REVEREND EZRA FISHER
114
Yet our servants and their fellow treasury from Oregon. laborers have been laboring as fast as they thought the churches would bear to bring about this object in as healthy and as permanent a manner as possible. have to meet
We
the influence of monthly Sabbaths and Missouri opinions, and an educated anti-mission influence in our missionary all
These prejudices are so far worn away
churches.
I believe
in all our churches that they, as churches, recognize the principle that our ministry should be given to the work and that they should be sustained somehow or other in that work.
At our one
association
last
man
in
we made
a direct effort to sustain
Lane County, which was an important missionary
should at that time have pleaded the cause of the Mission Society and asked that these efforts might in some way or other have gone through that channel, but for the fact that your Board was at the time sustaining no I
field.
Home
man
but myself in Oregon.
The
right kind of
work was
doing to accomplish the work and open the sympathies of our brethren. The churches as a whole are coming up to the work, although much slower than is desired by every It is hard teaching our liberal-souled disciple of Christ. brethren the lesson of being dead to the world and alive to God. Yet four churches, two of which were as little hopeful as any in the Association, have absolutely paid their minister
(Br. Riley) not less than $1000 the last year by buying him a claim and providing him with clothing and food for his family. Four more are paying Br. Chandler the present year
And I do not know of a church, small as our churches are, which pays their minister less than $100 for onefourth of the time, while they scarcely get the labors of the minister more than two days in a month, except in the riding nearly $600.
to
and from the appointments, which may take two days more. will perceive that your missionaries have not been
Thus you
indifferent to the true interests of Christ's church, although we have not been able to do so much as we would, nor to direct
what
is
done through the channel which might be
