Vol. XXXIV.

No. 11.

THE
AMERICAN MISSIONARY.

“To the Poor the Gospel is Preached.”

NOVEMBER, 1880.

ANNUAL MEETING.

CONTENTS:

This number of the American Missionary is sent to some persons whose names are not among our subscribers, with the hope that they will read it, become interested in the work it represents, and subscribe for it. Terms, 50 cents per annum. Subscriptions may be sent to H. W. Hubbard, Esq., Treasurer, 56 Reade Street, New York.

Entered at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., as second-class matter.

American Missionary Association,

56 READE STREET, N. Y.

PRESIDENT.

Hon. E. S. TOBEY, Boston.

VICE-PRESIDENTS.

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY.

Rev. M. E. STRIEBY, D. D., 56 Reade Street, N. Y.

DISTRICT SECRETARIES.

Rev. C. L. WOODWORTH, Boston.
Rev. G. D. PIKE, D. D., New York.
Rev. JAS. POWELL, Chicago.
H. W. HUBBARD, Esq., Treasurer, N. Y.
Rev. M. E. STRIEBY, Recording Secretary.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.

COMMUNICATIONS

relating to the work of the Association may be addressed to the Corresponding Secretary; those relating to the collecting fields to the District Secretaries; letters for the Editor of the “American Missionary,” to Rev. C. C. Painter, at the New York Office.

DONATIONS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

may be sent to H. W. Hubbard, Treasurer, 56 Reade Street, New York, or when more convenient, to either of the Branch Offices, 21 Congregational House, Boston, Mass., or 112 West Washington Street, Chicago, Ill. A payment of thirty dollars at one time constitutes a Life Member.

THE

AMERICAN MISSIONARY.

Vol. XXXIV.

NOVEMBER, 1880.

No. 11.

American Missionary Association.

This Missionary, as will be seen, is an Annual Meeting number. We have endeavored to give a glimpse at the things which were said and done at Norwich. We have been able to give almost nothing entire, except the briefer of the reports of the Committees. For Dr. McKenzie’s sermon we must refer to the Advance of Oct. 28; for Dr. Taylor’s paper, to the Congregationalist Supplement of Oct. 20; for Mr. Carroll’s review of missions, to the Independent of Oct. 28. For the rest, we have crowded what we could into this double number of the Missionary.

We are under renewed obligations to our denominational newspapers for their editorial representation at our anniversary, and their full and discriminating reports of our proceedings.

Our Annual Meeting in the Broadway Church, Norwich, awakened, in the minds of many, encouraging comparison with the Anniversary of this Association held in the same place 19 years ago. It was in the fall of 1861. Our country was just settling into the heavy tug of war. And yet one of the headings of the Annual Report was: “Enlargement demanded.” See how God has fulfilled that aspiration in the enlargement of our finances, of our constituency, of our field, of our work. The $51,819 of that year, upon the recommendation of the Boston Council in 1865, came up to $250,000 and $3,000 more, and the average of these fifteen years has been that same sum, $253,000. All the work we then had at the South, the very first of the kind that was done, was that of the one missionary and one teacher among the 1,800 “contrabands,” who at that point had pressed through our lines. But the men of that meeting, believing that the day of freedom was at hand, and praying,—in the words of one of Governor Buckingham’s State papers—that “the country might be carried through the crisis in such a manner as should forever check the spirit of anarchy, bring peace to a distracted people, and preserve, strengthen and perpetuate our National Union,” did solemnly and grandly resolve “to follow the armies of the United States with faithful missionaries and teachers”. You know how this Association did follow those armies across the sunny South, and how it turned its own forces into an army of occupation, until its field became identical with the realm of our national flag.

Now this marvelous enlargement, attained within less than two decades, has brought us to “the cross of our success.” Shall we take up that cross? Shall we consecrate ourselves to bear the burden of obligation which this extension of our work lays upon us? May we discern this call of God for enlargement, even as did the good men of that day?

The chief officers of this Association, the President, Rev. David Thurston, the Treasurer, Lewis Tappan, with his brother Arthur, the Secretaries, George Whipple and S. S. Jocelyn, now on high, were all here on this platform, bearing up against the discouragements of the way, and by their great faith inciting the people to “go forward.” “The workers die, but God carries on the work.”

A SUGGESTION—FINANCIAL.

We have passed another milestone in our work. The reports and extracts from addresses made at the recent annual meeting, and placed before our constituents in this double number of the Missionary, tell how far we have progressed, and indicate something of the demands that the journey beyond is already making upon us.

A perusal of these papers will show that the enthusiasm of earnest conviction characterized the Norwich meeting. The success of the past, no less than the present exigent needs of the field in every department, focused the thought of the meeting on one thing—enlargement of the work.

But the spirit that pervaded the annual meeting must in some way or other be carried over to the churches. Enlargement of the work means necessarily enlargement of resources. There must be at least an increase of twenty-five per cent. over the contributions of last year. It is a good time now to lay plans to secure this. We would suggest to pastors and others having charge of missionary meetings, that, as far as possible, the next monthly concert be made the occasion of bringing before the churches the interesting facts regarding the work of the American Missionary Association presented at the Norwich meeting. By possessing the minds of the people with intelligence, and their hearts with interest regarding the work, the needed increase in contributions, we believe, will be easily secured.

PROCEEDINGS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING.

The thirty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Association had for its meeting place the commodious Broadway Church in the beautiful city of Norwich, Conn. It was favored with perfect autumnal days, bountiful and beautiful hospitality, and a large and sustained attendance at all its sessions.

President Tobey being detained from attendance, the chair was occupied by Vice-Presidents Dr. Wm. L. Gage, of Hartford, and Dr. Wm. W. Patton, of Howard University, and at the closing session by Dr. L. T. Chamberlain, pastor of the church in which the meetings were held. Rev. Geo. M. Boynton was elected Secretary, and Revs. C. P. Osborne and J. H. Isham, Assistant Secretaries of the meeting. Dr. Langworthy, of Massachusetts, conducted the opening devotional services. The Treasurer read his report. The report of the Executive Committee was read by Secretary Strieby, after which an hour was spent in prayer, reminiscence and thanksgiving.

Dr. Alex. McKenzie, of Cambridge, Mass., preached the Annual Sermon, his text being Ex. ii.:9—“Take this child away and nurse it for me.” The thought elaborated with great force and beauty was the claim of the child, the African race, upon the King’s daughter, the Church of God.

Wednesday morning the prayer meeting was led by Rev. R. B. Howard, of Massachusetts. Part of the morning was devoted to presentations of missionary work outside of the special limits of the Association. A paper, valuable for its clearness and comprehensiveness, on “Recent Progress of Protestant Missions,” was read by Mr. H. K. Carroll, one of the editors of the Independent, in whose care is their excellent missionary column. Mr. Eugene Reveillaud then addressed the Association, through Rev. Mr. Dodds, who acted as his interpreter, on the recent remarkable religious movements in France. Mr. Dodds and Rev. L. W. Bacon spoke briefly on the same subject.

The Committees to which had been assigned the various departments of the work as represented in the official papers, then in order reported, and addresses were made on the subjects of which they treated.

1. The church work. The report was presented by Prof. Wm. J. Tucker, D. D., of Andover Theological Seminary, and was sustained by him in an able and suggestive address, showing the kind of religion needed by the negro and the progress already made. Dr. Roy followed with a statement of the disadvantages under which this department of our work was compelled to labor, and, on the other hand, of the favorable circumstances by which it was assisted.

2. The Indian report was read by Rev. A. H. Bradford, of New Jersey, after which General Armstrong spoke of the educational experiment at Hampton, its success and its needs. A company of the Indian pupils on their way from their summer homes in Berkshire County, Mass., added, by their presence on the platform and by simple exercises, to the impressiveness of the plea. Mr. Bradford sustained the report made by him in a forcible address, showing the evils of the treaty and reservation systems, and the need of still further reform in our civil service.

3. The educational work (South) was reported on Wednesday evening by Rev. Addison P. Foster, of New Jersey, Chairman of the Committee. Dr. Wm. M. Taylor, of New York, followed with a strong plea. Its leading illustration was drawn from the feeding of the five thousand; when the disciples came to the Master and said, “Send the multitudes away;” to whom he replied, “They need not depart, give ye them to eat.” Mr. Foster also sustained the report read by him. He demonstrated the greatness of the need and the religious character of the education demanded and sought to be supplied by our schools.

Thursday morning, after the prayer meeting, which was led by Rev. F. Williams of Connecticut, Rev. H. S. De Forest, President of Talladega College, spoke in continuation of the discussion of the report on education, setting forth the wants of Alabama and the condition and needs of Talladega. Rev. Wm. E. Brooks, just elected to the Presidency of Tillotson Institute, in Texas, gave his creed in regard to the work before him, in a brief address full of animation and hopefulness. He was followed by Professor Fairchild, of Berea College, who spoke of the influence of that Institution in doing away the prejudices of the whole community in which it was located. Dr. I. P. Warren, of Maine, also spoke briefly. District Secretary Powell, of Chicago, closed the discussion of this largest department of the work of the Association.

4. The African Missions were reported on by Rev H. M. Ladd, of Walton, New York, who followed the report with a brief address. Professor T. N. Chase, of Atlanta, Georgia, who recently has returned from a visit of inspection to the Mendi Mission, gave an account of the field, of the location of the mission, with its drawbacks and hopeful signs frankly and fully contrasted. Rev. Lewis Grant followed briefly. Dr. Patton also spoke on this topic.

5. The Finance Committee reported through its Chairman, Rev. Wm. H. Willcox, D.D., commending the business management of the Association, and making it clear that the $150,000 recently received for buildings in no wise lessened the demands upon the treasury or the dependence of the treasury upon the churches. Secretary Strieby followed, urging the need of the enlargement of the work. Dr. A. F. Beard, of New York, read a most suggestive paper on Giving as an important part of the sacrificial life to which the Christian is called. He was followed by Dr. Chamberlain in an earnest plea for justice and restitution to the races which our race has so deeply wronged, and briefly by President Magoun of Iowa College.

6. The Chinese report was read on Thursday evening by Dr. Lyman Abbott, of New York, and supported by him. In his address he stated fully and frankly the possible dangers arising from Chinese immigration, and the two methods by which they might be averted. Rev. Samuel Scoville, of Stamford, Connecticut, followed in a fervid plea based on the importance of the work, and the encouragements to its prosecution. Rev. R. B. Howard briefly followed.

It would not do to omit the witty and eloquent address of Rev. Dr. Hannay, Secretary of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, in which he spoke of the heroism of modern missionary effort and the statesmanship needed and shown in the discussions of the work of the Association.

The Lord’s Supper was celebrated on Wednesday afternoon, Rev. J. O. Barrows of Turkey, and Rev. Jonathan Edwards of Massachusetts officiating.

At the close, resolutions of thanks to the churches and citizens of Norwich, to the choir, the Committee and the railroads, were adopted, and responded to by Rev. Wm. S. Palmer, D.D., of Norwich, chairman of the Committee of Arrangements. The benediction was pronounced by Rev. Dr. Chamberlain. Thus ended one of the best attended and best sustained anniversaries of the American Missionary Association. For changes in the list of Vice-Presidents and Executive Committee we refer to the first inside page of the cover.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Second Church was filled below and above with a congregation of nearly a thousand women. Mrs. Dr. John A. Rockwell, of Stamford, Conn., presided, and, after the opening prayer by Mrs. Phipps, read a brief paper on woman’s responsibility in the nineteenth century.

Miss Stevenson, Miss Sawyer, Mrs. Hickok and Miss Emery, all familiar with the condition and needs of the colored women of the South, addressed the meeting, the interest of which was so great and so well sustained that it re-assembled the next morning. At that time Miss Douglass, who had labored in Georgia among the negroes, and Miss Ludlow, of Hampton Institute, Miss Lord and others spoke, keeping up the interest which had attended the previous session.

Resolutions expressing hearty sympathy with the work of the A. M. A., and urging an organization for home mission work in every church in New England, were adopted at the close of this full and earnest woman’s meeting.

HEROISM AND STATESMANSHIP.

FROM THE ADDRESS OF REV. ALEXANDER HANNAY, D.D., SECRETARY OF THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION OF ENGLAND AND WALES.

We sometimes talk—and I think in a very superficial and wild way—about heroic ages of certain nationalities, heroic ages of the church; and there are men who will say it was a heroic age in which foreign missions were projected, whether in England or here; that then the men were of great stature, and that they rose to the opportunities the great living Head of the Church offered them, and went out and did a giant’s work; and they look down on this time, and perhaps complain that it is not a heroic age, and that we cannot have a giant’s test put to us. Now that is all very flimsy and superficial talk in my judgment. There are epochs in the history of nations and of churches when great opportunities occur, the record of which becomes historical, and it seems that the men who take the prominent part then are men of Alpine bulk and grandeur of nature—true heroes; and then there comes a time of equable, dogged, plodding, unhistorical work, and it is said “The age of heroism and the age of heroes has passed away.” Brethren, the work of these quiet and plodding ages cannot be done well, except in the very spirit of the heroic age; and I take it there is a test of individual character, there is a test of strength and firmness in men, a strength of heroism demanded for the quiet, ordinary, fruitful work of times like these, equal, at least, to that which was needed to originate the new epoch. And I congratulate the representatives of the American churches assembled at the meetings of these great societies on the evidence which has appeared to me, (and I would use no words of mere courtesy in this, but a simple and unaffected expression of the feeling which has taken possession of me while I have attended these meetings), that here they are in the very spirit of their fathers, now gone to their rest, who said, “We must redeem the pagan nations and bring them to Christ.”

Another thing that has struck me is this: in listening to what we have heard here to-day, I have seemed to find not merely a fulness and vitality of the missionary sentiment, but associated with that, a keen, political outlook, the statesman’s thought about the demand of the hour and the special adaptations that are necessary in service for the carrying out of the great work that these societies have in view. It is especially encouraging in view of this, to which no one can be blind, that God is calling America to a singularly honorable, because singularly difficult, vocation, in dealing with the races with which her life of intelligence and faith is here being brought into contact.

It is quite true, sir, that the Head of the Church, as has been proclaimed from this platform, and from that at Lowell, again and again, is imposing on you the discipleship of the world, the duty of carrying the Gospel to all the nations of the earth. It thus lies upon the Christian nations so honored to stretch out their hands to lift the other nations up to the plane on which they are themselves living. But there has been brought to America, it seems to me, a specially difficult task. She has had thrust within her national boundary at least three separate races, that are on a different stage of intellectual development and civilization from that which she has reached; or if it be too much to say that these races have been thrust within her boundaries, then that the high and laudable ambition, which has moved you as a people to keep this great continent to yourselves, and to take as much more as you can get, has brought upon you this obligation in connection with the great races which are to be found on your soil. We are aware that the spirit and the policy of the world is hounded on, perhaps now more than ever, by that proud and insolent dictum of science, falsely so called, ready to be applied to the affairs of races as to other things—“the survival of the fittest.” No doubt there are men among you who are ready to take up the spirit of this maxim and to apply it all around, and to feel, as has been said here about the dead Indian, that it is the province of the stronger people simply to overrun, and press out, and hustle over the frontiers, or over the shores of your continent, the weaker races. Now, sir, as I understand it, you have been called to this vocation of bringing up these weaker races, of incorporating them into your own national life, of clothing them with all the honors and responsibilities of citizenship, of giving them a full status in the Church and in the township, of making them what you are yourselves, gradually scattering their darkness by the light of your intelligence, and vitalizing their enfeebled and degraded manhood by the overflow of the surplus energy of your own manhood. There has been given to you this great task to perform, to show the nations a better way of dealing with the weaker races than any nation has yet reached; and if the spirit of the American Missionary Association can but be breathed into the American people as a whole; if you can control your political action, if you can determine the issues in your Congress by that spirit, and control all your dealings with those peoples by it, one of the very brightest of the many crowns which will sit on the brow of the American nation will be the crown which you will win in that service. This is the work to which you are called.

I have been asked since I came here how I could explain the fact that the citizens of America seem to meddle so much in politics. I do not think we of England meddle enough with them. The existence of a political church among us forces a certain political contention upon us with which you here have nothing to do. But I take it that it is one of the highest, most urgent vocations of the Church of Christ, in this and in all lands, to see to it, that, so far as her influence shall go, by teaching and by testimony, by debate, by criticism, by all kinds of fair mental conflict to penetrate the political life of the nation with the spirit of Christ. It will not be well with you in America, any more than with us in England, whether with regard to your work for the black man and the Indian and the Chinese, or with regard to your own national stability and progress, until this work has been gone earnestly about. We can afford to rise above party politics, but we are bound to preach that righteousness, that truth, that spirit of self sacrifice, without which neither church nor nation can be made great and stable.

GENERAL SURVEY.

The battle cry of the American Missionary Association now is Enlargement. We are called to this by recent encouragements, and by the demands of the future.

THE ENCOURAGEMENTS OF THE PRESENT.

FINANCES.

We present our financial situation as one of these encouragements, and first in order, as being special, we mention the receipt of $150,000, the donation of Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, of Malden, Mass. This munificent gift has been so confidently anticipated, that Prof. T. N. Chase has for some time been occupied in maturing plans for the buildings to be erected by it, so that the work at all points will be pushed forward with rapidity and economy. We hope, therefore, at our next Annual Meeting, to announce that buildings have been erected at several points in the South that shall afford much needed facilities to overcrowded schools, and that shall serve as monuments to the liberality and wisdom of the donor, more fitting, because more useful, than the most costly shaft or obelisk.

Next in order, but not least in significance, we refer to the financial exhibit of our Treasurer, with its favorable balance sheet. The receipts for the year, aside from Mrs. Stone’s donation, have been $187,480.02, which together with the amount on hand Sept. 30, 1879 ($1,475.90), makes a total of $188,955.92; and the expenditures, $188,172.19; thus giving a credit balance of $783.73.

As a part of the gratifying results of the year’s expenditures, as we had no debt to pay, we can point to four school buildings newly erected or greatly improved; to six church edifices completed; to two in the process of erection; to five repaired and improved; and to three parsonages repaired, one in process of erection, and one built by the people. Among these new school buildings we are glad to number the large and commodious edifice for Tillotson Institute, Austin, Texas, a permanent outpost, we hope, in the rapidly increasing population of the great South-west.

Such a balance sheet, carrying on the one side our regular work and these new and greatly needed buildings, yet held in even poise by the generous donations of our friends, is an argument for enlargement at other points calling for it with increased importunity. We dare not be presumptuous, but may we not trust still further to the God of the poor, and will not his people sustain us in the trust?

FREEDMEN.

Our Educational work among the Freedmen furnishes the next source of encouragement.

The increasing appreciation of our schools by both the white and colored people of the South, is manifest. Georgia continues to give the substantial assistance of her annual appropriation of $8,000 to the Atlanta University. A large majority of the State Board of Examiners attended the anniversary exercises this year. Their examinations were close, their report to the Governor wholly favorable, and their recommendation of the continuance of the appropriation unhesitating, the closing words of their report being: “Who can doubt the wisdom of continuing the appropriation?”

The State of Mississippi was represented at the Commencement exercises at Tougaloo by her Superintendent of Education and other influential citizens, who, after careful inspection, gave public assurance of State aid. The first instalment, we are confident, will reach us this fall. Soon after the war, when this State was under Republican rule, it granted aid to Tougaloo. Under changed political control, this grant was for a time withheld, but now while overwhelming Democratic majorities are regularly reported, the proffer of aid is renewed. The significance of the fact is that both political parties, much as they may differ on other points, are agreed in sustaining the Tougaloo University.

Another evidence of such appreciation is found in the attendance at our school anniversaries, of persons who represent public sentiment. At Hampton, President Hayes, Secretary Schurz, the Governor and an ex-Governor of Massachusetts were present; at Berea, the audience numbered probably 1,800 or 2,000 persons, two-thirds being of the white race; at Fisk, there was reported “a crowded house;” at Atlanta, the audience was packed; at Straight University, New Orleans, it is reported that “the audience, both in numbers and intelligent appreciation, was one of the best ever gathered for the purpose in the city.” Our work is not now done in a corner, nor under the ban of good people, North or South.

The colored people show their appreciation of the schools by an increased attendance. The roll is larger than last year in the aggregate, and in nearly all the departments. The total number of pupils reported this year is 8,052 against 7,207 last year. The largest proportionate increase is in the theological, grammar and normal grades.

Our schools are meant to be religious. If not, they are as nothing to us. We watch, therefore, with great jealousy, the developments in this direction, and we are gratified to be able to report interesting revivals at Fisk, Tougaloo and Woodbridge, with conversions and a quiet spiritual work at other schools. The usefulness and activity of our students as they go out in vacation or at graduation may be illustrated by facts like these: “One pupil who is a minister reports over forty hopeful conversions in connection with his labors during the summer vacation.” Another writes: “I was assigned to a place where there was no school-house or church. The people had their meeting under an arbor. I worked with the patrons until they built me a school-house.” From Memphis the report is: “Sixteen of our young people have, during the summer, taught 1,035 day pupils, and very nearly as many Sunday-school scholars.” The returning pupils at Tougaloo reported that “the Sunday-school and Temperance work had been vigorously pushed with excellent results, one of which was over 1,300 signers to the Temperance pledge.”

Our Theological Departments are the flower of our schools, and the germinating seed for our church work. They have this year, as we have seen, increased in the number of their students and in their efficiency. Talladega reports that “eight young men will graduate from the Theological Department, all of whom will enter the Congregational ministry in the South. They are now warmly welcomed to the pulpits of all denominations.” From New Orleans: “The Theological Department is larger than in any previous year. Four of the class are ordained ministers, of whom two are pastors of churches in New Orleans.” The Theological Department of Howard University reports that “sixteen students were sent forth to preach, all of whom go to the South to the Freedmen.”

With such a record before us, a work so useful and that needs almost indefinite expansion, invites to that expansion by its very success.

Our Church Work shows a steady and healthful growth. The number of churches in the South is 73 as against 67 last year; of church members, 4,961—last year, 4,600.

In the four new churches organized, and in the six new edifices erected, and two in the process, five repaired, and in the parsonages improved and built, we see the additions to the outward scaffolding, within which is going forward the spiritual work of preparing the polished stones of the sanctuary; and we see the added force of workmen ascending this scaffolding, in the ordination of four young men to the Gospel ministry, and in the reports from our Theological Departments of well trained young men graduating and entering the service.

That spiritual work is indicated in part by the reports of precious revivals and ingatherings into the churches. The pastor at New Orleans writes: “It is my happiness to record one of the most precious revivals in the history of the Central Church.” From Shelby Iron Works, Ala: “The meetings closed with twenty-one conversions reported. Last Sunday fifteen came forward, entered into covenant with the church, and were baptized on profession of their faith. Some eight or ten are to unite by letter the first opportunity, who were not ready to join last Sunday.” From Savannah, Ga,: “There has been an unusual work of grace among this people, and the meetings have been quiet and orderly as with a New England congregation.”

We have been impressed this year with the unusual mention in the reports from the churches of the attendance and interest in the prayer meetings. If the prayer meeting is the pulse of the church, we should infer that the life blood flows warmly from the heart in our churches in the South.

The disposition for self help is a plant of slow growth among a people marvelous for their faith and passive endurance, but little used to forethought and activity. We have felt the need of developing “this grace also,” and have, therefore, taken unusual pains to induce the churches to aid more fully in the support of their pastors. The responses have exceeded our expectations; in almost every instance the additional sum we have named has been given, and in some instances more.

Other facts of the same purport are seen in such extracts as these, culled from the “Detailed Report.” The pastor of the church in Atlanta proposed that the church debt should be paid off. With a little help from the North, and from the professors of the University, it was done, making about $563 raised by the church, aside from current expenses, in six months. They have also aided in securing a fine bell of 800 lbs. The young church at Marietta, Ga., raised $300 for their new church edifice. In a church collection for the American Missionary Association in Marion, one man put in $5, being one-tenth of his crop—a bale of cotton. A man and his wife are sustaining their daughter in the school at Tougaloo with the money saved on snuff and tobacco since they signed the pledge. The church at Wilmington, N. C., claims to be the banner church among the constituents of the American Board, having given more than any other, according to number and means, as judged by the report of Dr. Alden.

The Sunday-Schools, as reported, show a slight increase in numbers, but the reports are not full, and hence the figures do not properly represent the strength of this arm of the service. Revivals have occurred in some of the schools. The Temperance cause holds its place in the hearts and efforts of our workers in the South. In the churches, schools, mission schools, and by the teachers who go out in vacation, is the good work pushed forward.

The Conferences in the South have held their meetings, and Dr. Roy, who was enabled to attend several of them, was delighted with the excellence of the sermons and papers and the ability of the discussions, as well as with the fervor of spiritual life. Some of the Conferences appointed delegates to the National Council. A marked feature at one of these meetings—that of the Alabama Conference at Selma—was the social and religious welcome it received from the white families and churches. Dr. Roy thus reports it:

“You have been told of the new era in our work, marked by the opening of half a dozen of the homes of the first families in Selma, Alabama, for the entertainment of the white members of the Conference. It was not merely the offer of their houses as eating and sleeping places, but it was a delicate and attentive Christian hospitality, which invited the guests around from home to home in order to the extension of acquaintance. When grateful words were said to Major Joseph Hardie for having led the way, he answered that that gave him too much credit; that the places had all been opened cheerfully, and that, after the sessions were over, other families had said: ‘Why didn’t you give us a chance? We would like to have had some of those folks.’ Another host, referring to the mutual satisfaction, said: ‘It is just because we are getting better acquainted.’ In the same line was the opening of the Presbyterian pulpit, morning and night. The exercises of the Conference were of a high order and well sustained throughout. It was much like one of the Western General Associations.”

THE INDIANS.

The experiment of educating Indian youth at Hampton and Carlisle is a confirmed success. We have in the office two pictures—one representing a company of these young Indians as they came to Hampton, in their blankets and with their stolid countenances, and the other taken after they had spent a year in the school. The change in dress is less significant than the bright and intelligent look of the faces in the last picture. A visit among them, as they are engaged in the school-room and at various mechanical employments, accounts for the change. The joint education of the two races, the black and the red, seems helpful to both.

Four agencies, the same number as last year, are under our nomination, and we have favorable reports from each. At the Lake Superior Agency some years ago, the Indians wanted blankets, beads and trinkets; now they want a boarding school. At Fort Berthold, 40 new houses were built this season; at the Sisseton Agency, the Indians dress entirely in citizen’s clothing, live in log houses and cultivate 4,025 acres of land, and the scholars in the boarding and day schools show marked improvement; at the S’Kokomish Agency, the morals, manners, health and homes of the Indians are improving—most of the houses have been ceiled and furnished with good, tight floors. More land has been cleared, and 1,000 fruit trees have been set out.

CHINESE IN AMERICA.

Of our mission on the Pacific coast, the efficient Superintendent, Rev. W. C. Pond, says that not only more, but better work has been done this year than ever before. The total enrolment of pupils is 67 greater than last year, but the most marked gains are in those reported as having ceased from idol-worship, and as giving evidence of conversion; in the former, 180 against 137 last year, and in the latter, 127 against 84.

AFRICA.

The aspect of our Mendi Mission, in a surface survey, seems discouraging. A deeper view discloses one great element of success, and moreover reveals lessons of wisdom that will be of much more value than any transient success.

After maintaining this mission for 30 years with white missionaries, with a rapid death-rate and meagre results, Providence seemed to open to us a plan for using the Freedmen of America, trained in our schools, as missionaries to Africa. Three years since a company was sent out, with Rev. Floyd Snelson as a leader. His age and experience guided the mission well, and the next year new recruits were added. But the failure of Mrs. Snelson’s health compelled him to return with her to this country. The management fell into younger and less experienced hands, and dissensions and complaints ensued. Prof. T. N. Chase, of Atlanta University, accepted our invitation to visit and inspect the mission. Accompanied by Rev. Jos. E. Smith, the pastor of our church in Chattanooga, he spent two months at the mission, making most careful examinations, the result of which he embodies in an extended report. It may suffice here to say that Mr. Chase found many things in an unsatisfactory condition, chargeable in some degree to moral delinquency, but more largely to immaturity of experience and of judgment.

From Mr. Chase’s report and our own knowledge of the affairs of the mission, we reach these results:

1. The colored man of America can endure the climate of western tropical Africa. We have sent to the Mendi Mission 17 persons of that race—seven men, five women and five children. Of this number not one man has died, and but one has been compelled to leave on account of ill-health; nor have any of these, with this one exception, suffered from the African fever so as to hinder their work, except temporarily. The children were not sick; of the women, one died, the wife of Dr. James. Mrs. Miller has been compelled to return as far as England for the recovery of health. In the single case of death and in the three of failure in health, the cause can be traced to the germs of disease in the constitution, existing there prior to leaving America; but in every case of a sound constitution, good health has been maintained. In this we see hopeful evidence that, with careful previous medical examination, the colored people of America can furnish missionaries for tropical Africa capable of enduring the climate and of rendering active service as missionaries—a result full of encouragement.

2. Due allowance must be made for the inadequate training of the young colored missionary. The Anglo-Saxon race has behind it 17 centuries of culture; the negro race in America, 17 years. This should make a difference as to the races. The white candidate for the post of missionary was born in a Christian home, reared in a Christian community, educated in early days with the best culture of school and church, enjoyed afterwards the training of the best college and seminary, with their full corps of highly educated professors, with all the advantages of large libraries, apparatus and lectures; and above all, that unconscious education that comes from constant contact with practical men and cultured society. The colored candidate was born a slave, lived in the slave quarters with no refinements of home or surroundings; his education was in our young and imperfectly equipped schools and colleges, and his knowledge of the world is bounded by this limited horizon. This should make much difference with the individual. Perhaps these facts on both sides have not been duly considered. They will hereafter be fully recognized by us, and will lead us to place the management of our African mission for a time in charge of a white superintendent. They will also dictate a great deal of caution in selecting candidates for that field. We may send fewer at first; we will try to send those that are best prepared.

3. Our experiment with colored missionaries in West Africa has not been discouraging when compared with our former efforts there with white missionaries, or with those of other societies in other parts of Africa. A new impulse has been given to African Missions by the startling discoveries of Stanley and others, and if the Christian world expects these new missions to be crowned with immediate success, it will soon be undeceived. There, as elsewhere, missions must furnish heroes and martyrs, must fight battles, suffer defeats, win victories and endure hardness. Leviathan in the African jungle is not easily tamed, and the efforts which would overcome the barbarism which has for ages defied civilization, and even discovery, will test the “perseverance of the saints.”

In the missions growing out of the new impulse for Tropical Africa discouragement and trial have been nearly everywhere encountered. Of the sixteen missionaries sent so promptly by the Church Missionary Society to establish the mission in Mtesa’s kingdom, some have died, some have returned on account of sickness, and the whole work is now in abeyance. The mission of the London Missionary Society at Ujiji is still pushed forward, yet with much sickness and several deaths, among which is numbered that of the lamented Secretary Mullens. The Livingstonia Mission on Lake Nyassa is compelled to abandon its first station on account of the tsetse fly. The Scotch Blantyre Mission has had the sad experience of wrongs practiced by the missionaries upon the natives, attracting the attention and stirring the sorrow of Great Britain.

We are not alone, then, in the trials of our African Mission, nor must we, more than others, be discouraged. Africa was not forgotten in the Redeemer’s plan. His people must meet and overcome difficulties. The assurance that the colored American can endure the African climate is worth all the effort we have made.

THE DEMANDS OF THE FUTURE.

1. Enlargement in the work already in hand among the Freedmen.

The noble gift of Mrs. Stone, while supplying some of the great and most pressing wants in certain directions, creates new ones in others. It gives additional buildings, but these mean more students, more teachers, more student aid, more libraries, and more apparatus.

Buildings are needed where the gift of Mrs. Stone, great as it is, does not reach—needed as imperiously as where it does. At Talladega, the original building erected before the war at a cost of $30,000, bought by us after the war, used and oft repaired, is thus described by President DeForest: “The walls are staunch, but the roof leaks, and within and without, from foundation to bell-tower, it needs repair. It is estimated that $3,000 are required for this purpose.” A house is also needed as a home for the President, to save room for teachers and pupils in the main buildings. In addition to the $15,000 from the Stone donation, Talladega needs for these buildings and repairs, $10,000. The wants of Tougaloo are even more pressing. The crowd of students defies all means of accommodation. Temporary barracks have been erected, out-buildings and garrets have been used as lodging places, and yet students have been turned away for want of room. The buildings now on the ground need extensive repairs to save them from decay, and additions should be made to the farm buildings to give adequate shelter to the stock and products of the 500 acres of land connected with the school. But what shall we more say? for the time would fail us to tell of the needs of Wilmington, N. C., of Greenwood and Orangeburg, S. C., Mobile, Montgomery and Athens, Ala.

Besides all this we ought to establish, at some eligible point in North Carolina, a chartered institution of higher grade, with a boarding department. We have for a long while felt the need of this, and have only been deterred by the lack of means. We ought also to found an institution in Arkansas, similar to that in Austin, Texas. We are just beginning efforts among the Refugees in Kansas, and these should be greatly increased, and include churches, schools and lady missionaries.

Endowments are an absolute necessity for our institutions at the South. Here are eight institutions, carefully managed, efficient in work, and furnished with buildings equal in number and size with some at the West of much greater age. These Western schools have in most instances the nucleus of an endowment, if not a complete one. Those in the South need endowments much more, and have almost nothing of the sort.

2. But enlargement should far transcend the limits of the work already in hand among the Freedmen. We take it for granted that every portion of the population of this country must have equal facilities open to it for education and advancement. No part of that population is so inadequately supplied as the four and a half millions of colored people in the South. There were in 1875, in this country, 1,932 schools of grades above the primary. Of this whole number, the four and a half millions of colored people have access to but 91! It must be borne in mind that in this number of schools (1,932) Harvard, Yale and Oberlin are but units, with their ample endowments, teachers of finest culture, libraries and apparatus of the best and largest; and to balance them the colored people can only point to a few new and inadequately furnished schools, of which those of this Association are among the best.

There were in 1875 in this country, 3,647 libraries, numbering 300 volumes and upwards in each. Of that number, the colored people of the South have access to 25! The same disparity is found here in regard to the size and quality of the libraries open to them as in regard to the schools and colleges.

It will not do to say that these people need only primary schools. No race can rise unless it has leaders who can teach and encourage the masses; nor will it suffice to say that the few seeking special advantages can go to colleges at the North. The people of the West cannot send their sons to Eastern colleges in adequate numbers. The West has, and must have, its own colleges. How can the poor ex-slaves of the South send their children to the North for education, when most of them have a life struggle with the wolf at the door?

Here, then, are glimpses at the great duty that this nation owes to the Freedmen for its own sake as well as theirs. But that duty involves enlargement, fifty-fold, of what is now done for them.

3. The work of the A.M.A. beyond the South needs enlarging.

The Chinese schools in California need the permanency of having buildings under their own control, and Bro. Pond earnestly desires the means to reach the “Chinese in the mines.”

The work of educating Indians at the East should be extended. It is not a substitute for schooling among the tribes; it helps it. Capt. Pratt, who inaugurated this movement in Hampton, and who now conducts the large Government school for Indian youth at Carlisle, is very earnest that more—much more—should be done in this direction. The power of the movement, in his opinion, will be measured by its extent. He is anxious that every school of the American Missionary Association in the South should be prepared to receive Indians. This broad plan deserves the careful thought of the Association, but if adopted, it will necessitate not a little enlargement of accommodations and of the teaching force.

But Africa! what does the future ask at our hands in her behalf? When we recall the struggles of the past for her enslaved children in this country, when we think of the graves of our missionaries in the Mendi country, and when we hear her children in our schools asking to be sent thither, we feel called to a new and strong effort to equip completely the mission on the West coast. The East coast calls to us also. The Arthington Mission, though we have moved cautiously, is neither forgotten nor abandoned. The generous offer of Mr. Arthington still remains; considerable sums have been collected in this country and in Great Britain, and as soon as the adequate amount ($50,000) can be secured, we shall feel called to go forward.

From all these considerations, we ask for a new and wide enlargement of our work. The duty to America and to Africa demands it. Especially do we urge that America owes it to its own safety and honor that it shall adequately care for the Freedmen. But who will take the lead in the movement to enlarge? The Pilgrims and Puritans of New England were the first to plant liberty, education and religion on these shores; they were on the crest of the wave that carried these blessings across the continent to the Pacific slope; they were foremost in the great anti-slavery struggle; they were in the van of the armies that fought for the unity of the nation and the freedom of the slave; they were the first, through this Association, to take the school and the Gospel to the Freedmen at Fortress Monroe; and who but they should see the great need of the hour, and step forth to meet it?

SUMMARY OF THE TREASURER’S REPORT FOR THE YEAR ENDING SEPT. 30TH, 1880.

RECEIPTS.

EXPENSES.

The receipts of Berea College, Hampton N. and A. Institute, and Atlanta University, are added below, as presenting at one view the contributions of the same constituency for the general work in which the Association is engaged.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND ENLARGEMENT.

Your Committee on Finance and Enlargement, to whom was referred the financial exhibit of the Association for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 1880, as presented by the Treasurer, beg leave to report that they have examined the accounts and found them duly audited. These accounts include a minute and detailed statement of receipts and expenditures, a list of the endowments, and also a full account of the property owned by the Association, and were accompanied by the account books of the Treasurer.

We are unanimous in vouching for the faithfulness and economy which characterize all branches of the financial administration. Nor can we refrain from a word of most emphatic commendation of the thorough explicitness of the Association’s financial statement.

But passing from this to the substance of the Report, we notice three points suggested by it which seem to call for special mention.

In the first place, it is ground for gratitude and thanksgiving that the year closes without leaving us burdened with a debt. On the contrary, there is a balance in the treasury of nearly eight hundred dollars. Not a very large surplus, surely, but the fact that the year’s work has been done and left us anything besides a disheartening deficiency, is itself occasion for thankfulness and cheer.

In the second place, there is ground for anxiety, lest the financial condition of the Association should be misunderstood. It is well known that a gift of $150,000 has recently come into its treasury. This fact, it is to be feared, has given, or may give, the impression that the Association is, for the present at least, in no further need of funds. We have already heard of one generous friend who has withheld an intended gift through such an entire misapprehension. And lest others should be similarly misled, it seems to us important not only to state, but to emphasize the fact, that this large gift brings no relief whatever to the usual wants of the Association. It is not designed to do the work which the Association is doing. This money is wholly appropriated to the erection of new buildings for the increasing numbers of colored students. It is to do nothing whatever towards meeting the ordinary expenses of the Association’s work; nothing whatever towards diminishing the necessity of aid which the Association is compelled to seek from the Christian and the philanthropist. It cannot be too clearly seen or too widely known, that so far as any augmented power for doing its proper work is concerned, the Association is not one whit better off for this gift of $150,000 than it would be if not a dollar of it had been given. But,

In the third place, this gift is itself a trumpet call for the enlargement of the Association’s resources and work. It is simply to erect new buildings for Fisk and Atlanta, at Talladega, New Orleans and Tougaloo. These buildings will soon be filled with students. That means the necessity for more teachers and more pecuniary aid to those who need it. It means increased work for the Association, and the necessity of increased funds with which to do the work. In one word, it means expansion, enlargement. God, Himself, is opening before us new furrows in hitherto untilled fields. That is His own call upon us for more seed-corn, and more labor for the enlarging harvest. He is building for us new homes for the development of mental culture and Christian character among the colored people of the South. Each one of these is a Divine summons for such co-operation on our part as is necessary for the best accomplishment of His designs.

In conclusion, therefore, your Committee respectfully suggest the adoption of the following resolution:

“Resolved, While most gratefully acknowledging the prosperity that has crowned our work through another year, we recognize and accept that prosperity as itself a call from God for still larger and more earnest work.”

W. H. Willcox, Chairman.

WHY WE SHOULD ENLARGE.

REV. L. T. CHAMBERLAIN, D.D., NORWICH, CONN.

I have been invited to the privilege of additionally sustaining the report of your Committee in their recommendation of an enlargement of the work of this Association; and, as a member of that Committee, I may say that we could not possibly have reported otherwise than we did. I could not have read the record of this last year, and have seen its events as our honored Secretary has presented them, without feeling that the movement must be toward an increase in every department.

Sir, you were entirely right in drawing your inspiration in part from the wonderful past. I, too, have recalled the years gone by, and they seem to say, as with one voice, that the time has come for the yet greater effort. My brethren, what a history sweeps back from this thirty-fourth anniversary, to the day when, in this same Commonwealth, the Amistad captives were bravely released, and an additional impulse was given to the anti-slavery sentiment of the participants! At that hour, the men who afterwards founded this Association, looked out on a tumultuous sea of discouragements. Themselves only a handful; the press absolutely unfriendly; the market-place contemptuous; the State frowning; the Church in general incredulous and silent; scarcely anything anywhere that did not wear a hostile front. And then, at last, one missionary commissioned and one teacher sent out; one paper persuaded into partial support; a few dollars given into the treasury; and a few steadfast souls pledging themselves to maintain the cause. But, to-day, what a different record! A great, honored organization, with an annual income approaching the fifth of a million; three hundred and thirty ministers, missionaries and teachers; seventy-six mission, and yet, for the most part, self-sustaining churches; more than five thousand intelligent church members, and nearly ten thousand pupils in the Sunday-schools; seventy-one common schools, normal schools, colleges and theological seminaries, with more than ten thousand eager and advancing students. An organization that takes effective hold on four millions of Freedmen, and then enlarges its bounds to take in the resident and emigrant Chinese, and the tribes of original Indians. An organization able to inspire the churches with missionary zeal, and making even our national Government respect its requests and its advice.

What a review is that, and almost within the space of a single generation. The success that has already been accomplished is reason why, at the very outset, we may call you to a hopeful and an enlarged interest in this work; for history is telling us to-day, if she tells us anything, that it is not a hopeless thing to attempt to provide efficiently for all the despised of our land. And, let me say, I should not hesitate to make that hopeful appeal, if there were no such glowing record to present. I would not change the tone of it, though the years rolled back, and you and I stood to-day where those men stood thirty and four years ago; for Christ has said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and has said distinctly that our neighbors are pre-eminently those who have fallen among thieves and are lying wounded by the way. That simple command is enough to assure us that our labor shall not be in vain. You and I know whom we have believed, and we know that whatever He commands is commanded in infinite wisdom and infinite love. We know that what He says we are to do, it is possible to do, and that in some way it shall be done. The stars in their courses, and earth, and hell, may fight against Christ, but sooner or later He is to reign.

Therefore, when the Master calls us, his requirement is enough to warrant us in our advance. On that simple requirement, backed by, and reflected in, the impulse of every regenerate soul, you may ground your missionary motive. That is the corner-stone on which, with abiding cheer and infinite courage, the missionary, and every friend of missions, may build forever. Therefore, while we have this firm foundation, and all the more that we have it, it is for us to note the actual progress that has been made. While we recur to these absolute considerations, let us not, through any attempt at unnecessary heroism, forget the fulfillment that has already been vouchsafed to the promise and to the command of Christ.

And now that I am speaking of motives, let me say that I cannot conceal my feeling that, with special and peculiarly appealing considerations, God is binding upon us the work for the so-called alien races of this country. Let me illustrate. Here, for example, are four millions of Freedmen—strange designation for the inhabitants of a Republic that has already celebrated its centennial! Suppose that a stranger to our history should ask us the meaning of it, what must be our confession? Why this, and nothing else: that the ancestors of those Freedmen, by fraud, and violence were wrested from their distant and native land; that for two centuries they were held in sheer and open bondage; that they were denied the commonest rights of humanity; bought and sold like beasts of the field; debarred from the privileges of education and true Christian instruction; that, while their toil went to build the colleges and schools and churches of the dominant race, they were left without any reward but the desolation of their bondage; that, when they piteously plead, their appeal was met with derision; that, when they respectfully protested, the protest was crushed back with blows and curses; that when they ventured to resist, the resistance was answered unto death, with lashes and bullets and the fangs of pursuing hounds; that manhood was deliberately degraded among them; womanhood was well-nigh obliterated; truthfulness was made dangerous for them, and chastity absolutely impossible; and then at last, that to keep them in such a bondage, the whole power of the National Government was pledged and put forth; that, by Constitution interpreted and special laws enacted, by military might and civic decree, by private volition and public compulsion, it came to pass that there was not one spot of safety for them in all the land over which floated the flag of their country; that, in their effort to escape from their bondage, not a single door might lawfully be opened to them, nor any hearth-stone give them shelter; but, taking the pole-star for their guide, they must flee from the Republic to the land of a king or queen.

Pardon me that I have opened the record. I confess it makes me sick at heart. With you I wish it had never been enacted; with you I wish it might be buried to-day in the deepest depths of oblivion. But I tell you, when we stand, as we do practically to-day, in the face of those men, and in the face of God who made us and them of one image and of one blood, we have no right to forget that guilty past. It is one of the mighty motives that are still to be invoked in their behalf. Like the blood of Abel, it cries to us for atonement. It says to us to-day, “In your nation, aided and abetted by you or your fathers, under your flag, that wrong was inflicted; and until that wrong is thoroughly righted, neither the remembrance nor the cry can be allowed to pass.” It says that you owe them every reparation in your power; that they have a valid lien on every dollar of your property, and on every possible degree of your culture. It is not enough that you have made them free—to have denied that would have been to perpetuate the wrong itself. It is not enough that you have given them the franchise—that in itself were a barren gift. Give them the rather that manhood that was their birth-right withheld. Lift them up, if you can, into truthfulness and purity, intelligence and industry; make them free with the freedom of the Gospel of Christ, and then that past may be forgotten.

And brethren, I make an appeal of that same sort to-day for the Indian and the Chinese;—the Indian, abused, deceived, made a fool of; a nominally Christian civilization degrading him beyond even his original degradation. And the Chinese, in that part of the land where they have chosen to dwell, despised, defrauded, spit upon. My claim is that whatever appeal you propose to disregard, it is not becoming for you to turn a deaf ear to those whom you have so foully wronged.

Moreover,—and I beg you to ponder this also,—you owe a debt of gratitude, in the case of the Freedmen at least,—with whom this Association is chiefly concerned,—that has not yet been discharged. And now, is it imagined that I am speaking of something far-fetched and fanciful? Does any body suppose that I am about to summon you by a visionary and distant appeal? Or, if anyone guess wherein it is claimed that that debt consists, is it supposed that time has made that claim no longer valid? Some may so reflect; I cannot share the feeling, for I cannot so easily forget the days and the months when the scales of our national destiny hung in equipoise, or seemed to vibrate towards the nation’s overthrow. It seems incredible, I know, but such was the fact. We had put forth what appeared to us well-nigh the last resource for the national defense; on every side the prospect was dark; it seemed sometimes as if we should be driven to question whether we were not doomed to overthrow—the heavens black above us, the billows rolling, and the very earth beneath our feet trembling and being moved. For the enemy smote us in the field and the traitor betrayed us at home. And you remember with what unspeakable thankfulness we then saw those who had suffered so much at the nation’s hands coming to our rescue, forgetting their personal wrongs, and fighting for the flag that had hitherto been to them an object of dread. You remember with what eagerness we offered them at last their freedom, lest the enemy should offer it to them before us. Why, what were we not willing to pledge, and to do, for the Freedmen in those days? We felt that they were helping us to save this Republic, and that the balance of power was in their hands; and did we mistake? Does history say that in the excitement we misread the facts? No, the after events proved the correctness of our thought; and it stands written in simple, imperishable lines to-day, that among the saviors of the country, there were none more deserving than those of darker skin, who forgot their wrongs and stood in the breach for you and me.

And so it comes to pass that, not only in obedience to the command of Christ but by the threefold consideration of repairing a wrong, and paying a debt, and averting a danger, we are called to the continuance and the enlargement of the work of this Association.

I have suggested two lines of action, parallel and coincident; the one educational, and the other strictly religious. I want to say to you now, that the inspiration for those movements must come in large measure from the Christian North; for, if you ask the South to be wholly responsible for her own improvement, then you ask reformation to precede itself, and a disordered and perverse sentiment to be its own awakener and its own corrective. Should you suppose that a nation of Freedmen, after two centuries of bondage, would have the sufficient desire for improvement, not to say the means adequate for its accomplishment? I deem it to be perfectly clear that this Association is right in thinking that one great part of its work is in laying the foundations, and affording the facilities, for increased instruction among the Freedmen. It is undoubted good sense, I take it, to establish here and there a common school, and here and there a normal school, and a moderate number of colleges, to the end that in them, during this formative period of the Freedman’s life, you may train his future teachers,—not attempting to make the way of mental improvement over-easy; not attempting any pampering plan of encouragement; but simply affording opportunity to those who will struggle and practice self-denial. God bless the institutions at Hampton, and Carlisle, and Berea, and Nashville, and Atlanta, and Talladega, and New Orleans, and Tougaloo, and that institution that has the good fortune, sir, to have you for its presiding officer (Howard University). For, do you know it? the former students of those very institutions are to-day teaching one hundred thousand of their own countrymen.

And then the religious work, the saving of souls—what a call for enlargement in that work! for that underlies even the educational work. Every teacher I know is an ardent and an earnest worker for Christ, and all your attempt is to make the way to education, the way to the cross of Christ; but, besides that, there is the preaching of the Gospel, and the gathering of churches, and the opening of Sunday-schools. I used to wonder why you asked us to preach to the Freedmen. Were they not already religious? Were they not gathered in churches? But I came to know the terrible fact that religion among the Freedmen, was not the religion of the understanding mind and the consecrated heart, but, rather, in the olden time, of uninstructed impulse and uncontrollable passion; and to-day the prevailing testimony concerning those old-time churches is, that in them religion is not founded on a regenerate, or even a moral, life.

What a task then, to lift up those millions—more difficult, I sometimes think, than the conversion of the original heathen! And yet it must be done—done for the sake of the souls who else will perish in their sins; done for the sake of this country that we love; done, first and last and always, by thoroughly Christian instrumentalities; and yet done under motives that take hold on the concerns of our national welfare. Therefore, my friends, count all the past progress in this direction only the signal and the token of your future success and triumph. If to-day the doors are opened wide, let us, in the Master’s name, go up and possess this land for Him, and for the future of our united and Christian Republic.

So much for this land. And what shall I say of Africa, that dark continent beyond the seas? I think of Africa, and the longing burns in my soul, that out of the uplifted negroes there may speedily be trained those who shall carry Divine light into the very depths of her darkness. Is not Africa actually reaching out her hands to this Association, and to us who have in our care so many of her children? You say, ‘the last to be enlightened.’ I grant it; but, I assure you, God has a great future for that continent. Who shall say that there, there will not yet be developed a civilization and a manifestation of Christianity, the most bountiful, the most beautiful, of them all?

Ah, my friends, the cry comes to us not merely from Africa! This call for enlargement is wider still; it is from the four quarters of the globe. For the work is all one; and you will find, if you think of it, that the solidarity of the race, the oneness of the kingdom of Christ, is in the appeal that is made through this Association. The considerations of an illimitable future join with those of the present. The new heavens and the new earth await our preparation for their advent. Christ, in His kingly glory, is summoning us to the conflict and the conquest. Let us advance in His name. With unlimited devotion let us give, let us pray, let us work. For once hath God spoken, yea, twice have I heard it, to God belongs the power, even as to Him shall be the glory forever.

SACRIFICIAL LIVING AND GIVING.

REV. AUGUSTUS F. BEARD, D.D., SYRACUSE, N. Y.

The kingdom of Heaven, in its ways, has many similitudes in the kingdom of nature. The law of the universe is, the giving of the lower for the sake of the higher. The worlds are built on the principle of sacrifice. At the bottom of the scale, we have, for example, lifeless matter. But this is put under contribution to force, and simple matter is organized into systems. And this giving comes under a law; we call it gravitation. Then this in turn comes under contribution to what is called a law of chemical affinity, and matter is diversified, and enters into many combinations in advance of what was. The forces, of which light and heat, electricity and magnetism, are different forms, also expend themselves. Then there is a step up by the contribution of what was, to this end, and we have the first organic process, vegetable life and its forces. The soil under these influences gives vegetable life, giving up a part of itself for a higher end. The vegetable, in turn, gives itself for the animal, and the human soul finds these all in sacrificial contribution to itself, every one giving for that which is higher, to lead up to the highest. Nature is packed through and through with illustrations of this. Thus the worlds are built upon this law. By the law of sacrifice, the lower rises into that which is higher. So Christ taught us it is, and is to be, in the realm of the soul. He taught us by word, by deed, by example, that sacrifice is not only the highest, the most satisfying, the most exhaustive expression of love, but is God’s way for man to reach up to God. It was the climax of this law that found expression in the gift of Christ, and we but follow God’s law in Christ’s way, when we are ready to sacrifice lower good for higher good, to bring into contribution lesser things for greater things. And life rises to its highest when it is sacrificial in its self-abnegations; in its renunciations, when souls are uplifted into heroic sufferings and self denials. In wives for husbands, in husbands for wives, in parents for children, in patriotic soldiers, in Christian philanthropists. Men who incarnate their love in sacrifice rise by their giving. They reach to nobleness upon the “stepping-stone of their dead selves.” They put off earthiness and put on heavenliness. It is God’s law from lowest to highest. That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. To give is to live.

So we come to the Christian’s highest doctrine. It is that of the cross. We sing “In the cross of Christ we glory.” We accept it as the chief doctrine of our religion. We see the grandest exhibition of it when Christ gave himself for the sake of a greater good than could be if he did not give himself; and we teach that it is the personal reception of this which is the mark of one who has a right to wear the name of Christ. To this doctrine the churches hold. Christians subscribe to it. We stoutly contend for it.

But now for our interpretations of this doctrine. When the exigencies of the world and the demands of a spreading Gospel call for willing hearts, to what degree do we find the principle in cordial and worthy practice? How many are the reasons for self indulgence! How ready to hide out of sight the great central doctrine when appeals come for its practical application! How arrangements are made in churches to cajole out of Christians what they will not give on principle! Who does not know many a church that squeezes out its charities,—if not a good part of its miserable support,—by fairs and festivals, by some wretched subterfuge in which one shall seem to get value received and make no sacrifice, to replenish its exchequer by tricks which appeal to no Christian principle. And how often churches come before the world, which they should be dying to save, as objects themselves of the world’s charities, dying to be saved. That which is ordained to be a dispenser of Christ-like benevolence and to develop the spirit of sacrifice, cannot rise into anything higher if it ignores the only law by which it can rise. The call for enlargement is the call for sacrifice. It is a call that religion shall not alone be a theory to be preached, but a life to be manifested.

* * * * * The call for enlargement of Christian work from every portion of the world, is a call to all. There appears to be no great lack of Christian men and women to go anywhere, to do anything for Christ. But how shall they go except they be sent? And here comes with emphatic intensiveness the appeal of Providence (and I hope with it may be heard the appeal of the Holy Spirit), that those who are engaged in other departments of life shall not forget their service. Let me say it plainly, what is needed now more than men, is money, the consecration of property, the sacrificial life in men who accumulate property. I do not think that there is a more universally unpopular theme to discourse about than money. If we preach about the giving of men, the church weeps and prays, and says “Amen.” But when we preach about the giving of money, how many meet this at least with a mental shrug, and do not love to have the Lord’s days made common and unclean with the money question? That which they have been seeking for all the week should not be dragged in too often on the day set apart for rest. But if we pause a moment, we shall remember how full the Bible is of directions about giving, and how much of the Lord’s teaching had reference to a right use of money. The unprofitable servant “dug in the earth and hid his Lord’s money.” Ruskin, I think, somewhere says that we, in the spiritual application of this, say that, of course, this doesn’t mean money. It means wit, it means intellect, it means influence in high quarters, it means everything in the world except itself. And a very pleasant come-off there is for the most of us in this spiritual application. Of course, if we had wit, we would use it for the benefit of our fellow creatures. But we haven’t wit. If we had influence, we would use that. But we are without political power. It is true we have a little money; but the parable can’t possibly mean anything so vulgar as money.

And yet it does mean what it says, plain money, good, hard, honest money. We are not to “hide the Lord’s money.” So also the parable of the talents means money, and we are to accept the meaning on its own terms, and not to dodge away under a metaphor.

If one man is richer than others, he has more “talents” to account for; and to use another’s words, “what he has acquired is the measure of what he owes.” Why is one man richer than another; that he may higher arch his own gates, pave better his own threshold, enrich more gorgeously his own chambers with all manner of costliness? No doubt, as a steward he may rejoice in his stewardship, but do we remember in just what catalogue inspiration places covetousness? Has any Christian a right to live for self, to cling to riches for self-aggrandizement, to consume riches upon his own lusts or set at naught the infinite urgency of the world’s wants? No, friends. There is a kind of justice in a certain thought of communism. God’s law of life is a law of service. No man has a right under Christ’s law of life to heap up riches in order to lord it over men, only to serve them. Ye have heard, said Christ, how, among the Gentiles, they that will be great exercise authority; they use their strength to exact from others, but it shall not be so among you. He that will be great among you, let him serve others, and be ye ministers even as Christ came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. And no one has a right to hoard for self-aggrandizement, or to use wealth to exact from others, and communism with all its wrongs has a truth here, but when those who have, use to bless those who have not, then that is the way of Christ. When causes like this before us call for enlargement, there is money enough which should be in the Lord’s treasury. It is there. It is the Lord’s. He gave the quickness of apprehension, the clearness of judgment, the strength of will which secures it.

WORKING OUT THE EQUATION.

DISTRICT SECRETARY POWELL.

It is the dictate of economy that we push the Southern work of this Association. It is cheaper to fight ignorance and crime with Christian education, than to fight their certain outcome with military and police force. It is vastly cheaper to settle the bills for the services of the Christian teacher now, than to meet the settlement of accumulated wrongs in the outbreak of a war or rebellion by and by. And this is a kind of settlement that must be met. There is in the universe a law of recompense; God in the government of the world is always working out equations. He may require centuries to bring about the result; if so, he takes them. Men are not far-sighted enough to see the outcome. The wicked grow bold and defiant and boastful because of punishment delayed, while the righteous for the same reason are led to cry out, “How long, oh Lord! how long shall wickedness be allowed to go unrebuked?” but all the while the law of recompense is filling out the equation. The eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth principle is rolling up the answer. Only give it time, and right shall have triumphant, though it may be terrible, vindication. In the case of individuals, the working of this law is not so evident, because retribution follows them beyond the grave, but in the case of nations, since they have no other life than in this world, settlement must take place here; and it never fails. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generations, and there is no escaping the visitations.

I might appeal to the history of nations, the record of whose career has been completed, in illustration of this, but a pertinent illustration can be found nearer home, even in our own country. This nation cherished and protected by law the institution of slavery. With an open Bible in the land, with Protestant Christianity in the ascendancy, with the light of a free Gospel shining upon all questions of morals, with the sentiment of enlightened Christendom smiting heavily the iniquity of the sin; nay, with a constitution for its government, a preamble which declared that all men were created free and equal; right in the face of all this, and despite all this, the giant iniquity and monstrous contradiction was fostered and protected by the law of the land. But the equation was working out. The day of reckoning at length came, and, in the settlement, justice exacted full payment.

In his second inaugural address, President Lincoln expressed the sentiment, that, if it were God’s will for the war to continue “till the wealth piled up by two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil of the bondmen be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn by the lash be repaid by another drawn by the sword, as it was said three thousand years ago, so must it still be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” This sentiment was prophetic, and ere the war ended the prophecy had been more than realized by literal fulfillment. Just see how it was fulfilled. Henry Clay once said that taking the slaves as they were—old and young, sick and disabled—the average value was about five hundred dollars per slave. The money value, at this estimate, of the four and a half million emancipated, would be two billion, two hundred and fifty million dollars. This amount, at ten per cent. interest for thirty years, or one generation, would yield, as value created by slave labor, six billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars, which amount, added to the market value of the slaves, makes the enormous sum of nine billion dollars, as representing the wealth “piled up by the unrequited toil of the bondmen,” and held by the oppressors in utter defiance of justice and right.

Nine billion dollars! Can it be that amount was sunk in the war? The answer is yes, and at least six hundred and fifty million dollars more! I take the figures from a responsible source, and they are these: To put down the rebellion it cost the North four billion seven hundred million dollars. To sustain the rebellion it cost the South two billion seven hundred million dollars; add now to this the market value of the slaves emancipated, two billion two hundred and fifty million dollars, and we have, as the total, nine billion six hundred and fifty million dollars, which this nation spent in order to rid itself of the curse of slavery. That was the equation in dollars. As to the equation in blood, justice was even more severe in the exaction. Every drop of blood drawn by the lash, it is no exaggeration to say, exacted for its canceling, not a drop merely, but a stream. A million graves moistened by the blood of those who fell on the field of battle, to say nothing of the blood that ran from the bodies of the wounded millions who survived, gave fearful emphasis to the divine equation. The wealth piled up by the bondmen’s unrequited toil was sunk, and much more in addition; the blood drawn by the lash was more than canceled by the blood drawn by the sword, and still, even in the presence of these awful facts, we are compelled to say, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

It would have been vastly cheaper, we can now see, for this nation to have paid every dollar of the money valuation of the slaves, and set them free before the war; it would have been better still had the iniquity been stamped out at the very formation of the Government, and this because right demanded it. But unfortunately, the standard of our national legislation has been expediency, not right, and under this cover slavery unwisely admitted within the defenses of our constitution, has proved to be the Trojan horse whence has issued so large a part of our national woes. And now, shall we heed the lesson this dearly bought experience teaches? The negro problem is by no means yet solved. There are questions pertaining to his social and political rights not yet answered. Let this nation try to answer them on any other ground than a full recognition of the negro’s rights as a man, and it will again come into controversy with Jehovah, and again be called sooner or later to pay the penalty of disobedience, dollar for dollar, blood for blood, over and over and over again. It pays for the nation to do right every time, and it does not pay for it to do anything else. Having made these people free, justice and self-interest say “educate them,” and it will prove as a matter of mere economy, far cheaper to do this now than to meet the bills that by and by must be paid in blood and money when God shall take the matter in hand to fill out the equation.

THE FREEDMEN.

REV. JOS. E. ROY, D.D.,

FIELD SUPERINTENDENT, ATLANTA, GA.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON EDUCATIONAL WORK.

* * * * We note with pleasure the growing interest in our schools, and approval of them, by the best people of the South and the public men of the North; the recent erection of a fine building for Tillotson Institute, at Austin, Texas; the munificent gift of $150,000 by Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, to be expended in putting up additional buildings, greatly needed for institutions which have outgrown their present accommodations; the recent acceptance by Christian workers of high standing and rare fitness, of positions in our Southern field; the successful development of industrial methods in many of our best schools, notably at Hampton, Tougaloo, and Memphis; the influence of our institutions on the colored people, as seen in their interest in education, their willingness to endure self-denial as teachers, their hopeful, dispassionate and sensible utterances on their prospects and duties, and their courageous self-support; and once again, and most of all, do we note rejoicingly the prevailing religious sentiment that fills our schools and the colored communities which they reach, with its deep, quiet, but melodious undertone. Surely there is reason, in all these considerations, for profound thankfulness to God.

We are impressed with the call in the Secretary’s Annual Report for enlargement. With the added facilities now providentially given and soon to be enjoyed, in the shape of new buildings at Austin, New Orleans, Nashville, Tougaloo, and Atlanta, there is a necessity for larger contributions for the education of the increased numbers to be accommodated. Similar facilities are loudly called for by the growth of schools at other points, and the Report suggests the need of new schools in Kansas and Arkansas. We cannot forget that the second grade of education will not be complete till these institutions are properly endowed, and the students, coming out of poverty-stricken homes, receive annually, either from scholarships or personal gifts, the small sums necessary to supplement their own earnings, and so to make their education possible.

Especially do we recognize the need at this juncture, of more efficient theological training. Our church work cannot prosper unless educated colored men are raised up to act as missionaries and pastors. The theological training now given, is, from the want of proper facilities,—with the exception, perhaps, of the work at Howard University, where the Presbyterians share in the support of the department,—of the most meagre and unsatisfactory character. We greatly wish that some large-hearted Christian givers might find it their privilege suitably to endow the theological schools already existing, that they might become, in all respects, for the colored students of the South, what Andover, Chicago and other similar schools are for the white students of the North.

Respectfully submitted by your Committee.

Addison P. Foster, Chairman.

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.

REV. ADDISON P. FOSTER, JERSEY CITY, N. J.

We have all noticed that of late public attention has been much drawn to the need of universal education in this land as a means of national safety. That book to which reference has been made several times in this meeting, and which every thoughtful man must read if he would inform himself in regard to the trend of popular thought to-day, “A Fool’s Errand,” by Judge Tourgee, concludes with an argument for the need of national education in these words:

“The remedy for darkness is light; for ignorance, knowledge; for wrong, righteousness. * * * Make the spelling-book the sceptre of national power. Let the nation educate the colored man and the poor white man, because the nation held them in bondage and is responsible for their education. Educate the voter because the nation cannot afford that he should be ignorant. * * * Honest ignorance in the masses is more to be dreaded than malevolent intelligence in the few.”

To the same effect are the words of our honored President Hayes, in his speech at Canton, Ohio, on the 1st of September last: “Ignorant voters are powder and balls for the demagogues. In the present condition of our country, universal education requires the aid of the General Government.” * * * * * *

Education, then, is called for. But the danger that specially attacks us is in the South. * * * There is more than twenty per cent. of illiteracy all through the Southern portion of our land. * * * But this illiteracy is largest, unquestionably, among those who are black. It has been stated that in one of our Southern States ninety per cent. of the colored people are illiterate; in another, ninety-one per cent.; in another, ninety-three per cent.; in another, ninety-five per cent.; and in Mississippi and Texas ninety-six per cent. Eighty-eight per cent. of the entire colored people in the South are illiterate—or were in 1870; undoubtedly it has changed somewhat since.

We are to labor, then, in our desire to secure popular education, especially among the blacks, and through the blacks we are to reach the whites. * * * But, as we educate the blacks, we ask ourselves, What sort of education shall it be? And I would say, it must be a Christian education. It can be nothing else if it is to accomplish its work. Public men, speaking on political subjects, refer only to a secular education. It is well that they should enforce that and insist upon it; but were we to content ourselves with secular education alone, we should make the most grievous mistake of the century. It is impossible to rely upon secular education for the saving of the nation; we must make it a Christian education as well.

Look at the influences of a merely secular education as seen in biography and history. What has the highest secular education done for men? It has made them simply one-sided, imperfect specimens of manhood, deformed and dwarfed in some of those most essential characteristics that give a man influence here, and happiness hereafter. A man like Hume could defend suicide. Highly-trained intellects like those of Voltaire and Rousseau could advocate licentiousness, both by word and by life. Men and women like J. S. Mill, George H. Lewes, George Eliot, and that gifted but vile woman, Sara Bernhardt, have traduced the idea of marriage, and put a stigma upon the purest relationship that God has given to earth. Education, mere intellectual training, has done nothing for the morals of these people. There was a prisoner executed a few years since in the State of New York, whose great grief before his execution for the terrible crime of murder, was that he could not live long enough to complete a very learned work which he was preparing on some science. And even the honored State of Massachusetts has on its criminal record the name of a professor in one of its highest institutions of learning who committed murder in a moment of passion.

Look at history, if you will, and is not the record the same? Take such nations as Greece, for example,—that wonderful land that reached the highest perfection in culture, in history, in song and in eloquence. Yet that land was sunk in the depths of impurity, and some of the crimes that were prevalent in those days I would not dare to mention in your presence. Take Rome,—that wonderful city, that ennobled the idea of law, that produced such marvelous intellects in the Augustan age. Yet in the very triumph of its intellect, as the capstone of intellectual pride went on to that magnificent temple of literature, the foundations of national virtue were rotten to the core and began to tremble, and presently the whole structure fell in ruins.

I tell you, my friends, there is no safety in mere secular education; it must be Christian as well. We need to put education into the control of principle; otherwise our education may simply give us a certain evil power over other men, and eventually bring ruin upon us. We need to put principle in control in order that whatever we may know shall be turned in the direction of purity, of uprightness and of helpfulness to our fellow-men. And so here, if we are to have an education for the blacks, or an education for the land, we must not content ourselves with what has been called for by these public men.

I say, then, that just here the work of this Association comes in. However much may be done by others, however much a secular education may attempt to accomplish, it can never cover the ground that is absolutely necessary. We have a secular education in the North, and it is doing much, but it has never done a religious work; nor will it ever do such in the future. We cannot expect that it should; and we feel a peculiar sensitiveness in this matter,—perhaps a sensitiveness that is not too great. We cannot trust the State to educate our young religiously. I, for one, confess a profound distrust of all State universities. I too often have seen those universities, in their attempt to be non-sectarian, ministering to the interests of that intensest of sectaries—the infidel. I will go even further than this, although I may carry but few of you with me in this conviction. I fear the methods of higher education in our high schools are not always what they should be. I have too often seen those who were the disciples of Huxley and Tyndall in science, and of Spencer and of Taine in sociology, literature and history, teaching their pupils doctrines that were insidious in their religious influence. I should be glad for one to see a return to the old-time academy system of New England, under which students who valued education enough to pay for it, were taught all branches of a higher learning on a Christian foundation, and trained first of all and most of all in character building.

But whatever you may say in regard to this matter, I am sure that I shall carry you with me in this conviction, that in the South, in our labor among the blacks, our institutions must be of this character and can be of no other. We must have institutions that shall furnish Christian homes. Those who come to our institutions, come from places where they have no such Christian training as have most of those who are in public schools in this more favored portion of the land; and those in the South, if they are to have a Christian training at all, must have it in schools that are under the management of Christian men, in chartered and endowed institutions, cared for by Christian boards of trustees. It is this Association that is doing precisely this kind of work; and this Association and others like it will, I firmly believe, be called on by God for years to come to labor with the same devotedness as they have in the past for the salvation of the land.

My friends, our land is in danger. I am profoundly moved with an anxiety for a land which should be dearer to us than life. It has seemed to me, as I have looked over this broad extent of country, that there were flames of fraud and violence springing up here and there, that were working disaster to our republic, and that would in time—if we may judge by the history of other republics that have been similarly controlled by evil influences, as France in the last century and Spain in this, and Greece and Rome in the centuries gone by—bring this our beloved land to wreck and ruin. And yet we have a God above, and He has given us methods of fighting the flames.

This summer the woods of New Jersey were all ablaze, and the farmers went out into the forests to fight the fire that they might save their homes and their property from desolation; and the method they pursued was this: to build against those fires a back fire that should rage more furiously and destroy the other flame as it advanced. It is your business and mine to

“Take up the torch of truth
And wave it wide,”

to take up this blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and carry it all through the South, and touch points here and there until at length we have the fires blazing all over the land, and ignorance is dispersed in the light of the Gospel. Already, in almost every Southern State, these fires are lighted and the work goes gloriously on. Let us not lose heart, but thank God that He has given us the privilege of joining in this grand work.

A SAMPLE STATE.

PRES. H. S. DE FOREST, TALLADEGA, ALA.

Our Southern States are so much alike, our work, its difficulties, its successes, its necessities are so similar, that a view of one part of the Southern Field will stand for all. Burke’s study motto, “From one learn all,” I think is applicable to the question before us. If, therefore, for the few minutes I am before you, I shall speak of one State only, and of the work of the Association in that State, it is not because it is more important than in neighboring States, nor because the work is more hopeful, but because for a few months I have been learning something there of our need and of our opportunities.

On that map, you see Georgia facing east to the sunrise, and northward toward New England. Behind Georgia, with its back close to Mississippi, where flows the Yazoo river, is the State of Alabama, in which about half of the population is colored. Ten years ago there were 475,510 colored men there, when our entire population was not quite one million. If we now look at the field, its condition is, perhaps, what you might expect. Bear in mind that there were no free schools there until after the reconstruction; that our New England ideas are exotics and grow there with difficulty; that twenty years ago, these colored men were all slaves and it was a crime to teach them; and you are prepared to believe such facts as these. Of our black population of nearly 500,000 there are 168,000 of school age; and now you ask how many after seventeen years of freedom are cared for. Recent statistics show that of this number there were 54,000 enrolled as pupils and 40,000 in actual attendance. You see a company of black youth on the street, and there is about one in three of them on the road to school, and about one in four who will enter the school-house. School-houses with us are not as numerous as at the West. On that grand and growing frontier, the white painted school-house anticipates the coming of the settler, and often the first building put up is a hall for learning. You may go through that dark State of Alabama, and travel far and wide, and not see a public school-house. Alphabetically Alabama leads the van of the States. She does not, however, in letters. The entire school year is about eighty-two days, and the teachers are paid upon an average $22.65 a month. We have never come to the taxing of property for education. Nothing but the poll tax of our State goes for our free schools, and the black man’s head-tax goes for the colored schools, and the white man’s head-tax for the white schools. You are prepared to believe, then, that our appropriation for each pupil is only $1.06. That is about two cents a week per pupil.

It is evident, then, that education is at a low ebb in that dark State of Alabama; and such as we have, bear in mind, is the growth of the last twenty years. It is an infusion of Northern ideas and Northern civilization; and these first friends of learning must be its friends still. Just now I remember calling but a few weeks since at an important point where two railroads cross each other, where iron and coal lie side by side, where different forms of industry,—blast furnaces and machine shops—are going up, and it is a place of great prospective importance that we ought at once to occupy. I called upon the county superintendent of education, a rebel colonel, I think six feet and more in height. He seemed to look down upon me. I am sure he did when I announced myself from Talladega. He at once branded me with “N.T.”—that means a Negro Teacher, with two g’s in the word Negro. I asked him concerning the education of the black man in that growing town. He said he knew very little of it; he paid out ninety dollars of public money for a teacher, but he knew nothing more. Said he, “We don’t think much of nigger education here.” It almost took my breath away. I said to him there might be others in the town who had different views of negro education, and asked him if there was not some friend of liberty with whom I might speak; and he replied, “We have not much of the nigger about us;” and I went out. Now it is very evident, my friends, that the work of education, so imperative, must be carried forward by Northern consecration still.

Well, if you now turn from our intellectual need to our industrial wants, I can show you a State whose mines and hills are full of treasure, where forest trees grow in rank luxuriance, where our cotton fields are sufficient to wrap half America in their folds. And yet our homes are mean and miserable, and dark and dirty, and there is physical want and physical poverty and physical distress. You tell me the black man is indolent. I say yes, but he is among a lazy generation. You tell me the black man is thriftless, and I say yes, but he is among a shiftless race. It is true that the industrial idea of those Southern States must be carried forward, and we must do it.

But the wants that I have referred to thus far are not our most serious need. We come to manhood, to morality, to Christian virtue, and there, brethren, we are just where you might suspect. Bear in mind, it is but a few years since slavery, the sum and the mother of villainies, was sustained by the law and defended by the pulpit. The piety and the morality of the colored people have been strangely divorced. As was said here yesterday, we are not opposed by skepticism. I grant it; we can subscribe to the whole catechism and take it in bodily, with one exception, and that exception is the Ten Commandments.

Now, “from one,” as Burke said, “learn all.” Let me tell you two or three facts that in my mind stand for a great deal. Recently a Doctor of Divinity, a foremost man in the Southern Presbyterian church, told me that near the city where he lives he has a plantation where he often spends a few days at a time, and preaches. That minister, like others, wants his Aaron and Hur about him. There is a church established there, and on his right hand was a colored minister, and on the left a deacon. That minister had three living wives. That deacon was a butcher, and lately there were dug up out of his barnyard the skins of fifteen cattle that he had stolen.

The facts concerning Southern churches are not well recognized, I suspect, at the North. A recent letter from one of our most trusted young men, told me that where he was working this summer as a teacher there are two colored churches, and that a woman, excluded from one of them on the Lord’s day because of her gross immorality, was on the next Sabbath received into the other church without a letter; and this represents the type of Southern black piety.

Brethren, I have come to believe that the seventy-three Congregational churches that you have planted there stand like light-houses in the midst of surrounding darkness. And another fact means much to my mind. When the census agents were with us, and our young men were arranged in the parlor for convenience, the officers asked them their fathers’ names. Some of the young men blushed as they gave them, and others handed them in on bits of paper. Young men of high character, students in our theological seminary, were born out of wedlock. They blushed at the infamy, and their blushing was because of Anglo-Saxon blood that was wickedly in their veins. I tell you, brethren, if you should reverse the course of the Queen of the South, and instead of going to the North you should go to the South, you would say with her, though in a different sense, that the half had not been told. It is fair to believe, then, that the Christian work of the South is most imperative, and I am glad to turn from the wants of the field to something of our undertakings. * * * * * *

Is it strange, then, that those of us who are allowed once more to face the front, and go personally into the conflict hand to hand, are looking Northward for supplies? I can remember, when we stood there in hours of need, how the Northern people did not withhold munitions of war or what was necessary for our comfort. We are engaged in the same warfare, and we need a large supply of munitions.

It is not seven days since, at New Haven, under the elms that shade Yale College, I saw light-bearers in martial array passing through the streets, and, when the band struck up the music that I heard once on the tented field at the South, my heart grew large. When I saw the marshaling of soldiers as in battle array, I thought of what I had seen at Cold Harbor, at Drury’s Bluff, at Richmond, and at Petersburg. They went on in the mimicry of war with mounted men, and my heart was full. But soon came a noble battalion of black men, side by side, step by step with their brethren, looking as grand as any of them, with their lighted torches going on towards the front. I saw there a parable. There is Alabama and the South, there is the Dark Continent with a sixth of the population of the globe, 186,000,000 waiting for the Gospel. Now, then, shall we fill those torches with oil and light them? We have men ready to be trained to go there, and, believe me, they will not only bless Africa, but do a large part in saving America.

Do you remember, my friends, that the oldest monuments we have, the most ancient coins that come down to us, represent the negro kneeling before his captor, with his hands clasped in petition, yet wearing shackles, and there kneeling in prayer to an enemy? That is the old picture of Africa that has come down through the sun-burnt ages. How is it to-day? Thank God, in our country the scene has changed. The black man is not kneeling before his captor. He stands erect with us, and with us he stands close to the ballot box. Those shackles are broken—do I say broken? No, they were cut asunder by the red sword of war, but still they lie at his feet. Those hands are not clasped now, but open, and they are extended, not to his captor, but to his old-time friends and liberators, to Christian men and women of the North. He holds in one hand a spelling-book and a Bible, and he stretches it out to us and says, “Come and teach me.” Brethren, it is blessed to hear that call. It is blessed to have a share in that work.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON CHURCH WORK.

The Committee upon Church Work would emphasize the fact that the religious work among the Freedmen is essentially that of reformation. The churches of this Association are the Reformed Churches of the South. Incidentally, they are Congregational. The reason which called them into existence, and which justifies their separate organization, is the demand for a pure, intelligent, progressive Christianity. The Association steadily refuses to multiply churches, or to increase their membership, except as the true type of personal piety can be established and maintained. And, acting upon this principle, the growth of the church is made to depend upon the material which can be prepared for it; in other words, the church is essentially the product of the school. There only can the foundations be laid for an intelligent faith and a pure morality.

Your Committee desire to commend the patient adherence, not only of the Association, but of the churches themselves, to this principle. They would also acknowledge with gratitude the prosperous condition of the churches, as set forth in the more detailed reports submitted. With hardly an exception, they are provided with houses of worship, they are substantially free from debt, discipline has been thoroughly maintained, mission work has been earnestly carried on, benevolence has been largely increased, the pulpit has been well supplied, and in many cases there have been most gracious proofs of the special work of the Spirit of God.

The present number of churches is 73, an increase the last year of 5, with a present membership of nearly 5,000, an increase of 635.

The question of greatest urgency connected with the department of Church Work, is that of education for the ministry.

Three of the schools have a theological department—Fisk, Talladega, and Straight. There is also a theological department connected with Howard University, partly under the care of the Association. But no one of these has any endowment. No permanent provision whatever has been made for the instruction or support of those studying for the ministry. The work is carried on under every possible disadvantage. Meanwhile, the demand for an educated ministry is steadily and rapidly increasing. The work of education has now reached the point where the ratio of increase will soon be enormous. Over 150,000 children have been under instruction the past year. The material for churches will soon be abundant. The only question will be, can it be used?

Other denominations, too, are looking largely to the schools of the Association for ministers. And England, in her missions for Africa, naturally turns to the Freedmen of America for missionaries.

Your Committee would call the attention of the churches to the growing prominence of the religious question at the South, and would most earnestly advise the patrons of this Association to make fit provision and endowment for the permanent work of educating men for the ministry.

Wm. J. Tucker, Chairman.

OUR DISADVANTAGES AND ADVANTAGES.

FIELD SUP’T J. E. ROY, D.D.

Our church work at the South has its disadvantages, its advantages, its obligations, its encouragements.

I.—Its Disadvantages.

1. One is that our church system is entirely unknown among the Freedmen. It is a singular fact that they should know absolutely nothing of the churches which had led in the anti-slavery reform, and which, through this Association, are now, as is confessed on all hands, doing more for the lifting up of these lowly poor than any other. The occasion of this ignorance is at hand. The doctrine of equality in Christ’s house, as based on his own words—“All ye are brethren”—precluded the setting up of this order of church life among a people, where master and slave should vote, side by side, upon all church business. I know that it will be said at once that the Baptists, with their congregational polity, did prevail all over the South. But theirs was, after all, not a Christian democracy, but an aristocracy of the white members. All right of voting was denied the colored. Even those two much-praised ancient Congregational churches at the South, the Circular in Charleston, and the Dorchester in Liberty County, Georgia, which took root in that soil, did so only by denying suffrage to the colored members. When one of the pastors of the latter, with the Bible in one hand and a whip in the other, drove his brethren as his slaves to their tasks, if that had been a genuine Congregational church, an appeal would have been taken to the brotherhood for an application of that Scripture: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal.” One of the colored members of that church, now a worthy deacon, told me this bit of experience. His master, a fellow church member, had found him with a Webster’s spelling book in hand, trying to learn to read. For this crime he was tied down, with his face to the ground, his hands and feet made fast to four stakes, and then upon his bare back he received such a flagellation that, under the torture, he cried out: “Oh, massa, do stop, and I’ll never again look into a book as long as I live.” With a fine turn he said to me, “I gradulated then.” Now, if that brother had had the right of telling that trespass to the church, and if all the members had had the privilege of voting upon the case, that would have been a piece of pure Congregationalism. Evidently such a church system could not obtain in a slaveholding community. So it is entirely unknown in that region; and this fact becomes a disadvantage in introducing it now.

2. Another disadvantage is that the Freedmen are so largely wedded to other denominations. It is popular to belong to the church. The mass, although they may not be members, will call themselves either Baptists or Methodists. One of them on being asked, “Are you a Christian?” responded: “No, Sah, I’se a Baptist.” The spectacular element of immersion afforded by this church order, and the scope given by the other to the emotional nature, have proven a great attraction to these rude and simple souls. Then it is easy for their zeal to rise into sectarianism and superstition, bitter and hostile, such as leads them to denounce the new church as having no religion, because it has no dreams and visions, no physical contortions—such as lead them to sneer at our members as only “Bible Christians,” while they have, instead, direct manifestations of the Spirit. It is a surprising revelation to our teachers and preachers who go to the South with nothing but love in their hearts, and their hands full of the best things they could take, to find such heat of sectarian opposition as soon as it is proposed to set up the church life, which represents the educational effort that is so highly prized.

3. Another disadvantage for the time in setting up our churches, is the standard of intelligence and of morality to which we seek to bring them. The colored man who confessed that he had broken every one of the commandments, but blessed God that he had kept his religion, stood in part, at least, for a good many of his people. It is hard for us who come in contact with that state of things to accept the facts. Even then we would not wish to take the risk of making them public, only so far as is sustained by their own newspapers and official reports. The saddest part of it is the impropriety of the leaders, ministers, and official members. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch. Each, in self-protection, condones the other’s guilt. We know that the system of slaveholding is largely responsible for this divorce of religion from morality. But the fact, as we have to confront it, is all the same. If you propose to set up a church that shall be clean and be kept clean, in pulpit and pew, you have undertaken a difficult task. The gravity of depravity is against you.

II. Its Advantages.

1. One is that our church system had not previously prevailed at the South, to become modified by the influences of slaveholding, and identified with it in the associations of the colored people. As individuals become intelligent enough to rise above the prevailing sectarianism; as they learn the anti-slavery history of our churches; and as they learn that the nature of our polity prevented it from coming South in the days of slavery, they turn to the Puritan way with avidity. It is to them a new discovery of friends, who had stood by them when they knew it not. Indeed, these people, whose ancestors were landed upon these shores the same year the Pilgrims came, appear to be the Yankees of the South. They fall naturally into the observance of Thanksgiving, and on that day they love to hear over and over the story of the Pilgrims and Puritans, their exile, their hardships, their poverty, their simplicity of life, their struggle for liberty. They soon learn that the Puritan ideas have taken possession of the North, are now penetrating the South, and are rising to a supremacy over the nation. As they advance in understanding they take in these ideas; and, more and more, will they be disposed to seek the church form which represents them.

2. Another advantage is the adaptation of this church system as an educating process for the colored people. Any one who considers the untutored quality of the communities in which the Apostles planted their self-governing churches, must give up the notion that they were New England people. Indeed, as one becomes acquainted with the qualities of mind and elements of character in these sable Christians, he can see that the Epistles of the New Testament were addressed to much the same sort of people. These can govern themselves as well as those. And, coming forth from the house of bondage, much more do they desire their largest liberty in Christ Jesus. The working of this autonomy of the churches is to them an educating process. It puts responsibility upon them. They must study its principles in order to exercise its function. Even such men as Senators Lamar, and Hampton, and Hendricks, in the North American, have argued that the elective franchise is not only the means of defense, but of education, among these new-made citizens. Precisely so does it work in church relations. Some of us, who have observed the process, have been surprised and delighted to see with what decorum and parliamentary skill they will handle a deliberative assembly. As, in the days of bondage, the only outlet for their native talent was the pulpit; and as their church was about their only arena for organic efficiency, so now they love most of all to handle their church affairs. And so does their self-governing fellowship become a means of education.

3. Another advantage comes from our preliminary educational work. At the first, it was thought by some that the Association was too tardy in advancing the church process. Soon it was learned that the right policy had been pursued in developing the educational interest, which was itself really missionary work, and which was the necessary preparation for a more organic way of Gospel propagandism. In connection with all our high schools and colleges, churches have been organized. These have been immediate sources of power and influence. They have also served as models and stimulus for others that have grown up around them. In almost every case our churches have been an outgrowth from these educational centres, or have been developed by the teachers and preachers who have been trained in them. Thus far, in the main, we have been preparing our machinery. I remember that our Elgin Watch Company spent its first two and a half years in erecting the factory and in manufacturing its own machinery. Now it is in competition even with London and Switzerland for the trade of Europe. We have been building up our Elgins—the Fisk, the Howard, the Straight, Atlanta, Talladega, Tougaloo, and Berea. They are furnishing us their approved mechanism. This correlation of the school work to the church work is after the wisdom of all successful missionary enterprise in foreign lands. In India the American Board tried the experiment of dispensing with the school process, only to put the mission back for years.

4. Another advantage is that by their slower growth, we can the more completely assimilate and mold the material of our churches. Drawn together by affinities of character, the more readily do they receive instruction and take over the ideas and the style of our system; the more certainly can discipline be maintained, purity and sobriety secured. Heterogeneous masses would swamp church order. At one of our Conferences, some of the brethren were bemoaning the slow growth of our churches. A Baptist minister being present, turned the tide by asserting that, for the present, there were advantages in that state of things, and that his denomination had suffered somewhat from the embarrassment of numbers. He said that when as a farmer’s boy he stood at the tail end of a steam thresher for shoving away the straw, if left alone, he found himself unable to keep up, and was soon covered down with the accumulation. So they were sometimes bothered in handling their great numbers in the way of discipline, and of effort at moral elevation.

THE NEED AND THE OPPORTUNITY.

PROF. WM. J. TUCKER, D. D., ANDOVER, MASS.

In the midst of the struggle and the difficulties attending work among the Freedmen, there has been one point about which we have allowed our minds to be at rest. As we have been vexed with the problems of education and with the problems of citizenship, we have said to ourselves, one thing is sure: the colored race is religious. And so we have allowed the religious question to remain comparatively in abeyance; we have said, this can wait; we have work in hand which we must attend to; by and by we will look after this.

But in that strange haste with which God has been forcing questions upon the American people as touching the Freedmen, we have come, sooner than we thought, upon the religious question at the South. I think we have made a mistake in that we have not given it more prominence heretofore. I think we shall make a grievous mistake if we do not carefully look this subject in the face now.

In what sense is it true that the colored race is religious? How far does the religion of the negro of the South fit him for the essential work which his race has now before it? His religion, it seems to me, has been peculiarly, by God’s providence, the religion of the slave, and now the religion demanded is the religion of the man. The most beautiful illustration in all history has been given us by the negro, of the words of Scripture touching God’s gift to his people: “He giveth songs in the night.” The great, happy heart of that people has been singing through all these dark years, while the great heart of the North has been heavy in its shame. The negro of the South has been living for half the century in another world than this. It his been literally true—“his citizenship was in Heaven.” He had no citizenship anywhere else. Now he is a citizen of this world, and the religion that fits a citizen of this world must be his, or he will fail religiously in the problem which is now working out in this country.

I think the question is very much, to-day, with reference to the Freedmen of the South, as it would be if the Christian of the second century could have been taken out from his persecution, from his sense of that other world, from his prayer for the speedy coming of Christ, and plunged into the hard, practical uses of this nineteenth century. We have taken the Freedman out of his Heaven where he was living with something of joy; we have brought him before the great duties of this world and this century. How is his religion fitting him for the change? I have said that his religion has been a religion of joy, fitting him to bear, fitting him to endure; but life has become something more serious than suffering—life has become to him a practical work. What De Tocqueville said to Charles Sumner in his youth, may be said to the young Freedman to-day: “Life is neither a pain nor a pleasure, but a most serious business, to be taken up with courage, to be laid down, if need be, in self-sacrifice.” The nation has made a change necessary in the type of his religion. He must be refitted religiously to the work which attends citizenship, its rights and its duties. How is he fitted for it? If we do not answer this question practically, ten years will show us how he is unfitted for it.

Meanwhile, too, we, as an Association, through our educational work, have been robbing him of his past religion. We have been letting in the light upon his superstitions; we have dissolved his dreams; we have put his Heaven a little farther off—he cannot fly into it so quickly as before; we have let in the strong, hard light of this world. We must give him something. If we simply give him education, even though it be so much of religious education as may be given in the schools, we are doing no more than sowing the seeds of scepticism—as when the Romanists of the old country lose their faith, it were better for them to stay in their faith with its tinge of superstition, than simply to be sceptics. We cannot afford to have this pure, tender, loving, spiritual life, developed during these last years, caught up by the scepticism of this century and hurried on into ruin. We have sceptics enough at the North; we have sceptics enough through the South; the nation is drifting fast enough into that way. Let us keep what religious sense there is in this race trained of God, pure, by making it strong, hard, substantial enough to stand the difficulties and the trials of their present condition.

The question then comes up, Can the Freedman be made a pure, honest, reasoning, intelligent Christian man? Can the type of piety be changed? Still his music if you will; take away something of the glow of his faith; push his Heaven a little further off—can he be made a man fit to live, and act, and do his work, in this our century, and assume the great duties of Christian discipleship here and now? Can he be made sufficiently moral, can he be made sufficiently intelligent, to do practically the work which all Christians must do, with clean hands and with pure hearts?

Well, Mr. President, there have been a great many theories on the matter, and very many men are ready to say, “You can do nothing with the Freedmen at this point.” I think it is the simple office of this Association to fly in the face of the theories of men in this century, to take one race after another, treat it for ten years, and then say to men, “There are your theories; here is the fact.” Men have said of the Indian, “He won’t work.” This Association takes men who say that, and quietly shows them the Indian at work. Men have said of the Chinaman, “You cannot change the type of his religion and give him any sense of faith in Christ,” and this Association is quietly showing souls won to the Redeemer. Men used to say, “The negro won’t fight; put him before the eye of his master and he will quail.” The negro saw his master in battle, he never quailed, he fell at his feet only in death.

A friend told me yesterday coming on the cars, that when the question was agitated as to whether a steamship could carry coal enough to cross the Atlantic, one of the scientific men of the day addressing a large audience in New York, made this statement, “If you load a steamship when it shall leave Liverpool with coal sufficient to last over the voyage, as you withdraw the coal, gradually the ship will lighten and lift, and by the time the ship is half over the sea the wheels will be out of the water.” Six days after he made that statement, the first steamer came plowing steadily up the Narrows into New York harbor. Men say of the negro, “He can’t do this, he won’t do that.” Meanwhile, the American Missionary Association is doing its strong work with him, and he is just plowing his way steadily into public notice and disproving everything flung in his face.

There are signs—and some of them very manifest—of the capacity of the Freedmen for great moral strength. Have you read Judge Tourgee’s reference to the fact that when the opportunity was given, after the war, for the negroes to register themselves for marriage—to be married by the laws of the State in wholesale—how eagerly they availed themselves of that opportunity, that they might have the form and reality of marriage, and the stamp of legitimacy upon their children? The negro knows what a home means; he has been wanting it; now he will have in time as clean a home as you or I may have. What do you think I discovered a few days ago in one of the historic towns of New England? A friend looking over the records of that old town, came upon the list of baptisms, and this fact came out: in early Puritan days in a town not twenty-five miles from Boston more children were born out of wedlock than in wedlock; and the Puritan says to the negro, “You don’t know what a home is.” Wait;—give him a chance.

You see how it is with regard to his industries. Men say he is lazy: why does he go to work as soon as he leaves the land which induces laziness? The reports come from Kansas that he is thrifty, that he is putting his hand to the plow, that he is doing the work he is given there to do. Individuals taken as types of the race are declaring their capacity for strong industrial development. You know his record in matters of education; you know he is beginning to make himself, so far as he has the chance anywhere, a power in citizenship. I believe that this question of morality will settle itself, that the negro can at least show, under right training, an average development in the morals of religion.

One question then remains: What is the true way of approach to this religious question of the South? Something has already been done through the strong, patient work, known as the church work of this Association—taking the products of the school, young men and women as trained in the schools, and organizing them into churches, for the churches are merely the outgrowth of the schools. The old churches of the South are not fit to be transferred into the churches of this Association. We are all the weaker for any church that might be allowed to come in in that way. The greater approach—and that which I believe the Association, so soon as it has the means, will endeavor to carry out—is in the larger training of leaders, to meet what will be within ten or twenty years the enormous demand for Christian leadership through the South. In other words, give to the millions of the colored race at the South a sufficient number of trained, educated, common-sense ministers, and they will make that people in half a century the joy and the pride of our land.

We need to do this to save the bright, strong men among the negroes from going elsewhere. A young man of good parts came to his church five years ago, and said to them, “Take my name off the church-roll; I am going into politics.” His brethren said to him, “Wait a little; you do not want your name off the church-roll if you are going into politics. But must you go there?” They showed him the more excellent way, and to-day he is one of the most effective ministers in the South. We want to lay our hands, while we can, while we have the material, on the very pride of the youth of the colored race, and secure them to the ministry. We want hundreds of men—the best men, who have the instinct of leadership about them—men who have that strong, organizing, executive force, as well as the sympathetic power, by which they can build up churches in the name of the Redeemer throughout that country.

What is the furnishing for this at present? Here are four schools: Howard commands the north-eastern section, situated at Washington; Fisk, in Tennessee; Talladega, in Alabama; and Straight in New Orleans; and nearly a hundred men from these departments are in the process of studying for the Christian ministry. We want to enlarge, and that speedily; for, as I have suggested, the ratio of increase through the educational work within ten years will be enormous. We want to enlarge greatly this productive power for the ministry; and to that end I believe, as the report has stated, we need substantial endowment for permanent work of this nature. It has been suggested in the report that we need men for more than home affairs. England, with generous look, is ready to enter into Africa and do large work there for Christ. What she wants is men. Fisk University has consecrated itself largely to the work of supplying Africa with missionaries. We want to respond to England, with her generous means, by the gift of men, sending out worthy men, by which the two nations shall go hand in hand in bringing light into the dark continent.

Meanwhile, I say as I sit down, that, with regard to this whole question touching the South, there seems to me to be two aspects of it; the one of which will give us at present only discouragement, the other giving us the largest hope and joy.

When Henry J. Raymond was editor of the New York Times, some of you may remember, after one of his stirring editorials, some one at the South sent him this laconic letter: “Henry J. Raymond. Sir: Come down South, and we will tar and feather you.” To which Mr. Raymond replied in equally laconic fashion: “Sir: I think I will wait; the inducements are not sufficient.” Capital, looking South, says, “The inducements are not yet sufficient.” Society, looking South, says, seeing the ostracism there, “I think I will wait; the inducements are not sufficient.” The North, ready to pour in its own civilization there so far as it might be accepted, has come to say to itself, “I will wait; time on this continent is on the side of the Puritan.” But the American Missionary Association, touching the conscience and the heart of many strong souls at the North, said, long ago, “I wait no longer; the inducements are sufficient.” Knowing the ostracism, knowing the persecution, knowing the difficulties, the inducements for Christian work, for education, prevailed upon that heart; and to-day we have the result of what that spirit has been that has looked the South in the face, that has taken the Freedman by the hand, that is pushing the glorious work of reformation and reconstruction; not in the name of a party, hardly in the name of the country, but in that ever-blessed name above party—even greater than country—the Crucified.

AFRICA.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

The Committee, to whom was referred those portions of the Report of the Executive Committee relating to the work of the Association in Africa, beg leave to submit the following report:

We stand at the opening of a new era in the history of African missions. No real cause for discouragement in the present aspect of affairs presents itself. There is, on the contrary, abundant reason for gratitude to God, that through the darker experiences of the past, in which He has revealed to us more clearly what are His plans, He is leading us to the brighter issues of the future. The logic of events is irresistible. We, of this Association, are driven to certain hopeful conclusions.

1st. Africans for Africa. This is the evident teaching of God’s providence. It is the great lesson of the Mendi mission. The long list of the heroic dead, martyrs for the Gospel in Africa; the vast expenditure of resources necessary in supporting white missionaries; the peculiar dealings of God’s providence with the negro in this country, especially fitting him for this work—all point in this direction. This is the fact which gives peculiar significance to the work of this Association, both in this land and in Africa, and we hail it with encouragement and hope as one element of the new and happier era of lasting success, which we believe will, in the future, attend, under God, the missionary work of that waiting continent.

2d. Need of careful supervision. In view of the facts laid before us, and in view, also, of the important enlargement of the work contemplated, we most heartily commend the determination of the Executive Committee to appoint a general superintendent of the work of this Association in Africa. Such a superintendent appears to us to be a necessity. We believe that he would have more than he could conveniently do in devoting himself to systematizing the work in its various phases, providing a suitable literature for the people, supervising educational and industrial enterprises, keeping account of the financial matters of the missions, giving character and direction to the counsels of the missionaries, studying new regions for advance movements, reporting needs and plans, and thus enlisting interest at home and abroad. We urgently hope, therefore, that the appointment of such a superintendent, residing at some healthful point, easily accessible to the missions, will be made at the earliest practicable moment.

3d. The subject of the Arthington Mission is no longer an open question. You have already determined, upon conditions believed to be practicable, that you will occupy that land for Christ. The money, we have some reason to hope, is coming, the men are coming, the Association is only waiting to begin wisely. In an enterprise of such vast moment to all concerned, care is better than cure. Your Committee believe that they only give voice to the earnest desire of the churches, when they express the hope that, as soon as the necessary funds are received, you will go forward with the same judicious care as in the past, and take the proper steps to ascertain more fully the best ways of entering this open door for enlarged work and greater results.

4th. In view of the events of the year, so full of sadness in the history of many African missions, your Committee recognize the fact more clearly than ever before, that the call of God rests, in an especial manner, upon this Association, to maintain and enlarge this African work in the way of His own appointment. The great results it is achieving for the negro of the South have received a new meaning and impetus in the light of African missions. The whole problem of the negro in America is finding its solution slowly but surely. In the providence of God this Association, in the two-fold relation which it holds to the Freedmen of America on the one hand, and to the pagans of their fatherland on the other, more truly than any other, we believe, holds the key to the evangelization of Africa.

Your Committee, therefore, feel warranted in suggesting that the true attitude of this Association, in view of the report of its missions in Africa, should be one of thankfulness for the experience of the past, encouragement in the work of the present, and earnest expectation for the future.

Henry M. Ladd, Chairman.