“Your medicine has help me demegiately as I have took it.  I hope God will ever to be with in your Jerney throught life in well doing.”

This letter came from a young lad in one of the lower grades of school work.  He had been seriously sick for weeks, and the teacher to whom he wrote sat with him and ministered to his comfort after the weary hours of her school work were over.  This lad appreciated her self-forgetful kindness; his heart was touched, and as she left the malarial atmosphere of this Southern country for brief rest in her Northern home, this boy sent her this letter.  His letter is “phonetic” and of the individual type, but I venture that the tearful prayer going up to God from his grateful, loving, simple heart may reach the Father’s ear, and bring down a blessing upon his loving friend as “demegiately” as the rounded periods of learned lips.  He evidently is no dusky Claudius whose confession must be: 

    “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;
    Words without thoughts never to Heaven go.”

“What a privilege it is to be prayed for by such confiding souls,” said the teacher as she handed me this letter.

* * * * *

Speaking of prayer among the colored people, calls to mind a petition offered for myself, when Field Superintendent, soon after my appointment.  An old black woman in New Orleans was called upon to pray, after I had spoken to the people.  She chanted her words in soft, melodious tones, keeping time with her body swaying back and forth, as she prayed.  She prayed for the former superintendent, Dr. Roy.  She thanked God for his patient, loving care of the people.  She told the Lord how he went as a prophet of Israel, back and forth among them, bringing the bread of Heaven to their hungry souls.  She sought Divine blessing, rich, full, free, upon him and all his loved ones.  Then she chanted in the liquid accent of the Creole, “And now, O Father, bless our young brother the new superintender.  Let him down deep into the treasury of thy word and hide him ’hind de cross of Jesus.”  And the heart of the “New Superintender” said “Amen and Amen.”  That experience was what he needed.

How close to the great throbbing heart of God these simple children of cotton-field and cabin come!  In gaining intimate acquaintance with them one is reminded of Heinrich Heine’s confession in his notes on Uncle Tom’s Cabin: 

“Astonishing!  That after I have whirled about all my life over all the dance floors of philosophy, and yielded myself to all the orgies of the intellect * * * without satisfaction, like Massolina after a licentious night, I now find myself on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands—­on that Bible.  I kneel down by my black brother in the same prayer!  What humiliation! * * * Tom, perhaps, understands these spiritual things better than I. * * * But a poor negro slave reads with his back and understands better than we do.  But I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the Bible as Uncle Tom does.  Poor Tom, indeed, seems to have seen deeper things in the Holy Book than I.”