Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/381

 CORRESPONDENCE 363 the city who would co-operate with the church if one should be constituted. Really they have double the numbers and quadruple the ability the church at Oregon City had before our late revival. I urged upon the leading members to establish weekly religious meetings for prayer and conference, look directly to God for His blessing and then make their wants known to the Home Missionary Society's Board. I am satis- fied that, with a comfortable place of worship and a good, faithful, acceptable minister, the Baptists might expect, under God, to exert as much influence in the place and prosper as much as any religious "denomination now in Portland. I felt peculiarly impressed that now is the time to strike in Port- land. There seemed to be a good religious atmosphere with the brethren and especially with the sisters. They want to see the standard raised there, but they say they must have a house and a minister at once and build their own houses, and they say they do not see how this all is to be done unless they can get more foreign aid than they can reasonably expect. I urged them to make their wants known to you as soon as they could get to understand what they wanted and what they can do. They said they would call a meeting soon and deliberate on the subject. I assured Br. Failing that I should be down and stir them up in five or six weeks, if they did not act promptly in the mean time. This is the most important place in the territory to be occu- pied by the Baptists, after Oregon City, and, but for our edu- cational interests, it would be miuch the most important place of the two, at least at present. A minister ought to be appointed forthwith to that place with a salary of $700 to $800. A man worth that money to that place would build a house in one year there, hard as the times are, with three or four hundred dollars from the building funds of the Home Mission Society, if he went to his work trusting alone in the Owner of the Uni- verse and the Disposer of men's hearts, and money too. God grant that you may find the man and put him into that field. Portland is the New York for Oregon at present, at least for the trade of the Willamette and Columbia River valleys. My soul is pained when I think of the delays of the Home Mission