The Kentucky Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church convened recently in Louisville. Bishop Miles having called the meeting to order, before proceeding to business startled the Conference by saying:
“I have received complaints against a great many of you preachers who do not pay your debts. You are liable to be arrested, and I fear I shall have to call a private session to consider the matter. If you don’t receive enough money for preaching, you had better quit and go to work at something where you can make more money. You need not say a word. I know you, and I’ll just give you until next Friday to get square with your creditors. I hope you’ll do this, because I don’t want to expose you, but if you don’t come up and do right the public will know it, and you will be left without an appointment.”
It is certainly a sad condition of things when a Bishop has thus to reprove ministers, and so many of them. It is no surprise to those who know the kind of men who are ministering to the colored people. There is no greater need among the colored people than that of a morally and intellectually competent ministry; but it is gratifying to know that there are such men in positions of influence and power as Bishop Miles. It is in the speedy multiplication of such men that the colored people’s future, under God, depends.
Our thanks are due and cheerfully rendered to Rev. and Mrs. John P. Cowles, of Ipswich, Mass., for one hundred copies of a book entitled “The Use of a Life.” These volumes are to be distributed among our missionaries. The life whose use these pages trace was that of Mrs. Z. P. G. Bannister, whose work as a Christian educator and missionary supporter has entered into the life of the nation and the work of the world’s evangelization. The inspiration of her work at Derry, where she was associated with Mary Lyon, and at Ipswich, in the education of young ladies, spread westward until from the Atlantic to the Pacific it has been felt. Mrs. Bannister was a most remarkable woman. She was rich in her intellectual endowments; rich in her knowledge of the Scriptures; rich in the strength of her consecrated life to magnify the kingdom of Christ and thereby make all her scholars the friends of missions. Scholarship, thorough and severe, she believed in, but it must be consecrated to Christ and used for the extension of his kingdom. The story of this book is an inspiring one, and its perusal is especially commended to Christian young women who are asking the question, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”