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328 REVEREND EZRA FISHER

Baptist church property. 2 ^ Since the first of January I have paid by way of establishing our school not far from $300 in securing the site, $50 to the erecting of a building on land, $50 towards ceiling our meeting house and have $100 more to meet on my subscription for our school building be- fore next summer and have given no less than $100 of time in soliciting subscriptions and collecting funds for our school building. I do not name this to boast of my liberality. But we have entered upon the work and there seems to be an im- perious necessity laid on the few friends who have taken hold of it. The rainy season has commenced and our school building is not enclosed. We have therefore to fit up our meeting house for the winter. I wish you to send Mrs. Fisher the Mothers' Journal and pay for it from my salary. We are in great want of religious periodicals to circulate among the churches and our members. Numbers of them would gladly pay for them, if the proprietors would run the risk of conveyance of the money. But they seem unwilling to pay their money and forward it and not receive the papers. We could obviate this difficulty by ordering you to pay for the periodicals from our salaries, but our salaries in N. Y. are worth from 75 to 400 per cent more to us than the money is here, and, with the great expense of living here and the respon- sibilities in carrying on the work before us, we cannot make that sacrifice. We will get the subscribers, collect the mon- ey and forward it faithfully free of charge for our services, if the proprietors of the papers will allow us to forward it at their risk. We will also pay the per cent for transporta- tion. We feel that after the preaching of the Word, our brethren cannot be profited so much in any other way by being led into the duties of the consistent Christian as through the medium of the Christian press.

Br. Mahlom Brock has subscribed and paid for the Moth-

223 The First Baptist Church of Portland was not organized until 1855. Mat- toon, Bap. An. of Ore. 1 114. Mattopn says that Rev. H. Johnson obtained tht property for the church in 1850, and give* it as a half-block on the corner of Fourth and Alder Streets. Ibid. p. 140.