement but the wild rush of populations that marked the early days of California, Colorado, and the Dakotas and more recently those of Washington and Ok lahoma can never be repeated on the same scale. We have passed the days of emergency when our missionaries had to fly on the track of thousands hurrying forward to settle up some newly opened territory. The last op- portunity of it's kind probaly Is Alaska and this we have already occupied and propose to magnify as far as the pecu- liar conditions of the climate and pop ulation shall justify But practically the day of the missionary pioneer is over. The work of the twentieth cen- tury in distinction from that of the nineteenth will be one of development rather than expansion, of consolida- ton rather than of conquest. The coming period may develop fewer he roes like Whitman and Atkinson and Bells, like Turner and Gaylord and Wiley, like Picket and Ward, but it will be much beholden to wise builders and fearless preachers and men of