The Hephzibah Baptist Association of Georgia is now in annual session. Meeting at Bark Camp in Burke County, Hephzibah Baptists recommend church Sunday Schools and report on the progress of a college preparatory school operated by the association. Among other advances, a new school building has recently been completed and 84 students are currently enrolled.
Yet Hephzibah Baptists are only too well aware that all is not well in the Southern Baptist world as the war impacts Baptists at many intersections.
The Committee on Publications reports:
That in the present distracted state of the country, which has caused the suspension of many publications and annihilated others, they can do little more than recommend the encouragement of all measures likely to develope Southern genius, and Southern publications. It is a matter of congratulation and thankfulness to Christians that even at this early day in our history, the Bible is already published in our Confederacy, and we may hope that at no distant day we may be blessed with a purely Southern literature.
The Christian Index is worthy of, and entitled to the support of our denomination, and it is earnestly hoped that it may not be permitted to languish and die for want of patronage.
The report concerning the Hephzibah Mission notes:
That during the past year the services of Rev. W. J. Murrow, Rev. G. H. Cliett and Rev. E. J. Pannel have been secured to a limited extent. The minds of the people have been so engrossed with their political troubles, that your missionaries have not met with their accustomed success, and the sale of books to any extent has been very difficult, and a larger number of them are still on hand. Your Agent recommends the Association to make no further appropriations to this Mission, and to instruct the Agent to close it up during the ensuing year.
A common refrain during the war years is lamentation over increased public drunkenness. Hephzibah Baptists offer their own observations, as reported by the Committee on Temperance:
That while public drunkenness has perhaps not increased within the last score of years, in proportion to the increase of the whole population within our bounds, we have to mourn a fearful increase in private tippling; and that which adds to the extremity of our regret, is the fact that regular, private drinking, to an alarming extent, has become the right-arm sin of many church-members. Even as the holy Sabbath, within the walls of the holy sanctuary, is the atmosphere polluted by the fumes of ardent spirits, exhaled from the breath of professors of religion. So common and so popular has this vice of regular, private tippling become, that we fear the pulpit often fails to expose its pernicieus influence to see that the use of tobacco is increasing in our country to the great injury of our citizens in health, and waste of thousands of dollars that might be appropriated to a useful purpose. Let us labor to check these ruinous habits, by teaching temperance in all things.
Joy mixed with anxiety thus pervades this meeting of Hephzibah Baptists during the first year of the Civil War. Their anxiety, as time proves, is well-founded.
Source: Hephzibah Baptist Association Minutes, October 26-29, 1861
