The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 12, December, 1889

• PRESIDENT, Rev. Wm. M. Taylor, D.D., LL.D., N.Y.
• Vice-Presidents.
  • Rev. A.J.F. Behrends, D.D., N.Y.
  • Rev. F.A. Noble, D.D., Ill.
  • Rev. Alex. McKenzie, D.D., Mass.
  • Rev. D.O. Mears, D.D., Mass.
  • Rev. Henry Hopkins, D.D., Mo.
• Corresponding Secretaries.
  • Rev. M.E. Strieby, D.D., 56 Reads Street, N.Y.
  • Rev. A.F. Beard, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
• Recording Secretary.
  • Rev. M.E. Strieby, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
• Treasurer.
  • H.W. Hubbard, Esq., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
• Auditors.
  • Peter McCartee.
  • Chas. P. Peirce.
• Executive Committee.
  • John H. Washburn, Chairman.
  • Addison P. Foster, Secretary.
• • For Three Years.
    • S.B. Halliday,
    • Samuel Holmes,
    • Samuel S. Marples,
    • Charles L. Mead,
    • Elbert B. Monroe.
  • For Two Years.
    • J.E. Rankin,
    • Wm. H. Ward,
    • J.W. Cooper,
    • John H. Washburn,
    • Edmund L. Champlin.
  • For One Year.
    • Lyman Abbott,
    • Chas. A. Hull,
    • Clinton B. Fisk,
    • Addison P. Foster,
    • Albert J. Lyman.
• District Secretaries.
  • Rev. C.J. Ryder, 21 Cong'l House, Boston.
  • Rev. J.E. Roy, D.D., 151 Washington Street, Chicago.
  • Rev. Rev. C.W. Hiatt, 64 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio.
• Financial Secretary for Indian Missions.
  • Rev. Chas. W. Shelton.
• Field Superintendent.
  • Rev. Frank E. Jenkins,
• Secretary Of Woman's Bureau.
  • Miss D.E. Emerson, 56 Reade St. N.Y.

Relating to the work of the Association may be addressed to the Corresponding Secretaries; letters for "THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY," to the Editor, at the New York Office; letters relating to the finances, to the Treasurer.

In drafts, checks, registered letters, or post-office orders, 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 151 Washington Street, Chicago, Ill. A payment of thirty dollars at one time constitutes a Life Member.

NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS.—The date on the "address label" indicates the time to which the subscription is paid. Changes are made in date on ladle to the 10th of each month. If payment of subscription be made afterward, the change on the label will appear a month later. Please send early notice of change in post-office address, giving the former address and the new address, in order that our periodicals and occasional papers may be correctly mailed.

"I bequeath to my executor (or executors) the sum of —— dollars, in trust, to pay the same in —— days after my decease to the person who, when the same is payable, shall act as Treasurer of the 'American Missionary Association,' of New York City, to be applied, under the direction of the Executive Committee of the Association, to its charitable uses and purposes." The Will should be attested by three witnesses.

We return from our Annual Meeting held in Chicago with a deep sense of gratitude to God and to the many friends who in various ways helped to make it one of the most pleasant and profitable of our anniversaries. We did not have the remarkable uplift of a munificent gift like that of Mr. Daniel Hand, which made our meeting at Providence so memorable, but we had, in the strength and appropriateness of the sermon, and in the ability of the addresses, papers and reports, that which will render this meeting a cheering landmark in our history.

Our financial exhibit, with the able report upon it, was one of the encouraging features of our Annual Meeting. The report of the Treasurer announced the gratifying fact that the books closed with all obligations and indebtedness paid, and with a balance on hand of over $4,000. The able Finance Committee gave a careful examination of the Treasurer's books and papers, and made very commendatory report as to methods and accuracy.

The National Council, at its meeting in Worcester, recommended that the churches contribute to the Association for the coming year $500,000. The Finance Committee after careful examination of the needs of the work endorsed the recommendation of the Council, and the Association heartily adopted the report. This sum, therefore, is what, in the judgment of competent persons, is imperatively needed; and we, therefore, take pleasure in going before our constituents, appealing for that amount.

This noble gift, which awakened such enthusiasm at our annual meeting one year ago, came with its echo of work well done during the year—an echo which we trust will reverberate with steady force through all the years to come. In the Treasurer's report the figures were given as to the appropriations made from the income of this Fund during the year; in the General Survey cheering statements were made as to the many pupils it had stimulated to industry and education, and the buildings it had erected; and in several of the papers and addresses, grateful mention was made of the benefits conferred by it. We trust that other large givers may be stimulated to follow in the footsteps of one who has so wisely invested his money for the uplifting of the most needy in our land.

A recent letter from Mr. Hand shows his deep solicitude that his gift shall be used for the highest moral and religious purposes. He says: "I have feared that the teachers might be more concerned for letters than for morals. My bequest was given to you chiefly as a religious society. Religion is the first, chiefest and best of it all."

This presents a genuine case of the embarrassment of riches. We never had better. We wish all our friends might have the opportunity for the careful study of it, for it is worth their time and attention.

Full reports of the proceedings were made daily in the Chicago Inter Ocean. They were all gathered into a supplement, and have already been widely scattered. Some copies are still on hand at our offices in New York, Boston, Cleveland and Chicago, and can be had on application.

The annual sermon, as usual, will be printed with the Annual Report. This number of the MISSIONARY (an enlarged number) will contain the Minutes and the official papers, including reports and the speeches upon them, (the latter necessarily somewhat abridged) Secretaries' papers, and the closing address of Rev. Dr. Taylor. Other papers and addresses, including the Representative Addresses, will be published hereafter as far as practicable in subsequent numbers of the MISSIONARY or in some other form.

No meeting of the American Missionary Association has ever been better than this last one. Dr. William M. Taylor, who with such consummate felicity combines so many of the best characteristics of the Scotch, the English and the Yankee, presided. The topics of the several papers and addresses, though covering a large range of thought all converged to the same main point, and were especially pertinent to the hour. Those who had been invited to prepare papers showed, by the manifest pains they took with them, their sense of the importance of the occasion. They brought the results of their best and most earnest thinking. And it is rare that such speakers are confronted by a more earnest, intelligent and sympathetic audience.

The meeting was a good one in every respect; it is not easy to overestimate either its delightfulness or its moral power. It is not possible for a great society to place before itself a more eminently Christlike purpose. It has been greatly honored of God in its results thus far. And no decently intelligent history of America will ever fail to note the vital and decisively critical part which, in the Providence that overrules all history, has been given to this so timely and so sagaciously Christian organization to take in preparing the various despised races of America for good citizenship in our common country, so that Negro, Indian, Chinaman and whatever other race representatives are among us may sing in glorious unison: "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty!"

The Annual Meeting in Chicago was remarkable in many respects. All the sessions were good. There was no talking against time. There were no displays of eloquence. No one spoke for effect. The ruling desire seemed to be to get at the facts, and to learn the lessons which they teach.

Subjects were carefully grouped together, so that at the close of the meeting one felt that the fourfold character of the work of the Association had been fully and intelligently presented. Speeches were almost entirely by those whose names were on the programme, and who, therefore, had given time and thought to the matters on which they had been invited to enlighten others. Every one came with the idea that he might speak, that he had the liberty of the floor, and yet few cared to use this liberty. Debate is good, but on matters which concern the treatment of more than ten millions of people—eight of Negroes, two of mountain whites, besides Indians and Chinese—extempore addresses are not the best use of time. As a result of this preparation, Wednesday, the day when most of the papers were read, will compare favorably with the best days of the American Board. The ability of the younger men in our denomination was conspicuous. None of our great benevolent enterprises will suffer in their hands.

While there was great seriousness, there was also evident hopefulness, and an unshaken confidence in the power of the gospel to remove all the difficulties in the race problem, the Indian and the Chinese questions, and in the treatment of the Mountain Whites. While a unit in sentiment as to the importance of the school, the convention seemed to be equally a unit as to the importance of making it a missionary school, and of keeping it in closest union with the church. The conviction seemed to prevail that to separate the one from the other would, in the highest degree, be unfortunate. It was evident, furthermore, that the work of the Association has only just begun, that no backward step can be taken, and that the churches ought to give larger sums for the support of the Association year by year. It deserves, and will reward, their confidence and generosity.

The Annual Meeting of the American Missionary Association, held in Chicago last week, and of which a full account will be found elsewhere, brought out anew the directness and energy with which this society is bringing its aid to the solution of some of the most immediate and perplexing problems in this country. The Negro, the Indian and the Chinese are the especial objects of its care, and it has rendered immense service to these races in this country, not only by its direct answer to the appeal for help which comes, consciously or unconsciously, from all of them, but by its educational influence upon the country at large. The importance of the race question in the South cannot be overstated, and it is a question the very gravity of which makes all partisanship on either side the gravest offense against the welfare of the country. The American Missionary Association, planting itself resolutely on the principle of equal justice to all races on our continent, and holding firmly to the method of Christian education, holds distinct leadership in the only direction which can bring permanent peace and safety. There is no missionary work in the world so urgent and so important as that among the Negroes of the South. It is not often that the work of a great Association is so plainly marked, commends itself so thoroughly to the support of the country, and converges so directly upon those things which are most urgent in their demand upon the best thought of the best citizens, as the work of the American Missionary Association.

The meeting of the American Missionary Association in Chicago had no debated question to excite difference. All agree that the meeting was one of the most earnest and effective in the history of the Association. Beginning with the opening sermon of Dr. Meredith, and closing with the address of Dr. Taylor, all the reports and addresses were thoughtful and pertinent. Some of the papers on special topics were of a very high order, and it may not be invidious to name the remarkable paper by Colonel Keating, of Memphis, Tenn., which places him alongside of Drs. Curry and Haygood among the leaders of thought in creating the true New South.

No society in all this country of societies is doing nobler or more useful work than the one which has been holding its yearly meeting this week in the city of Chicago; none more thoroughly deserves the favor and sympathy (expressing itself in dollars) of the public.

Look at a few eloquent figures. This American Missionary Association, not yet fifty years old, has one hundred and thirteen missionaries at work among the Negroes, the sadly neglected white mountaineers and the newly arrived immigrants in the Southern States. It has established and maintains there one hundred and thirty-six churches; also five chartered institutions of learning, eighteen normal and graded schools, and thirty-seven common schools, served by two hundred and sixty instructors. Among the Indians it has half a dozen churches and three times that number of schools, sixty-eight missionaries and teachers; among the Chinese in this country, sixteen schools, thirty-five missionaries and teachers. Its expenditures during the year footed up a little over $366,000—a little over a thousand dollars a day. What a work these figures represent, not merely for the Christian religion, but for civilization, for morals, for good citizenship!

The American Missionary Association ought to have at least half a million dollars to work with, this year, and Hartford should show well up toward the top in the list of contributors.

The rich treat which this number of the MISSIONARY presents may well suggest the privilege and duty not only of reading, but also of circulating it. Let each reader possess himself of these important facts and figures—these broad views as to the great work laid on the hearts of American patriots and Christians—and then hand the magazine to some neighbor. Let us suggest farther, that the MISSIONARY, in its monthly issues, is full of the same sort of facts and thoughts, and should be more widely read—it should have a larger list of paying subscribers. Please read the subjoined letter from a converted Chinaman and then "go and do thou likewise."

A little swarm of "Busy Bees," in Dover, N.H., have been making honey for the needy children in one of the missions of our Association. Their gift, amounting to sixty-five dollars, has been used to furnish a Reference Library for the school at Wilmington, N.C. Special rates were kindly given us on books by the Congregational Sunday-school and Publishing Society and other firms in Boston, so that this sixty-five dollars furnished a number of very useful books. Have not these "Busy Bees" in New Hampshire set a good example to other children's societies?

Speaking of the Sunday-school and Publishing Society reminds me of two things. The first is the kindly interest and generous help of that society in the work being done by the Association in various fields. Literature is abundantly supplied from their press, and in some instances they have sent colporteurs and missionaries into the various fields, who do a grand good work.

The other thing suggested by reference to this society is a queer contribution which was brought in to Mr. Hall, a missionary of the Association at Fort Berthold, Dakota. I chanced to be there when it was brought in. Mr. Hall had told the Indian boys and girls of the useful work done by the Sunday-school and Publishing Society in different parts of the land. It has always been the policy of the Association, as our friends know, to present the other Congregational Societies in our missions, and distribute the small gifts which it is possible for these poor people to give, among the different societies and not absorb it all in the Association. These Indian boys had not money to give to the Sunday-school Society, but they saw a premium offered for killing gophers. They are a mischievous little animal, devouring a large amount of wheat, corn and other grain every year. The farmers pay two cents for each dead gopher. The proof that the gopher has been killed is his tail. Now these little Indian boys had been so interested in the story told of the work being done by the Sunday-school Society, that they spent their Saturday afternoon holiday snaring gophers. They brought the tails in the envelopes of the society, as their contribution. I took some of the envelopes, paying two cents apiece for each tail and brought them East with me. On one envelope I found the following: "Richard Fox, one tail." What could be more appropriate!

Another of our District Secretaries not long since took a cup of coffee at a lunch counter kept by a colored man in Northern Ohio. After paying, he spoke of the work of the American Missionary Association. The colored man's face lit up at once.

"Are you in that work?"

"Yes, I am."

"Take back that fifteen cents, sir."

The Forty-third Annual Meeting of the American Missionary Association convened in the New England Congregational Church of Chicago, Ill., on Tuesday, October 29, 1889, at 3 o'clock P.M.

The Association was called to order by the President, Rev. William M. Taylor, D.D. The hymn, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," was sung, after which the President read the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah and led the Association in prayer.

Dr. Norman Seaver, supplying temporarily the pulpit of the New England Church, welcomed the Association, and was responded to by Dr. Taylor.

Rev. N.A. Millerd and Rev. E.N. Andrews were appointed tellers, and while the roll was being made out, Secretary A.F. Beard read the portion of the Constitution relating to membership in the Association. Rev. J.C. Armstrong, of Illinois, was elected Secretary, and Rev. E.S. Williams, of Minnesota, Assistant Secretary.

The President was instructed to appoint a Nominating Committee.

The Treasurer, H.W. Hubbard, Esq., presented his annual report with schedules and the certificates of the auditors. The report was accepted and referred to the Committee on Finance.

Field Superintendent Rev. Frank E. Jenkins read the General Survey of the Executive Committee. The document was accepted and the parts were referred to the special committees to be appointed.

The President appointed the Nominating Committee as follows: Rev. G.S.F. Savage, D.D., Rev. H.P. Higley, D.D., Rev. A.W. Archibald, Rev. A.B. Allen and Rev. A.C. Hodges.

The Association was led by Secretary Strieby in a concert of prayer with the workers in the field, Rev. Flavel Bascom, D.D., District Secretary Roy and many others participating, by remarks or prayers, in the exercises.

The Nominating Committee reported the following committees, which were appointed:

Committee on Business.—Rev. G.H. Ide, D.D., Rev. C.R. Bruce, Rev. M.W. Montgomery, Rev. D.P. Breed, Rev. E.M. Williams.

Committee on Finance.—F.J. Lamb, Esq., J.H. Moore, Esq., Pres. David Beaton, Pres. Albert Salisbury and Rev. W.S. Rugby.

Committee of Arrangements.—Rev. Norman Seaver, D.D., Wm. Dickinson, Esq., Wm. H. Bradley, Esq., O.B. Green, Esq., Rev. F.A. Noble, D.D., J.H. Hollister, M.D., District Secretary J.E. Roy.

The exercises Tuesday evening opened with a selection by the quartette choir of the New England Church.

The Association was called to order by President Taylor, and Rev. W.B. Wright, D.D., read the Scripture and led in prayer. "Watchman, tell us of the night," was then sung, after which Rev. R.R. Meredith, of New York, preached the Annual Sermon, from Isaiah xlii, 1-4.

The sermon was followed by the administration of the Lord's Supper. The following named persons officiated at the service: Ministers: Rev. H.P. Higley, D.D., Rev. Graham Taylor, D.D. Deacons: S.D. Hastings, W.H. Bradley, Wm. Dickinson, C.F. Gates, H.W. Hubbard and Chauncey Collom.

At the close of the communion service, adjournment was taken to Wednesday at 8 A.M.

The benediction was pronounced by President Taylor.

The prayer-meeting from 8 to 9 o'clock was led by President E.D. Eaton. At 9 o'clock, President Eaton was called to the chair temporarily, and was succeeded by the Vice-President of the Association, Rev. F.A. Noble, D.D.

The minutes of the previous day were read and approved.

The President, Dr. Taylor, then resumed the chair.

The Nominating Committee reported the following special committees, who were appointed:

Committee on the Chinese.—Rev. H.A. Stimson, D.D., Rev. E.P. Goodwin, D.D., Rev. Wm. Walker, Rev. J.G. Aikman, D.J. Pike, Esq.

Committee on the Indians.—Rev. A.P. Foster, D.D., Gen. C.H. Howard, Rev. Clinton Douglass, Rev. C.V. Spear.

Committee on Educational Work.—Rev. W.B. Wright, D.D., Rev. F.P. Woodbury, D.D., Rev. Amos Dresser, Rev. H.M. Tupper, Rev. F.A. Ragland.

Committee on Church Work.—Rev. Graham Taylor, D.D., Rev. Warren F. Day, Rev. L.B. Maxwell, S.D. Hastings, Esq., O. Davidson, Esq.

Committee on Mountain Work.—Rev. D.M. Fisk, D.D., Rev. S.E. Lathrop, Rev. S.A. Norton, Rev. E.P. South, Rev. W.E. Barton, Robert F. Wheeler, Esq.

A paper on "The American Missionary Association, its Place and Work," was read by Secretary M.E. Strieby, and referred to a committee to be appointed.

Following this, Secretary A.F. Beard read a paper on "The Missionary View of the Southern Situation," which was referred also to a committee to be appointed.

The report of the Committee on the Chinese Work was presented by Rev. Henry A. Stimson, D.D. and accepted, and an address was made by Rev. E. P. Goodwin, D.D.

The Nominating Committee nominated the following special committees, who were appointed:

Committee on Secretary Strieby's Paper.—Prof. G.B. Willcox, D.D., Rev. J.F. Dudley, D.D., Rev. E.D. Hill, D.D., Rev. Flavel Bascom, D.D., Rev. C.W. Camp, Rev. W.L. Tenney, Rev. J.E. Snowden.

Committee on Secretary Beard's Paper.—Rev. H.M. Tenney, D.D., Rev. C.O. Brown, D.D., Rev. E.M. Williams, Rev. E.F. Williams, D.D., Rev. Calvin Keyser, Deacon G.N. Palmer.

Right Rev. H.B. Whipple, of Minnesota, then addressed the Association on "The Future of the Indian in our Country."

After which, remarks were made on the Chinese question by Dr. H.A. Stimson and Rev. M.F. Sargent.

After announcements of committees and programme for the afternoon, President Taylor pronounced the benediction, and recess was taken until 2 o'clock P.M.

The Association was called to order by Vice-President Noble. "Saviour, visit thy plantation," was sung, after which Dr. Noble conducted the devotional exercises for a half hour.

A paper on "The Future of the Negro in our Country," was read by Rev. C.H. Richards, D.D., of Wisconsin, and referred to the Executive Committee with power to publish.

Rev. C.F. Thwing, D.D., unable to be present as announced, forwarded his address for the use of the Secretaries of the Association.

Rev. A.P. Foster, D.D., presented the report of the Committee on the Indian Work.

Addresses were then made by Rev. T.L. Riggs, of Oahe, and Rev. C.W. Shelton, Financial Secretary for Indian Missions.

After singing, "Sow in the morn thy seed," the Association was addressed by Rev. W.B. Wright, D.D., on the Educational Work, presenting the report of the committee and speaking in its behalf. Rev. F.P. Woodbury, D.D., spoke also on the same topic.

After announcements, Dr. Noble pronounced the benediction, and the Association took a recess until 7:30 P.M.

The Association was called to order by Secretary Strieby, who invited E.W. Blatchford, Esq., of Illinois, to preside during the evening in the absence of President Taylor. Professor G.B. Willcox led the Association in prayer.

On being introduced by Secretary Strieby as representing the American Board, Mr. Blatchford said:

"I have no authority from the American Board to convey to you any special message; and yet I know that they will be glad to have me express to you their sentiments of sympathy with you in your work. The work is one. In carrying forward the work of the American Board and the American Missionary Association we are obeying the same command of our Lord: Go ye into all the world and disciple all. We are inspired by the same prophetic promises, that the time will come when this world shall obey the command of God as it is obeyed in heaven. In fact, this gathering is in itself a type of the unity of this work; for as I look around me I see brethren and sisters representing the different societies in which we are all interested. I see them here from the New West Commission; I see the workers and representatives of our Home Missionary Society; I see, of course, many representatives of the American Missionary Association, and those deeply interested in the work of our American Board. So that we have here in this very meeting an illustration of these words of the Apostle: 'One Lord, one faith, one baptism.'"

Mrs. J.J.M. Angear, in charge of a Chinese Sunday-school in the First Congregational Church, Chicago, spoke of her work, her Chinese choir singing "Stand up for Jesus," and later a verse of "Sweet By and By," in both English and Chinese.

Representative addresses then followed, Mr. Chin Kue speaking for the Chinese, Mrs. Elizabeth Winyan for the Indians, Rev. T.L. Riggs interpreting, and Rev. Mr. McClellan for the Negro. A verse of "Shall we whose souls are lighted," was sung, after which Rev. W.E. Barton spoke of the Mountain Whites.

President Eaton's paper was deferred, owing to the lateness of the hour.

After Secretary Strieby had led the Association in prayer and pronounced the benediction, recess was taken until Thursday morning at 8:30 A.M.

Devotional exercises from 8:30 to 9 o'clock were conducted by Rev. E.S. Hill. Vice-President Noble called the Association to order.

The minutes of the previous day were read and approved.

A letter to Secretary Strieby from Col. J.M. Keating, of Tennessee, on the "Southern Problem," was read by Secretary J.E. Roy. A rising vote was taken, expressing approval of the sentiments of the letter and requesting the Association to publish it. Dr. F.A. Noble was instructed to correspond with Col. Keating, assuring him of the Association's appreciation of his address.

The report on the "Mountain Work," was presented by Rev. D.M. Fisk, D.D., who followed it by an address.

District Secretary C.J. Ryder read a paper on "The Debt of our Country to the American Highlanders."

"My Country 'tis of Thee," was then sung, after which Secretary Ryder's paper was referred to the Executive Committee of the Association with reference to publication.

President Taylor resumed the chair at this point and introduced Rev. H.M. Tenney, D.D., who read the report of the committee on Secretary A.F. Beard's paper. The report was accepted and referred to the Executive Committee.

An address on the Church Work was made by Rev. C.W. Hiatt, District Secretary of the Association, and was followed by several brief addresses on the Mountain Work.

The report and an address was then made by Rev. Graham Taylor, D.D. The report was accepted and its recommendations adopted.

After announcements, Dr. Noble was instructed to reply to Dr. Arthur Little, of Massachusetts, in response to his telegram of greeting. After the benediction by President Taylor, recess was taken until 2 o'clock P.M.

The Association was called to order by Vice-President Dr. F.A. Noble. A verse of the hymn, "In the cross of Christ I glory," was sung. F.J. Lamb, Esq., read the report of the Committee on Finance, supplementing the report with a brief address. The report was accepted.

The report on Secretary Strieby's paper was presented by Prof. G.B. Willcox, D.D. The report was accepted and referred to the Executive Committee.

Following this, Secretary Strieby made a statement respecting the Hand Fund. Dr. E.P. Goodwin, President Salisbury and President W.M. Taylor spoke on the Financial Report, and the report was adopted.

The Association then adjourned to the chapel, and the church was occupied by the Woman's Missionary Meeting under the auspices of the Woman's Bureau of the Association. Mrs. George M. Lane, of Detroit, Michigan, presided. The report was made by the Secretary, Miss D.E. Emerson, after which addresses were made by the missionaries: On the mountain work, by Miss Hayes, of Tennessee; on the colored people, by Mrs. Shaw, of Georgia, and Miss Plant, of Mississippi; and on the Indians, by Miss Barnaby, a native teacher.

The Nominating Committee reported the following list of officers for the ensuing year:

• President,
  • REV. WM. M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D., N.Y.
• Vice-Presidents,
  • REV. A.J.F. BEHRENDS, D.D., N.Y.
  • REV. F.A. NOBLE, D.D., Ill.
  • REV. ALEX. McKENZIE, D.D., Mass.
  • REV. D.O. MEARS, D.D., Mass
  • REV. HENRY HOPKINS, D.D., Mo.
• Corresponding Secretaries,
  • REV. M.E. STRIEBY, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
  • REV. A.F. BEARD, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
• Recording Secretary,
  • REV. M.E. STRIEBY, D.D., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
• Treasurer,
  • H.W. HUBBARD, Esq., 56 Reade Street, N.Y.
• Auditors,
  • PETER McCARTEE,
  • CHAS. P. PEIRCE.
• Executive Committee,
  • For Three Years.
    • S.B. HALLIDAY,
    • SAMUEL HOLMES,
    • SAMUEL S. MARPLES,
    • CHARLES L. MEAD,
    • ELBERT B. MONROE.
  • For One Year.—ALBERT J. LYMAN.

A ballot was taken and the brethren named were elected. After the benediction by the President, recess was taken until 7:30 P.M.

The Association was called to order by President Taylor. "Stand up, stand up for Jesus," was sung, after which Rev. Simeon Gilbert, D.D., led in prayer.

The records of the previous sessions of the day were read and approved, and the Secretary was instructed to complete the minutes.

The invitation to hold the next Annual Meeting in Northampton, Massachusetts, was accepted.

President George A. Gates, of Iowa College, addressed the Association, and was followed by an address by President Cyrus Northrop, D.D., of Minnesota, and also by President E.D. Eaton, D.D., of Wisconsin.

The closing address of the Association was made by President Taylor.

The following minute read by Secretary Roy was then adopted:

Rev. Norman Seaver, D.D., responded for the New England Church. He said there was a saying that lightning never struck the same place twice, yet, though it fell to him to welcome the Association, it had also fallen to him to respond to this vote of thanks. He had asked Secretary Beard what he would say on this occasion, and was answered, in his witty way, "Tell us Godspeed, and we are glad to get rid of you." Dr. Seaver felt that the local people were the recipients, and the visitors the benefactors in what had been done. The President had inspired them with his spirit; he had not withdrawn his presence, and very late might he return to the heavens. Students and young ministers had been benefited by listening to those many learned men and devoted servants of God, and were inspired for future usefulness. "We are not the benefactors, we are the recipients, and we wish you Godspeed."

After having sung the doxology, with the benediction by President Taylor, the Association adjourned, to meet at Northampton, Massachusetts, for its next Annual Meeting.

We commemorate the forty-third anniversary of the American Missionary Association. During these years, its place and work have become somewhat definitely settled, and I take this occasion to set forth the position that it now holds in relation to its constituents, its sister societies, and the great work providentially thrown upon it.

1. The Association recognizes the control of its constituents. That recognition was one of the corner-stones on which it was founded. It sought its members and its funds from persons of evangelical faith and practical morality. Of such, it offered membership to any one who contributed to its funds. Thus broadly was it placed on a popular basis.

At length, however, it began to be felt by many of its supporters that there were evils in this method—that the acts of the society were liable to be regulated by the local attendance at each annual meeting, and that such meetings might easily be "packed" to carry out a purpose. The officers of the Association, true to the cardinal principles of its founders of control by its constituents, welcomed the discussion and cheerfully accepted the present constitution, which was adopted after due deliberation. That constitution designates as voters, life members and delegates from the churches, local conferences and state associations. The Executive Committee believe that we have now reached a satisfactory basis, but if it shall be the will of the constituents to make further modifications hereafter, the fundamental principle of the Association will dictate a ready acceptance of any change that will not set aside the evangelical, missionary, and philanthropic basis on which the Association was founded, and that will not impair contracts or endanger invested funds. The Association belongs, under Christ, to its constituents.

2. The work of the Association embraces all forms of effort in both the church and the school. It was organized and chartered as a missionary society. This was its fundamental aim. It was not till 1869, twenty-three years after its organization, that the word "educational" was put into its charter. But this change did not alter the character of its work—the school is missionary, the church an educator—and this church and school work are inseparably blended. The people among whom it labors are children in knowledge, and will remain so for a long time, for there are millions of blacks, mountain whites, Indians, and Chinese in our country who cannot read and write. In Northern communities where the children grow up in Christian homes and are environed in cultured society, with the best of common schools, the church finds the material for its membership, so far forth, prepared to its hand, but among these millions of unlettered peoples the church, if it is to be pure and intelligent, must be the outgrowth of the Christian school; and the branches of the tree might as well be expected to grow up without the roots, as such churches without these schools. The work among them begins in the primary school, and follows them through all departments of industrial, normal, collegiate and theological instruction.

In all this long process the teachers are with them at every step—in the shop, the school, the Sunday-school, the prayer meeting, and the church, and often the principal of the school is the pastor of the church. Thus the church, which grows up within or along side of the school, gets the priceless boon of the personal example and influence of these Christian teachers, in refining the manners and in making character; and as the pupils are converted they enter the church to become its stable members and intelligent officers. On the other hand, the families in the church, with their kindred and friends, furnish the pupils for the school and help to sustain it by their money and prayers, both the church and the school being stronger by their mutual support and more potent in their influence in the community than if they stood apart. And even after the scholars have left the school and have entered upon the business of life, the Association is especially fitted to gather them into churches. It has occurred in several instances, in starting new churches beyond the range of our schools, that we have found them to be made up first almost wholly of graduates and students from our different institutions, and that these have remained the most intelligent and reliable members.

We have found, too, that when a church was thus organized where we have no school, we are very soon importuned to start one. In localities with a scattered population there might not be sufficient public funds to open a colored public school; in many more places they would sustain the school for only two months in the year, and in larger towns it sometimes has happened that these public schools were of such a character that the parents begged for a Christian school as a means of saving the moral purity of their children. Thus, in every way, and under all circumstances, the school and the church need and help each other. And what is true of the colored people is equally true of the whites in the mountains and elsewhere, among whom the Association is working so auspiciously, planting its schools and churches in mutual helpfulness.

The suggestion that all the church work of the denomination in the home-field be given to one society, and all the educational be concentrated in one other society, deserves thoughtful consideration, for it meets with this very serious objection, that it provides for but one collection for work that now receives two or three. The experience of our churches is conclusive against the hope that one enlarged collection would be given to the one society. For a time, a brief time, spasmodic efforts might, as in former cases, result in some special contributions, but the new experiment would certainly be more disastrous, if it should fail, than those already tried, because it would involve far greater interests.

It is not to be supposed for a moment that such consolidation is contemplated in order that the churches may escape the large responsibility now resting upon them; and if economy and efficiency are the only objects sought, we fear the result would be disappointing. Such an arrangement would not save in the number of workers in the field, and surely it is not wise business management to leave great interests inadequately supervised. Even if the consolidated society were divided into separate departments or bureaux, the supervision could not be less, if efficient, while the combination would be likely to lead to complications, and would weaken, in the several departments, the sense of individual responsibility and take away the impulse of historic life and achievement.

More work well managed and vigorously pushed seems to me to be the only plan that will satisfy the Christian conscience or meet the approval of the Master.

3. The work of the Association extends to all races of men. This claim is sanctioned by the fraternal agreement existing between it and the American Home Missionary Society, by its own history, and by the needs of the field. The agreement with the sister society says explicitly that the Association is "to pursue its educational and church work in the South among both races." The history of the Association shows that at the beginning the populations reached by it in America were all white except the Indians and a few colored refugees in Canada.

Its home missions at the North and West were among white people: and so were they even in the South before the war. John G. Fee and his heroic associates in Kentucky, and Daniel Worth and others in North Carolina, founded churches and schools only among the whites. Berea College was for whites only, at the outset. It was not till the era of emancipation with its overwhelming flood of freedmen that the Association turned its direct and almost exclusive attention to them. It heard the voice of God in the tramp of these millions marching out of bondage into freedom, and in that voice it heard the call to itself, providentially prepared for the new era. It answered the call, without, however, abandoning its mission to preach the gospel to the whites also; and now, with its schools and churches well established throughout the South, with an open door to the whites, and especially to those in the mountain regions, it hears the voice of God calling it thither. The ready adaptation of its methods to these people, and the success of its efforts among them, attest the validity of its call and the wisdom of its response.

4. The work of the Association is not a transient one. A New England pastor at the beginning of our work for the freedmen, gave me a hearty welcome to present our cause in his pulpit, telling me frankly he did so the more cheerfully because he thought our work would soon be over—say in twenty or twenty-five years. Now that good man believed that home missions in the West, and in some of the older Eastern States, would be needed well nigh on to the millennium, yet he imagined that the blacks, just escaped from bondage, utterly poor, ignorant and degraded, would (perhaps he hardly stopped to think how) rise in twenty-five years above all need of help from any quarter in their upward struggle! But the fallacy of such a supposition is realized more since these twenty-five years have passed than it was then. It is now clearly seen that these ex-slaves will require for three or four generations the most abundant help to bring them up to the level of those Western settlers, including the Swedes, Germans and Norwegians crowding in thither, who are comparatively well-off and intelligent. And then, after that preparation of the Negro has been made, the regular work of home missions will only be fairly begun among them. The work for this people, therefore, is not transient, and the missionary society that has it in hand has before it not only a great but long-continued task.

And for that great work the Association has had a manifest call and preparation, and has gained an experience and an influence of peculiar value in its further prosecution. The Association has wrought itself into the schools and churches, into the industries of the colored people, the improvement of their homes, the preparation of their sons and daughters for home and business life, and for teachers and preachers and physicians; it has wrought itself into their better aspirations for both this world and that which is to come. It has won upon the confidence and respect of the white people by its unselfish and Christian work, its kind but firm adherence to principle, and by the blessing it has conferred upon both races in aiding the South in the only true solution of its great problem.

The Association has become anchored to this great work by the large amount of invested funds intrusted to its care. It has received thousands of dollars from the Freedmen's Bureau, from the Avery estate, from the gifts of Mrs. Stone and others, and added to all these is the large sum placed one year ago in its hands by the munificence of Mr. Hand. These several sums aggregate more than two millions of dollars—an amount of endowment, we believe, without a parallel among our Congregational societies for the home field. While no inconsiderable share of these funds is in plant, and therefore increases instead of diminishes current expenses, yet the Association is the only legal custodian of these funds. They constitute, therefore, a strong evidence of the confidence of large donors in its usefulness and stability and in the importance of its work, and at the same time they make a strong plea for current contributions to sustain that work. God has moved the hearts of noble men and women to lay these firm foundations. Will not others equally able and far-seeing in their benevolence add to these gifts and thus extend these foundations, and will not the churches build thereon with diligent and cheerful hands?

These forty-three years under review have been memorable in the history of this Nation. They have witnessed the reign of slavery in the height of its arrogant domination. They have seen the rising protest of conscience and religion against that domination, with the mad resistance of slavery, until it culminated in one of the bloodiest wars of modern times. They have beheld a united Nation emerge from the conflict, and not a slave in all its broad land. They have seen the uplifted hands and hearts of the freedmen grasping for knowledge. And, last of all, they behold the new power seated on the throne vacated by slavery, dooming the colored man to a position of inferiority scarcely less degrading than slavery itself.

Along all these lines the sympathies and efforts of the Association have run. It pleaded for the slave in his bondage, when to do so cost odium and ostracism; it joined with others in the appeal against slavery, with the hope that righteousness would avert the calamity of war. When the slave came forth free, it went with prompt hands to fit him for his new position, and now, as he enters the long and dark struggle against poverty, ignorance and race-prejudice, it girds itself for the great struggle, armed with what have ever been its only weapons, the light of knowledge and the love of the gospel of Christ. The contest may be long, the work will be great, but the triumph must be sure. May the church of Christ, the patriots of the land, and the abundant blessing of the Almighty God strengthen and help us in this great undertaking!

The Southern problem is a National peril. Problems are not always perils. This is a problem large with political and religious perils, and whether political or religious it can not be ignored, nor can its consideration be postponed. It is here. It is our problem. It is nearer to the South, and more immediate, than to the North, but it is ours. We are not foreigners in any part of this country. It has been settled once for all that we are to be fellow citizens in a common country when we come from Boston to Chicago and when we go from New York to New Orleans. The problem which belongs to a country to which we belong, is ours. This might as well be understood. We have no right to take our hands off from that of which we are a part and which is a part of us. No part can say to another, it is not your concern.

This is true politically. Thrice true is it religiously—Christian faith is not confined to State boundaries. It belongs everywhere. The problem is not a new one. It has its roots bedded deep in history. When years ago it began to be discussed by a few they were called agitators, as if the discussion of right and wrong were itself a wrong, as if the letting in of light upon the darkness were a deed of darkness. Nevertheless, the Nation became thoughtful over the question of the rights of man. While it was musing the fire burned, and an irrepressible conflict came. In the issue it was settled that no man should be held by another man in involuntary servitude in this common and inseparable country.

A quarter of a century has elapsed since this settlement of a problem which involved the destiny of two races, and of our whole country. The question now before the Nation and before the churches is a corollary of slavery. It is the second section of the first chapter. The first question was: How shall liberty be proclaimed to the captive and the enslaved become free? The second is: Being free, how can the two races—as distinct and separate as are the white and black races of the South—now equal before the law, live side by side under the same government, and live in Christian truth and peace? This is the problem, and, like the first, it is irrepressible.

In one sense it is a new question—that is, a new generation of white people has in part come forward to participate in the duties of citizenship, since all men became men in the law of the land. To them the question is practically new. The situation as they find it, is this: The Negroes, who, twenty years ago, were four millions, are now eight millions. The increase of the blacks above the increase of the whites in the period of twenty years, is fourteen per cent. In his work on the African in the United States, Professor Gilliam, having in hand the figures of our Census Bureau, forecasts with the demonstration of mathematics our population one century hence. We do not know what may modify his figures, but he computes that at the present rate of increase there are to be in the old slave States in one hundred years, ninety-five millions of whites and double this number of African descent. Therefore, whatever may modify, it is probable that before one half an hundred years are over, the numbers of the blacks will furnish them sufficient guarantee for their legal rights.

There are those in this presence who have seen the population of this republic multiply itself nearly three times. Our childhood's geography taught us that twenty-three millions of people lived in the United States. Now our children learn that there are sixty millions. Twenty years ago four millions of Negroes and eight millions to-day. Therefore, as large as the problem now is to us, it will be greater for our children if we err in our solution of it.

This race of African descent has been declared by constitutional enactment to be entitled to whatever privileges belong to man, as man. Standing on this, and beginning with nothing but the heredity of hindrances, with the brand of color and the prejudice of race against them, this people have climbed up from their low estate with a remarkable progress. They have applied themselves to take hold of knowledge as no other people ever did in the annals of history. They have made great inroads upon their previous illiteracy. They have rapidly acquired property. They have developed industrial skill, and established the evidences of business facility. They have shown themselves capable of good citizenship, both in the understanding of its duties and the practice of them. They have vindicated the act of emancipation and the decrees of citizenship.

Yet to-day their standing both as citizens and as Christians is opposed. The question of their rights is discussed as if it were an open one, and in the South it is coming to be increasingly denied. Under the plea that it is unsafe for the black man to exercise his civil rights, there arises a condition of affairs that can have no standing under our government except a revolutionary standing. And the question whether the rights of man as man shall be regarded, is to-day a more pressing question than it has been at any previous time since the slaves were declared to be men.

The Southern press, which both creates and voices public opinion, reveals an attitude of mind increasingly hostile to the equal civil rights of the black man, for the simple reason that he is not white, which is calculated to fill the friends of American institutions with gravest apprehensions, and which demands the serious attention of us all. Almost every week discloses to us the fact that intimidation, oppression and violence do override the government of the land, in its application to the Negro people. Influential Southern journals have pronounced the Fifteenth Amendment a living threat to the civilization of the South, and declare that Christian statesmanship demands its abrogation.

A thoughtful book published in New York, written in a calm and judicial tone by an able lawyer in Virginia, in its chapter upon the future of the Negro, says: "The social aspect of the Negro suffrage is certain to grow more threatening as the blacks increase. The motives which have led the great body of whites to vote together in this age, must augment in force in the age to follow. To day the rapid increase of the black population constitutes a greater danger to the stability of our government than any that is sapping the vitality of the European monarchies. The partial disfranchisement of the Negro in the future would appear to be inevitable, essential, if not to the existence of the South, then to the prosperity of the Union." This is a temperate expression of much Southern opinion.

Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar fields, in the furnaces and mines of the South, aspiring to nothing higher and not antagonizing the whites in political matters, there would be no race problem.

Six months ago we could quote from an editorial column written by an ex-Confederate officer for an influential Democratic paper in the South these words: "The duty of the white people of the South is plain. In the spirit of noblesse oblige we must sympathize with those who are fitting the colored people for the duties of life, remembering what the Negroes were to our forefathers and what our forefathers were to them. No one can doubt that a Negro has a soul to save. That admitted, he is as much entitled to the benefits of salvation as the white man. But", he adds, "what do we see? Nearly all the bodies of Christians even, except the Roman Catholics, shuffling to set the Negro apart and leave him largely to his own ways, shuffling out of their responsibility according to the gospel which they profess as their guide, and putting the Negro apart in spite of the word of God, whom they worship, that he is no respecter of persons. The Negro was brought over here by theft and outrage. He is here to stay, and we must deal with him according to the golden rule, and as we would wish to be done by if we were similarly placed."

This is not a quotation from the National Council of Congregational Churches, where such an utterance would both by nature and by grace find expression, but it is from the pen of an officer of the Southern Confederacy, who knows the light when he sees it, who keeps open an honest eye, and who does not hesitate to speak from an honest mind. This sentiment balances somewhat of that which pleads against the black man, and not a few friends of this kind has the American Missionary Association won to itself throughout the South. It never had so many who are saying: "Yours is the most practical missionary work ever undertaken by a Christian body." "You have won our confidence by your spirit and your methods; you have our cordial sympathy." At the same time we recognize the fact that both prejudice and partisanship are now making strenuous efforts to create the judgment that the Negro should be stripped of his civil rights and that his education is going on too rapidly. For example, the Southern Journal, whose Christian sentiments of six months ago, just quoted, with another editor to-day, comes to us with another deliverance, probably nearer to the heart of most of its constituency, saying: "The Negro is not a fit subject for Northern missionary effort. Northern money is not wanted to build him schools, and Northern teachers and preachers are not wanted to improve his mind nor to save his soul. He should be let alone. He is out in the water: let him swim. He should be left alone to work out his own salvation." The editor who says we must save him is an ex-Confederate officer who has always lived in the South. The editor who says he should be left alone is a Northern man who has gone South to live. The first writes, noblesse oblige. The second does not understand the language. He, doubtless, has the largest constituency.

The pulpit also creates and voices public opinion. Our work is coming to get many a good word from the Southern pulpit. But a Southern white bishop—Bishop Pearce—did not write to unwilling ears when he said: "In my judgment higher education would be a calamity to the Negroes. It would elevate Negro aspirations far above the station which the Negro was created to fill. The whites can never tamely, and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored people into places of trust, profit, and responsibility." This, you will observe, is from a minister of Christ. It is from a bishop of a church. It is from one who prays our Lord's prayer, given alike to white and black. "After this manner, therefore, pray ye." "Our Father." This is from one who believes in the baptism at Pentecost, when devout men from every nation under heaven received the impartial benedictions of God. This from one who read the story of Peter and the sheet. "Alas, my brother."

All this, then, is the atmosphere of the situation. Some prophetic souls are looking out upon a most perplexing and perilous problem with profound solicitude, and extending to us their sympathy and prayers for our work. More, many more, are teaching and preaching that God has created the Negro race to fill forever a place of inferiority, and that he must stay down in the bog or in some way be destroyed. It is not surprising, therefore, that ignorant white people should give form and substance to these hostile opinions in scenes of violence and cruelty. They believe in the inherent inferiority of the blacks, and have a mighty fear lest this doctrine should prove to be untrue. The Negro, twenty-five years ago in absolute poverty and illiteracy, has been greedy for education, and has seriously thought of nothing but to rise from his low condition.

The intelligent white man now, and to his great surprise, is all at once confronted by the intelligent black man. They are not so numerous now as to be an element to fear, but the whites are foreseeing the not distant day when they can not be relegated to inferiority because of their color. The calamity that Bishop Pearce deplores and would prevent is not far away—educated Negroes with aspirations, in other words, men.

The general Negro illiteracy is gaining fast upon the white ignorance, and the despised Negro is found to be living above many of his illiterate white neighbors. This makes it easy work for designing men to sharpen race prejudices, which by force and fear shall keep the Negro down.

On the Negro side, he has been patient and forbearing. With these outbreaks of persecution some are discouraged, and are ready to surrender their manhood. On the other hand, some are no longer patient, but are enraged. They would retaliate. They feel that defense against wrongs is right. An influential Negro paper says, "EDUCATE, AGITATE, RETALIATE. Does one strike me? With the power of God on high, back also will I strike him." This feeling grows. Add to it the fact that the Negro is developing the power of organization. There are leaders. They are in their councils and conventions. They are feeling deeply, speaking plainly, and organizing efficiently.

This is the situation! "How shall this problem be solved? How shall we prevent the conflict between races?" A Southern author says: "These problems have been solved in the past in four ways. By reducing the weaker race to slavery, or by expulsion, or by extermination, or by the amalgamation of the races. Slavery is out of the question—that is settled. Equally repugnant is expulsion or extermination. Amalgamation is abhorrent." Therefore, the problem will not be solved by any historical precedents. The two races must live here in the same sections, equal before the law, with mutual rights, and all rights must be sanctioned and confirmed.

The American Missionary Association is living with this problem day by day. It is trying to see it with the look of Christ. This Association foresaw this question forty years ago. It took on itself the preparation for it. It guided itself to meet the problem in the fields before the armies in the South were disbanded. It went with its distinctive and unpopular principles. It went in the patience and love of Christ. For the most part it met a natural and unconcealed hostility. It did not retaliate even in spirit, but it stood firm in spirit and in truth. It has lived on in the South, and taught the same ever-living and everlasting gospel for all men, of whatever race or color. Its record is before the churches. They have never had reason to feel other than grateful to God for its work. Beginning with a great number of little primary schools, and with thousands of beginners in the alphabet of learning, it has gradually passed into larger and more far-reaching influences by teaching teachers and preachers, who shall go, and who do go out and reach multiplied thousands.

In order that applied Christianity may have the power of self-help and self-care, industries are introduced. In that the people are being fitted to save themselves. All of our work from first to last is missionary, and instinct with the motive of salvation; our schools are means to an end; fitting preachers, teachers, mechanics, home makers to meet the problem and the peril. It is not by education that the question is to be solved. The missionary view is not simply the educational view. This society is not an educational society. Education is not the panacea for the ills of man. Ignorance is a great evil, but it is not the worst one; sinfulness is worse and more difficult to cure. The one who is educated may make trouble and not heal it; secular education can not meet the problem; State education can not protect against the peril, but sanctified education can, for it has in it the power of God. This society is a missionary society which, like the American Board, teaches in order to save. You can scarcely save ignorance. This means Christian schools not only full of ethics, but vital with faith. It means also the twin life of school work and church work. To put these factors apart would be a great disaster to each; nay, it would put away from the only society that can effectively, and we believe effectually, meet this problem, the chief factor in the solution of the impending and serious question. Education alone is not equal to this question, and those who have won the ear and the sympathy of those who need to come under the power of the gospel, who have been their friends and teachers, who have their confidence and trust, are the ones to take this gospel to them and show them how to take it to others. The schools reach parents, the schools reach pastors, the schools reach the people, the schools are intertwined with all the church life that has any hope in it. This is the missionary view. When this people in the wilderness cried out in their distresses, "Who will speak for us?" the Association spoke for them. When they needed sympathy, sympathy it gave. When they needed instruction, it went to them in the name of Christ. In his name it stood for the Negro. In his name it stood by the Negro. In his name it stood with him. It stands there to-day. It is his friend and counselor. When the Negro is cast down, the churches will hear one voice and they will wish their own society to be found faithful in this.

With this charter as a missionary society for schools and churches, we present to the Negro race continually the personal hope of souls not only, but the hope of the race. When they think that the progress is slow we tell them that Christianity is sure. When they tell us that they can not wait, but must organize and retaliate, we tell them to wait upon God. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." We ask them to remember that a quarter of a century, or a century, is a short time in the history of a people. We point to a million—a round million—of Negro children in the schools to-day. We are teaching them to be men. We are saving them to be Christians. We teach them not to remain down and not to be put down. Being men, they are to stand like men, but like Christian men, to conquer prejudices by worthiness, to meet race hatred with only a stronger purpose to command respect, not to render evil for evil, but contrariwise, blessing; not blow for blow, but to go on upbuilding themselves, deserving their rights, and remembering that a great element in the solution of this problem must be an intelligent faith in God. With this missionary view we stand firm. We have learned that the Southerners of our own race, even when they hold their prejudices against our principles, respect those who stand in a Christian way for their principles; and that these principles will never be accepted in the South by our holding them loosely, or in suspense, or in any sort of abeyance. They respect us when we teach our people that they have all the rights of manhood and womanhood; that they are to respect themselves and to be worthy of self-respect; that they are not to consent in their own minds to any assertion of superiority based upon the tint of the skin, and that they are never to feel guilty for being black. We are teaching the colored people to hold honor with themselves.

What this Association and other missionary forces have done and are doing—this Association more than others—will be the balance of power to prevent the dreaded conflict of races; the balance of power to settle the question; How can the two races live in the same section with mutual respect for each other's civil and Christian rights? This may take time. Christianity takes time. It is ours to take Christianity to teach that the beginning of Christianity was the death blow to wrong principles and evil practices of men, however well intrenched and fortified these forces may be.

It is this which gives us courage to grapple with centuries of wrong and to undertake the slow reduction of these evils. When Christianity came, the era of conscience came, and in His gospel is the power of intelligence and moral determination that shall not be overcome of evil, but shall overcome evil with good.

The missionary schools and the missionary churches are, we believe, the only safeguard against the conflict of races. They are the guardian against this national peril. This being so, the churches must speed them more and more. They must not hinder them nor tie their hands. The guarantees of this peaceful solution are in the hands of the churches. Multiply and hasten the Christian energies. Multiply the Christian prayers that we may be workers together with Him of whom it is written, "He shall not fail or be discouraged."

It is an ominous fact that in the South illiteracy is steadily increasing. It is an encouraging fact that in the region surrounding our chartered and normal schools illiteracy is steadily diminishing. The colored people are multiplying more rapidly than the means of educating them. If the supply of school accommodations to-day exactly equalled the demand, so that every colored child of suitable age was provided for in some school, there would be at the time of our next annual meeting 255,500 children asking to be taught their letters to whom we should have to say, We cannot teach you. But the supply does not yet nearly equal the demand.

In respect to education, the South is a dark sky rapidly growing darker, but flecked with patches of lighter shade, which are gradually growing brighter and larger. Such a bright space frames each of our chartered and normal schools. Fisk University, Talladega College, Tougaloo University, Straight University, in New Orleans, and Tillotson Institute, at Austin, Texas, are doing work which vindicates each year more distinctly the strategic sagacity which located them. In these institutions alone nearly two thousand students of both sexes are being trained to be light-bearers to their race. Besides these, each of which is essentially a normal school, and includes a normal department, eighteen distinctively normal schools are sustained at different points of strategic importance. Two new schools have been established during the year. Good work has also been done among the mountain whites. The income from the gift of Mr. Daniel Hand has enabled the Association to enlarge its school accommodations, and to assist more than three hundred students, who, without it, would have been unable to attend schools of any kind.

The committee would emphasize among special needs of the work, funds for a girls' hall at Tillotson Institute, and for the endowment of a theological school for training colored pastors. Two facts are pre-eminently gratifying. The first is that in nearly all the schools of the Association some kind of industrial training is provided, and that the influence of such training is conspicuously shown in improved ideas of home life and comfort among those connected by family or other ties with our students. The second fact is, that in all our schools the students are taught that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that consequently the separation between religion and morality, which is the supreme danger of the Southern black churches, is perceptibly diminishing.

The mission of the American Missionary Association is shown to be a specialty and a unit by its church work. It is the work of a specialist among Christian organizations that alone could have produced these churches. To meet the demands of an exigency which could not be met by the pre-existent ordinary agencies, this child of Providence was born of God and the times. For the accomplishment of ends for which no means had been found, its methods were providentially chosen by a process of spiritual selection. Its agencies are the accretions of the Divine purpose in its progress toward the salvation of the undermost, and the edifying of the whole body of Christ. To the production of its unique Christian institutions the exclusive devotion to the study of the peculiar conditions of these entirely distinct communities was necessary. There have been generated by this devotion and acquired through the experience of nearly half a century a knowledge and skill which claim for this Association the recognition of the world as its foremost expert in the successful application of Christianity to the solution of the most difficult race problems of modern civilization.

And yet in the accomplishment of this great achievement, loyalty to the common faith and to our own polity, as well as to the teachings of experience, demanded only the new application of the old prime factors of God's own choice, the local church with its evangelism and Christian nurture.

In the work of this Association these two great agencies are uniquely one. The pastor is often teacher and evangelist. The sanctuary is school-house and mission station. At twenty-three points on the field God has made of these twain—the church and the school—one. The church is the unit of this unity. For while the church is generally the offspring of the school, the school finds both its profoundest reasons for existence and its highest consummation in the needs and ends of the church. In it the work both of the teacher and evangelist co-ordinates and culminates.

It will not be so very long before these schools and colleges will find their chief sources of supply in these churches, which although now so dependent, must ultimately be depended upon to maintain and develop their own institutions. Even now it is to be remembered that the appeal of this evangelizing church work meets with the wider and more popular response from the giving constituency of the Association, while the educational institutions are more dependent upon the larger gifts of interested individuals.

Moreover, it is the church which opens the springs of the family life from which the schools must draw their scholars. And it is the church which creates the environment necessary to the Christian homes, to which the graduates are sent back again to live their lives, and from which, as the heart's fulcrum, their saved lives can best lift up the lost.

These little church groups of evangelized and educated families are at once the prime sources and the constituent elements of the new Christian civilization which already heralds the coming of the kingdom to those neglected, outcast peoples, to secure whose human rights, Christian privileges and church fellowship is the first, loudest, longest call upon the Congregational Churches of America.

Therefore, in the name of this Association, whose heroic type of missionary and teaching service makes our whole membership and ministry the more attractive and ennobling; in the name of its schools which became churches, and its churches which are schools; in the name of their 8,400 professing Christians, and their 15,000 Sunday-school scholars, and the 1,000 converts of the year; in the name of the races of three continents to whom the Father is sending these our brethren as we are sent to them, we pledge the fidelity of the American Missionary Association to the two-fold agency of its one work, the discipling of these races by the evangelizing church, and the Christian nurture of its schools. And we re-echo the call which the National Council makes upon our churches for the $500,000 required by the exigencies and opportunities of this year's work for the neediest and most helpless of all our fellow-countrymen.

The formal report of your committee can without injustice be brief; not because the field considered is narrow, or the work unimportant as a missionary movement, but from the fact that a certain unity pervades both, making it possible to comprehend in one view even the diversities of a population of over two millions, and an area of above one hundred thousand square miles.

The official summary of the year's work, on which we report, once again sets before this Association the situation and its involved problem; a situation full of contradictions, a problem at once serious but not hopeless.

Here is the amazing spectacle of a self-isolated people, begirt with the active life and thought of our eager times, yet sharing neither. Here is an empire that is content to live in the past: having rich resources it neglects to develop them; a productive soil but niggard crops. Amidst a veritable Lebanon of forestry it has shanties for homes; with coal deposits that are the envy of the world, its shivering women in stoveless hovels attempt to defend themselves about their domestic toil with coarse homespun shawls and slat-bonnets. In an age that has harnessed mechanism, beast, and steam to the plow, scythe, sickle and flail, these owners of mountains of iron and mines of power still indolently vex a grudging soil with tools of such barbaric simplicity that their intrusion is scarcely more than a provocation to weeds.

Here is needless poverty in the lap of potential wealth, thriftlessness in the face of every seeming stimulus to diligence. Here is a diversified landscape that should inspire and a climate that should invigorate, but in place of vivacity and health we find apathetic endurance and intrenched disease. Scrofula and its parasite kin are domesticated in the debilitated blood, and pills, calomel, and death jointly contend for the prolific cradle, and even when temporarily defeated succeed in transforming childhood into unlovely age, without the long interval of intermediate active, zestful manhood.

And yet, pitiful as is this exhibit of deficiency, these Highland dwellers are none the less men and our brethren. Slavery robbed them of their lands half a century ago, and roughly shouldered them off into the mountain wilderness dowered with the pauperizing maxims of oppression, notably the indignity of toil, and their shrewd native mother-wit has been left to rust to dullard loss in the absence of schools worthy the name; worse still, their natural devoutness has been warped by unworthy shepherds, till superstition, bigotry, and gross immorality have taken fierce possession of many a society, hearthstone and heart. If to-day the schools are inefficient and some of the preaching blasphemous; if self-satisfied idleness has turned over this mountain realm to want and the slavery of low living, and (as ever) made woman at once the servant and the victim of its barbarism, it is but another historic count in the awful indictment of human selfishness. And all these crying deficiencies are but make-weights with our conviction of responsibility to this mountain flock of God, that often has been misled and unworthily sacrificed.

The only problematical element in this matter is the measure of our faith in God and man and all-prevailing truth. Wherever the ground has been broken by faithful men there is a crop to show as returns for invested toil. More than a thousand children are now under Christian instruction in our schools. Our pupils are in hungry demand as teachers, even to a minimum of years that to us would seem absurd (15 and 16 years). Over twenty churches are holding up a reasonable religion, as a life rather than merely a profession. New fields plead for mission work. Our already planted churches and schools are stimulating other denominations to redoubled diligence in church planting. Courage is in the tone and look of our frontier workers. The officers of this Association feel in an aggressive mood. The question resolves itself into one of faith and contributions. What, my brethren, shall be our answer?

The committee on the work of the American Missionary Association among the Indians respectfully report that they gratefully recognize the good hand of God in the work already done.

Since the American Missionary Association took the work, the expenditures have increased from $11,000 to $52,000, the out-stations for direct evangelistic effort from seven to twenty-one, and the churches from two to six. This last year, the Association has established three new out-stations: the Moody station among the Mandans, fifty miles north of Fort Berthold; the Moody Station No. 2 among the Gros Ventres, twenty-five miles north of Fort Berthold; the Sankey Station among the Dakotas at Cherry Creek. It has just put up a mission house, with a room for church worship, at Rosebud Agency. It has organized anew church at Bazille Creek, some distance out from Santee; a branch church at Cherry Creek, on the Sioux Reservation, and is just forming a church at Standing Rock, for which a building is now completed.

This record is certainly gratifying and shows that the Association appreciates the emergency, and is striving to meet it, so far as the means put in its hands allow. But your committee feel also that never before was there so great an opportunity as now brought before the Christians of this land, and especially our own denomination, for work among the Indians.

The relations of the Government and of the churches in Indian work are now unusually harmonious and kindly. The present Administration is thoroughly in sympathy with missionary operations, and will do nothing to impair their efficiency. We believe it to be sincerely actuated by a desire to promote the best welfare of the Indians, and ready to co-operate with all good people in efforts in this direction. It aims to educate every Indian child. We desire to see this done, and believe that when the Government assumes, as it should, the primary education of all Indians of school age, we shall be called on to turn our efforts to a much larger work for direct evangelization.

Our opportunity is enlarging further by the breaking down of the old pagan prejudices of the Indians. The testimony of all the workers on the field is to this effect. The Indians are desirous of living as white men. They are rapidly losing their distinctive Indian ideas and are imbibing the notions of their white neighbors. This is seen in their burials, which now are not uniformly, as of old, on scaffolds, but are more and more interments. It is shown in their feeling and behavior when death comes into their households. They no longer fill their houses with hideous outcries, but instead seek the missionaries to inquire about the life in the other world.

A further opportunity is to be noted in the fact that the Dakota Indians have specially fallen into our care. Our chief missions are located among them, at Santee, Rosebud, Oahe, Standing Rock, and outlying stations. But the Dakota Indians number 40,000 in all, or about one-sixth of all the Indians in the country. We have mastered the Dakota language; and a Bible, hymn-book, dictionary and other books are printed in that tongue. We have, then, special ability to carry on mission work among them, and are bound to utilize it to the full. The time is ripe for immediate action. It must be taken without delay if taken at all. The opening up to white settlement of a large strip of land though the center of the great Sioux reservations is to bring the Indian into contact with the influence of white men as never before. It is impossible that that influence shall be altogether good. The contact of the Indian with the frontiersmen of our own people has resulted most deplorably in the past, and we cannot hope for much better results now. Rum and licentiousness are sure to work untold harm to the Indian unless they are met by the gospel. This opening up of Indian territory to white settlement lays, therefore, a most imperative and immediate obligation on Christian people to protect the Indian from ruin by giving them the gospel.

We are satisfied that nothing but the gospel will suffice. Education alone can not save, and may simply give new strength to evil habits and influences. It must be a Christian education; schools should be simply preliminary and altogether subsidiary to the most energetic and wise presentation of the gospel. The uniform policy of the American Missionary Association in all departments of its work has been in this direction, and we gladly recognize the fact that its Indian work has steadily progressed with the idea of evangelizing the Indian.

We know very well that the Association is laboring for 8,000,000 Negroes and for 2,000,000 Mountain White people and for 125,000 Chinese, as well as 262,000 Indians. We know that the proportion of the Indians is comparatively small. At the same time we urge that this disproportion is to a large degree counterbalanced by the special opportunities we have considered. The Indian problem is before us for immediate settlement. It admits of no delay. Care for these few Indians now, Christianize them now, as we may, and the Indian becomes as the white man, and our missionary efforts will then be released for other fields.

In this special emergency we feel strongly the necessity laid on the Association for an enlargement of its administrative force. Since the death of our lamented brother, Secretary Powell, the force at the New York office of the Association has been short-handed. We hope that the earnest efforts which are being made by the Executive Committee to find a suitable person to become another Secretary of the Association may be at once successful. An emergency is upon us, and we say this with the conviction that the demands of the Indian work are now so imperative as to require a large portion of the time and thought of such a Secretary. It is a necessity that such a Secretary should frequently visit the field and be in constant communication with the workers.

This is the smallest and least conspicuous department of the work of the American Missionary Association, but the one that stands in the closest relation to ourselves, and the one also that can show the largest returns. The Chinese in America are few in number, but they are scattered everywhere, as if God intended in them to put the spirit of our churches to a crucial test, and, where that test is endured, to give to his servants a prompt reward and an unanswerable confirmation of his promises and of their faith.

These strange little men from "the land of Sinim," mysterious, silent, capable, incredibly industrious, money-making, with their pig-tails and their felt shoes, their "pidgin English" and their unintelligible "turkey tracks," their wooden countenance and their "bias eyes," their opium, and their "ways that are dark," who, in spite of restrictive laws and brutal personal treatment, are filtering in everywhere, until they may be seen crouched in the corner of any street car, and are a familiar object in the village street—why are they here? here just now and here so persistently? It is no mighty immigration of men, such as De Tocqueville liked to dwell upon. It is no conquering host, no familiar immigration. Whatever may once have been the attractive force of the California gold fields, washing soiled linen can hardly be regarded as satisfying a national instinct, or thumping through the long hours of the night upon an ironing table a soul-filling amusement. Much may be said of "the golden fleece," but these are no modern Argonauts. They are money-making as our friends the Jews, but no "high emprise" or "grand endeavor" fires their calm pulse, and much as has been written of the coolie system and the "Six Companies," nothing has been adduced which seems adequate to explain the movement.

The fact is, God is in it. He is crowding these heathen upon our churches in these missionary days of an opening world, first of all to prove our Christianity. Do we believe that all men are brothers? Do we believe that the Holy Ghost who renewed our hearts can renew these? Do we believe that the Lord who died for us, died for the world? Do we believe—not that the world—but that this particular heathen as he stands before us in his blue blouse, or sits at our side with his reading-book, is as dear to our heavenly Father as you and I are? Do we believe that we are to go to him with the gospel to find a way for the truth into his heart, to bear his burdens, to win him by love, and that without him we ourselves can not be made perfect? Do we believe, in short, that God has brought him here to our door that we might learn that if we have not a religion that will save, and will make us eager to have it save a Chinaman, we have not a religion that will save ourselves?

Seven hundred and fifty of these men already members of the churches connected with our mission on the Pacific Coast! and who will say how many more on the rolls of our churches from St. Louis to Boston! What are these Chinese converts, the fruitage of our Sunday-schools and prayer-meetings, our personal labor, but God's blessed seal set upon our Christian faith! Here is the evidence. Ours is the conquering faith of the world. It will save every man, for it has saved these men, no less than you and me.

But this is not all. China's day has come. We hear from beyond the sea of the new railway, the awful floods, the burning of the "Altar of Heaven," and the strange stirrings of the mind of that mighty people, the oldest, and judged by its persistent life, the strongest now on the globe. Merchants tell us of its limitless trade: diplomatists speak of its astuteness and of its new navy, second only to that of England; scholars wonder at a nation of heathen with whom learning determines rank, and where the "boss" and the fixer of elections are unknown. Missionaries write of the throngs that gather in strange cities to hear them preach, of the new gentleness and courtesy everywhere shown them, and of the increasing number of young people pressing into the mission schools.

In the midst of all this, when the Lord's voice is heard calling us to lift up our eyes and look on the fields now white for the harvest, comes word from our solitary watchman upon the watch-tower in Hong-Kong that when he returned to his post, as he did last year, perplexed and down-hearted, because not one Christian in all America heeded his call and went with him to his field, to his surprise and joy the Lord has been preparing his own servants in the person of Chinese emigrants coming home from America, bringing with them not money only and knowledge of the wide world, but the new-found faith; graduates of laundries, but also of our Sunday-schools, members of our churches, filled with an eager spirit to tell their parents, their brethren, their neighbors, of Jesus Christ. Ah, dear friends, God's ways are not as our ways. Let us not be slow to catch his thought and walk where he leads.

Here, then, is the call to us. Begin with the Chinaman at your door. Recognize that the Lord Jesus stands before you in him. You prove your own faith; you "do it unto" your Lord; you forward the plan of God when you take him by the hand and gently entreat him for Christ.

For the same reason you will give your money to support the work of this Association. No work has been more devoted, more upheld by prayer, more Christlike, or, we may add, more deservedly successful than that under the lead of our representative, Dr. Pond, on the Pacific Coast. He has already surrounded himself with a band of trained Christian converts, who would be a joy in any field, and who are making themselves felt for good far and wide. Their influence reaches to Chicago, St. Louis, and even Boston and New York. It is ours to see that the Christian city they find here is not less Christlike than that which met them when they landed on our shores, and that the hoodlum of our Eastern cities no more represents the spirit of our churches than does he of San Francisco and of Oakland. Let us be careful to show that our hand will be as promptly raised to protect the helpless Chinaman from insult on the street as it will be to lead his soul to Christ. Let us insist upon it, as Americans and as Christians, that no distinction of race or of color shall stand between any man and his rights, either in the State or in the Church. Then may we hope that all—white and black, Chinaman and American—will care less for rights and more for duties, and, in the joy of a true brotherhood, will labor together to bring in the day of the Lord. In any case, let us, with all our multiform machinery, our conventions, our societies, our churches, be not so busy "saving souls" that we have not care to save men and women.

Your committee beg leave to report that they have had under consideration the matters committed to them. They have been attended by your Treasurer, and they have examined his reports submitted, particularly the detailed statement of receipts and expenditures for the year closed; also statement of trust funds of the Association; also statement of resources and liabilities, and of the income of the Daniel Hand Educational Fund for the same period. These statements come to us duly vouched for by the standing committee of auditors elected by the Association. A summarized statement of receipts and expenditures has been printed and distributed at this meeting, which accords with the detailed report. Other reports show that the invested funds of the Association, aside from the Daniel Hand Fund, are $230,875.78, being $500 more than in the previous year. From the statement of resources and liabilities, we find that the various colleges, schools, stations, buildings, and property constituting what may be termed the plant of the Association, amount, at their estimated value, to $745,849. This is a large sum, but the investment yields no pecuniary return to the Association. It represents the fixed property with which the Association carries on its work, and the figures may serve in some measure to apprise us of the magnitude of the work being carried on by the Association.

The Daniel Hand Fund is a separate and distinct trust, and its income cannot be used for the general work of the Association, and may demand some further notice before this report is closed. The general condition of the fund is found on the printed abstract already mentioned.

We find the system of keeping the accounts clear, convenient, and well adapted to exhibit from month to month the exact pecuniary condition of the Association, and the restrictions upon drawing money from the treasury well calculated to insure safety in that respect, and we find the management of the Treasurer's accounts and office in all details satisfactory and deserving our commendation. Comparing the gifts and work of the Association for the last year just closed with the previous year, and the recommendations of the Finance Committee a year ago, we find that the year 1888 closed with a deficit of over $5,000, that the amount of receipts for that year had been $320,953.42; that the Finance Committee then recommended that the friends of the Association should raise for the year $375,000 for its current expenditures. It is a source of great gratification to find that this recommendation has been nobly met, and $376,216.88 have been received during the year just closed, an increase of over $55,000; that the deficit of the former year has been supplied, and that the Association commences the current year with a fund in the treasury of $4,471.67. This we deem substantial indorsement of the Association and its work, by the churches, Sunday-schools, missionary societies and its individual friends. This report might stop here with congratulations for the prosperous year just closed, but the duties so well done, and work so well performed, must simply furnish the Association a standing place and vantage ground for a greater work on its part, and grounds for greater sacrifices and gifts by its friends for the year to come.

The National Council, representing the Congregational churches of the whole nation, lately in session at Worcester, by a unanimous vote recommended that the churches and friends of the work of this Association raise for it for current expenditures for the year now commenced the sum of $500,000. Is this magnificent sum too much to ask for the year now auspiciously begun? Happily for your committee, we are saved the necessity of elaborate or studied examination of the needs of the work that has been done by the papers read and to be printed and addresses delivered from the platform during the meetings up to this time. You are thus informed more fully than we could hope to inform you what these needs are and their urgency. But we may say that of the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South it is estimated only 2,000,000 can read and write. Add to these the millions of poor whites in the mountains and the red men of the West and the Chinese in our land, and we are fully justified in asserting that the work of this Association equals in magnitude any work of the church, and involves issues of Christianity, and patriotism touched by no other work of our age. It is estimated by the officers of the Association that through its schools and colleges and the teachers furnished by them, who are instructing the children in the South more or less every year, perhaps 175,000 are being reached and instructed. Assuming that as many are reached by other missionary and benevolent societies, we see the tremendous need that can not be ignored. This burden is laid peculiarly and urgently on this society and its contributing friends. Can we meet this duty with less than $500,000 for the current year? Your committee say, No. Perhaps you will be ready to acquiesce. But let us see what this means. It means that every living donor who contributed last year must increase his contribution 50 per cent., or the number of donors must be largely increased. A large amount was received last year from estates and legacies, namely, $114,020.41. This resource is a variable quantity. The Association can not depend on any increase from this source. Its confidence must be in the living, who can give if they will.

Your Committee deem it proper to call more particular attention to the magnificent gift of Daniel Hand to the Association. It is quite likely that some may suppose, and some may have measured their gifts last year in the belief, that the income of this fund was applicable to pay current expenses of the Association. But this is not so. The Daniel Hand Fund is appropriated to special work, which, although connected generally with the work of the Association, is yet not a part of that ordinary work for which this fund we recommend to be raised is to be expended. Hence all friends of the Association must make and measure their gifts to it understanding that the sum we propose must be raised without any aid from the income from that million dollars constituting one of the grandest gifts of our time. Shall this $500,000 for the current work of the Association for 1889 be furnished to it? This is God's work. The churches here represented and the friends of the Association have the money. It can not be put to any nobler Christian use; the needs demand it, and we recommend that $500,000 be raised for the Association for its current work for the year now begun.

The paper by Dr. Strieby impresses your committee as an admirably comprehensive and discriminating statement of the policy and work of the Association. As to the reconstruction of our educational and missionary societies, to the suggestion of which much of the paper calls attention, and from which he dissents, we should do well to make haste slowly. Some time in the future it may become practicable. But we discover no finger of Providence pointing toward it at present.

If the thought were to reduce our societies to which these interests are intrusted to two, calling for but two annual collections where we now have three or four, it needs no prophet to foresee the effect of that on the amounts collected. If the suggestion is of the reconstruction, not of the societies, but only of the work—if it proposes that our educational and missionary enterprises be so divided that no one society shall to any extent conduct both—it has certainly an attractive look.

But is it more than a look? The educational institutions of several of our societies were born out of the inmost life of those organizations and lie on their bosom for nourishment to-day. To ask the American Board, for example, to turn over its colleges and schools to some other society, for that, of course, is involved in the plan suggested—would be like asking one of our Christian mothers to send her babe to the foundlings' home. Some of us are old enough to remember that the venerable and now sainted Dr. Anderson was at first vehemently opposed to the schools planted by the missionaries in India. It was confounding things that differ. The work of a missionary society was not to manage schools. The schools were discontinued. But the Board soon discovered that it was doing its work with but one hand. The schools came back and came to stay. Now we conservatives are rather jealous of our progressive brethren calling for a reconstruction of the American Board. We know not whereto this thing may grow.

If the colleges and schools of the American Missionary Association were secular, if they had no vital oneness of life with its churches, there might be room for the plan suggested. But they are as thoroughly Christian in their aim as the churches. The churches are as indispensably educational as the schools. As Dr. Strieby remarks, the teacher is often the pastor. The pastor finds a great part of his flock in the school. The teachers teach in his Sunday-school. The prayer-meeting depends on them for its success. The unseen shuttles of mutual sympathy, flying back and forth incessantly, are weaving the two together, and working out the one pattern of the Divine life in souls, that covers both. The plan proposed would, at least to the eye, disentangle all complications. It would lay out the work in the Year-Book with clean-cut precision. But vital things are not always improved by vivisection. It would doubtless simplify our apprehension of the organs of a man to lay the lungs on one side of the table, the heart on another, the liver on a third, and the brains on a fourth. But how far it would enhance the vitality and usefulness of the man is another question. There is an organism which is often, and without harm, in that fashion distributed. But it is a mannikin—not a man.

The one most formidable evil among our colored countrymen is their deplorable ignorance of the connection between religion and morality—or rather the fact that religion, on its outward side, is morality. The sable deacon who, when confronted with a list of his sins as dark as his countenance, replied triumphantly; "Well, bredren, I'se broke ebery commandment ob de ten—but bress de Lord, I'se nebber los' my 'ligion," was no monster of iniquity. He was only saturated and sodden with the delusion which submerges Pagan, Mohammedan, and Papist alike, and throws no little of its froth over Protestant, too often, that duties toward God and toward man are not blended, or even dove-tailed together. But they are weights in opposite scales. Be only devout in your penances or your hallelujahs, and your life among men is of little account. Now, that notion can not be corrected in such a people as that one with which we have to do in the South by an occasional Sunday sermon. In the day-school it must be reiterated morning, noon, and night in various applications, line upon line and precept upon precept. And so, on the other hand, teachers, as well as scholars, must be reminded by pastors, with a little Puritan iron in their blood, of their Christian, as well as educational obligations. One member of your committee who has had practical experience in the Southern work reports that some teachers, occasionally even now, need to be reminded of the Christian service that the Association, as well as the Master, expects from them. But divide these different functions, put the churches and Sunday-schools under other auspices, and, self-evidently, that temptation would be so much the worse. We must have groped out of the morning twilight toward the millennial day much further than we have before any such plan can be reduced to fact.

Dr. Strieby speaks in the paper of his clerical friend of twenty-five years ago, who thought the work of the Association would be transient. It reminds us of Mr. Seward's remark that three months would end the civil war. We are in for a long campaign. The sad fact is not to be blinked that, with the enormous increase of the colored population, the illiteracy among them is greater to-day than at the close of the rebellion. We have need to sing at times:

As Dr. Goodwin grandly told us yesterday, our work is under the Master's order. Success is no concern of ours. But success, because it is His concern, is sure. Every losing battle in His service turns in time to victory. We remember in Count Agenor de Gasparin's "Uprising of a Great People," how spell-bound, awe-struck, he appeared to be before that magnificent ground swell of the loyal nation, rolling on, as a traveling mountain range, to sweep the rebellion as drift-wood before it. The eight millions of the freedmen and their children are rising. If, for the present, there are refluent waves that sadden us it is God who brings in the tide. "And when I begin," saith the Lord, "I will also make an end."

The committee to which was referred the paper of Secretary Beard respectfully report that the "Missionary View of the Southern Situation" therein presented impresses us profoundly with the fact that the sincerest piety is the most exalted patriotism. It commends itself to us as worthy of the most serious attention of the thoughtful of both races in the North and in the South. The gravity of the Southern problem, as set before us, is little less than appalling. The colored race now looks back over a quarter of a century of freedom and recognized rights. The traditions and customs and conservative ties of slavery are broken with its chains. The ideas, aspirations and manly instincts of liberty have taken hold upon the colored people and are becoming controlling. The intellectual progress of the many, the political and national prominence of the few, the acquisition of wealth, and the marvelously disproportionate increase in their numbers, serve to awaken the colored race to self-consciousness and a sense of power. It is beginning to demand its rights and to be impatient of their resistance and suppression. The Samson of the past, bound, shorn and blinded, stands to-day with fetters broken, with locks grown long, and with eyes yet dim, but with the dimness of returning vision, as one who sees men as trees walking. And whether he shall be carried on to complete emancipation, intellectual and spiritual, a true manhood, or goaded to madness, and driven to bow himself against the pillars of our national and social temple, and pull it down to the common ruin of us all, is the question of the hour. A race so situated, were there no other factors in the problem, would be a peril to any people, and would call for the most helpful effort and self-sacrificing zeal and Christ-like patience.

But the white man in the Southern situation is as serious a factor in the problem as the black man. In a different way, the incubus of slavery has rested as heavily upon him as upon his black brother. The illiteracy is not all on one side. If we put ourselves in the place of our Southern white brothers, and remember what human nature is, apart from the grace of God, we may not greatly wonder, in view of the heritage of the past and the real difficulties and perils of the present, that there is an intensity of race prejudice, and a bitterness of caste spirit, and an increasing hostility to the rising colored population which registers itself in outbreaks of violence and bloodshed, in the defiance of law, and in crimes against the ballot-box. We may not be greatly surprised that there should be intelligent men who regard the education of the colored man as a calamity, and deny his rights, and call for his disfranchisement. The white man of the South needs emancipation and Christian elevation as well as the black. We are the debtors of Christ to both races. Leave these two races to themselves without the gospel of Christ, and the conflict between them is inevitable, and it can be but terrific and protracted, and a dark blot upon the Christian name and civilization. Dr. Beard has well said that the problem can not be solved by historic precedents. All talk of slavery or peonage for the inferior race, or migration, or extermination, or amalgamation, is idle and morally repugnant and politically dangerous.

The problem set for our solution by Almighty God is just this—as stated in this missionary view of it: How, being free, two races as dissimilar as are the white and black races, now equal before the law, can live side by side under the same government and live in prosperity and peace. This problem must be solved, and it must be solved aright. And we may be sure that the ultimate solution of blessing for both races does not, and can not, lie in any retrograde movement toward the old darkness and bondage, but forward in the direction of the larger light and truer liberty of Christ. If the colored race, as a race, seems to have reached a point when "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," its hope and ours lie not in a return to ignorance and degradation, but in pressing on to that larger knowledge and truer wisdom, the beginning of which is the fear of God, and the fullness of which is a hearty recognition and cordial acceptance and discharge of the obligations and trusts of a Christian manhood and Christian citizenship. The condition of the colored race, indeed, is but a necessary stage in its upward and onward march. It is no other than we have always had reason to expect would be reached. That the mile-stone of to-day marks so great progress is cause for profound gratitude. The new features of the situation and the fresh difficulties are those, and those only, which are incident to progress.

There is but one solution for the Southern problem, and that is the solution for which this Association has labored from the beginning, and which this paper urges. Christianity in its highest forms, an intelligent Christian manhood, is that solution. It is an impressive thought that it is the mission of this Association, more than all other institutions and agencies, to develop that Christian sentiment among the colored people, and indirectly among the whites, which shall create a balance of power which shall save the races and the nation from that conflict which without it seems inevitable. This fact is a trumpet call to us to press the work of the Association in its schools and colleges and churches with renewed vigor and devotion.

And we would especially emphasize the necessity of preserving the unity of the educational and religious work of the Association to this end. Every teacher must be a missionary as truly as every preacher. And this unity of purpose and effort must be felt. Church and school, as in the past, must continue to stand together in the minds and labors of the people that there may be no exaltation of education at the expense of religion. In the dark days of slavery, it was faith in God that sustained the Negro, that inspired his songs, and that made him strong to endure and patient to wait. And it was by the power of God that he was at last set free. Never did the colored man need that faith in God, and in an overruling and guiding Providence, more than now, when the goal of liberty and equality is so nearly attained, and yet strangely delayed. Nobly do the leaders of the race realize that faith, and seek to lead their brethren into it.

It belongs to this Association, by all the agencies at its command, to teach this people to be patient and to wait upon the Lord, to endure hardship, to leave vengeance with the Lord, and, accepting the responsibilities of liberty and citizenship, to gird themselves to meet them in the spirit and in the strength of a grand Christian manhood. This the history of this people warrants us in expecting from them. To this manhood, struggle and work we welcome them, and in it we pledge them our Christian support.

Let this be the temper of those who hold the balance of power between the races in the South, and in no long time the slumbering conscience of the Southern white will respond. The noble utterances of the Southerners, who already demand that the Golden Rule shall be applied to the race problem, prove that it is already waking to life and power. It will be felt then that it cannot be safe to sin against God, to despise even the least of his children; that it must be safe to follow in the way where he leads, to do his bidding, and to give equal rights to all, and to treat all men as brethren. And thus the missionary view prevailing, and the missionary solution accepted, the perils and conflicts of to-day will disappear as the storm-cloud passes, and the difficulties of race relations now anticipated will adjust themselves in God's way, and in God's time—the way of Christian manhood and brotherhood, of righteousness and of peace.

When that Egyptian King, of whom we all know, was carving those memorials of his greatness which, even as brought to us by the magazines of late, have interested us all so much, and when Egypt was the most superb power in the world, slave women, of whom the mother of Moses was one, were lamenting by the Nile. But the people then to be pitied were not the Hebrews, but the Egyptians.

As I think of the future of my country, my anxiety is not for the black race.

The two nations which seem destined to exert in the near future the most intense and wide influence are Russia and the United States. Before each of them God has set essentially the same task and appears to have conditioned largely their prosperity upon the way in which they do it. That task is to develop into full-orbed free men a vast number of citizens who have been dwarfed and twisted by slavery. How to do this most thoroughly and speedily is the superlatively important question for each nation to decide. In Russia, there is no more acute observer than Count Tolstoi: and Count Tolstoi has said to his countrymen, "What we in Russia need supremely is three things; they are schools and schools and schools." The American Missionary Association, in view of all that has been said here these two days, seems to me to be repeating, with the emphasis of an adequate experience, those same words; and I think Mr. Hand has shown a judgment equal to his generosity in so wording the conditions of his gift that it repeats the same thing. The Association, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is telling us that what we need in the South supremely is "schools and schools and schools."

By schools I certainly do not mean institutions which train only the mind or the body, or both. I am perfectly familiar with the picture which Mr. Maturin Ballou has drawn of the Alaska Indian using the knowledge gained in missionary schools to raise a check. I know that education which does not rightly train the will may be giving tools to a burglar or weapons to a mad man. The anarchism in Chicago, but for the education it controls, would have been like Bunyan's giants—able only to gnaw its nails in malice and have fits in sunshiny weather. But the American Missionary Association understands this thoroughly. In that copy of the year's review which Dr. Strieby sent me, the report of the school work was marked with a red pencil, that of the church work with a blue one; but the two marks overlapped, the red and the blue, so completely that all attempts to separate them were hopeless. Dr. Strieby himself could not distinguish between the church work and the school work of the Association. No man can. They are indistinguishable because they have been inseparable. This is as it should be. This is essential to their real success. This is New Testament preaching—discipling; and that is what the Master told us to do. The danger of Count Tolstoi's leadership in Russia is great, and it is solely this: that he does not know that fact. The safety of your guidance, gentlemen, who conduct the policy of this Association, is that you do. The education given by the State and by the Federal Government has been and must necessarily be, almost wholly secular. But the education given by this Association is distinctly, not technically, religious. It is rooted and grounded in the Bible. And if what I am saying appears to you trite, I am glad of it, because it shows that on the substantial facts we are at one and need no argument.

There are, however, two facts which sharply distinguish between the work we have to do among our emancipated slaves and that set before Russia among her emancipated serfs, and which make it more conspicuously obvious than it can be in Russia that we need schools. We have, first of all, to contend with the prejudice of color. We have been told how great that is. I need spend no time in repeating this while the debates at Worcester and in the Episcopal Convention at New York ring in our ears; while Harvard seniors can not elect for class orator the ablest and fittest man they have if he happens to be colored, without eliciting from New York newspapers two-column editorials of amazement; and while writers as wise, as informed, and as calm as George Cable, are unable to write without showing their quivering apprehension of a race war. The wickedness of this class feeling is conceded by all good men, and I need not dwell upon it.

The cause of it has been largely overlooked, and therefore the remedies so often advocated have proved futile. Until the cause is distinctly recognized and acknowledged and remedied, the prejudice will remain. The cause is this: All freeborn people in every age and clime have had a contempt for slaves. That is very near the feeling—mark my words—they ought to have. It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in Charleston. It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds in the slave. Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the reverse of all these things. In nearly every other nation—there are two exceptions that will readily occur to you—save our own, as soon as the slave's chains have been broken and the slave's vices eradicated, the emancipated man has been absorbed among the class of freemen. There was nothing left to suggest that he had ever been a slave. The people forgot it. But the black man bears an ineffaceable mark that he belongs to a race which has been enslaved; and it is, therefore, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred unconsciously but instinctively assumed that his is still the servile character. There is no natural antipathy between the white and the black races; if there were there could be no mulattoes. The sole reason of the persistence of this caste feeling is that the black man bears the mark saying to every one that sees him, "I belong to a race that has been enslaved:" and unconsciously men assume, "Therefore your character is still a servile character." The prejudice is deep; it is almost universal; and so long as there is a God in heaven who led forth the Hebrews and overthrew the Pharaohs, there will be no safety for this Nation of ours until the prejudice is obliterated, as completely as that which once existed and was more intense between the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman. If, as has been the case in many another land, there should arise an emergency threatening the existence of our Nation, and there were one man, and only one, capable of steering us through the storm into safety—some Lincoln or Washington—and if every voter in our country knew that this man were the only one who could do it, that man, if he were black, could not be elected President. Were such an emergency to arise to-morrow, we should perish. We should perish by suicide, and richly deserve all that we got. There is no safety for our land until this prejudice of caste is gone. It never came by argument; it can never be argued away. It can not be smothered under legislation nor uprooted by resolutions nor effaced by tears. While good men feel it they will fight it, but the majority will yield to it and it can be decided in only one way. That way was well outlined by a colored student in Hampton Institute in the debating club of that institution. The subject for discussion was, "How Shall We Black Men Secure Our Rights?" The last speaker was black as ebony, and had been bred in his early years a slave. When he arose I expected to hear him repeat the familiar complaints and suggest the familiar remedies. He did neither. He simply said: "My friends, I do not agree with all that you have said. I think, as you do, that the way white people treat us in the street cars and hotels"—and he might have added, in churches, but he did not—"is wrong, unchristian, and cruel." And when he said that, there was a pathos in his voice which made me ashamed to be a white man. "But," he added, "while I think as you do that it is cruel, I do not think that the white people will ever stop treating us as inferiors so long as we are inferiors, and I think that they will despise us as long as they can. But when we get enough character in our hearts, enough brains in our head, and enough money in our pockets, they will stop calling us niggers!"

He was right—a thousand times right. We must face the facts and steer by them, and not attempt to be guided by sentiment and emotions. So long as the sight of a black face instinctively suggests to us rags and ignorance, and servility and menial employments, just so long this prejudice of caste will endure, and no amount of individual genius, culture, or character will be able to brush the mildew of caste from any individual black man's brow. That lady may be a Florence Nightingale, but if I whisper, and whisper truly, that she came from the slums, that her sisters are in the penitentiary, and her brothers are thieves, society will never forgive her for not being in the penitentiary herself. Society will pity her in ostentatious magniloquence, which is far worse than contempt or neglect; perhaps it will clothe her with silk and diamonds; but it will never treat her as it would not dare not to treat any lady whom it felt its equal. As has been well said, what is needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact—the recognition of fact. When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears, "Negro" will be as honorable as "Caucasian." And for this, through its churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid success.

I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities. Africa is the only continent on the planet that has never had a history. For millenniums it has been a locked closet. But in the providence of God the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it. All the passions, good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and energetic of our race to look or to go thither. Love of money, love of adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has at last been thrown back. Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me to educate. Do you believe these facts are accidents? Do you believe that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of his own will? There never can be a Christian education which does not plant and foster the missionary spirit. Is it a dream? If so, let me die before I wake. Is it a dream that among 8,000,000 of our fellow citizens each of whom, as Dr. Strieby told us at New York, is qualified to live, perhaps to thrive, in the climate which has proved a grave to Anglo-Saxons, each of whom is qualified to visit Africa with a fair hope of making himself received as a child returning unto his own household? Is it too much to hope that, under the Christian education we may give them if we will, enough will desire to preach Christ to the dark continent to gem it with life and light as the sky is gemmed with stars?

I am too old to do it, but so complete is my conviction that the future of the race in the coming century shall move toward Africa as in the ages following Paul it moved toward the North and West of Europe, that were I a young man, loyal and devoted to my Master, and trying as he told his followers by Gennesaret to read in the morning and evening red the signs of the times, I should not go to Africa, perhaps; I would go to Tougaloo University, I think, and there devote all my energies and powers to instructing black men in the meaning and scope and inspiration and promise of the Master's words, "Go ye."

I feel that I have learned a great deal to-day; and as the last speaker spoke concerning Africa, an idea has come into my mind which I may express. Here we have on one side of the great ocean, Africa; on the other side, America. We have here a race conflict; on the one side eight millions of blacks, we will say, and perhaps eight millions of irreconcilable whites on the other. And these dominant eight millions of white men maintain, with the utmost pertinacity—and they have the power in their right hand so far as we can see—that they propose to rule and keep down those eight millions of black men. I have seen the title of a book recently published, "An Appeal to Pharoah," which is vouched for as a calm and temperate discussion of the question whether, after all, we are not going to get by this race difficulty by a great deportation to Africa. It is a good deal to raise the question of eight millions of men leaving one country and going across the ocean and settling in another continent. But isn't there something in it after all? Might it not compose the differences? I know that the cost would be very large, but careful estimates go to show that the cost is not anywhere near the amount we spent in our civil war. On the one side, we have these eight millions of black men—ignorant, very largely superstitious, still somewhat above those of the same color in Africa, and plunged here into an antagonism which is deep, and bitter, and hopeless. On the other side, we have these eight millions of white people who do not accept the results of the war. Isn't it better that eight millions shall go? I don't know. I think it deserves serious consideration.

But when the question arises for practical consideration, I think there is another and a little deeper question that we ought to remember, and that is this: Which eight millions ought to go? Is it these who have been faithful to the American flag, who are straight in the line of progress that this republic proposes to maintain, who are in the line of the development of all the ages, who are looking upward? Or is it the eight millions who are hopelessly side-tracked by the purposes of infinite God, and who are standing here in this republic, undertaking to maintain a conflict that is necessarily one of despair, as sure as God is at the head of the universe? Expatriation if you please, deportation if you will; but consider the question whether it shall be eight millions of American patriots who are to be sent over to Africa or eight millions who have come out of a rebellion and maintain their seditious and rebellious attitude to-day.

My friends, we all know that we are going to live together. There is no more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and citizens, and because God has put them here for our work and our education. I tell you, my friends, the immediate problem seems to me only one form of a larger problem. What is the problem of the planet to-day? Is it not the problem as to which of two theories shall maintain itself concerning the masses which are at the base of society? Isn't that the problem in every nation? Isn't it the problem here concerning white and black, red and yellow alike? There is no possible doubt about it. The labor problem, do you call it? Here is one theory which holds that the masses shall be kept down. Here is the other system which maintains that they shall be elevated. We have got to live with them in the world, for I imagine there is nobody talking about sending them to the moon. Don't you know, and I know that the world is growing smaller every year? Talk about neighborhood—look over this continent. Germany is here; Ireland is here; France is here; China is here; Africa is here. We are neighbors to everybody. We are touching elbows across the ocean all the time. If you send anybody to Africa, why, he is only next door; and by and by we shall have air ships that will float up over there in a few hours! How are you going to manage this thing? We have got to live together in this world, and nearer and nearer to one another with every generation; and this country may just as well be the field in which to try the experiment out as any other country on the face of the globe. I think we are going to try it out to the end. There are symptoms of it all around.

But the conflict is here; it is in the air. It is not a conflict by sword. You know they tell the legend among the old mediæval stories that in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly conflict there, and carrying on the battle of the day. It seems to me, in some sense, true of us. The sword has done what the sword could do; it can do no more. But the conflict is here in the air, pronouncing itself with every event that drifts across our horizon. Harvard sets its seal on the brow of Clement Morgan, and the Memphis Avalanche has no other word for him than to call him "that dusky steer with the crumpled forelock."

My friends, we are going right forward in the field of conflict, which is the field of victory. One with God is a majority, and we are thousands with God. And we have on our side the weak and the helpless, too. I don't want any better aid than that. You know that Burke in that magnificent invective against Warren Hastings, when he rose to the very climax of it and told the story of those atrocious tortures to which the poor and ignorant and misguided peasants of India had been put, how they had had their fingers tied together and mashed with hammers, and other unmentionable things had been done to them, appealed to the parliament and said that if they should refuse justice those mashed and disabled hands, lifted high to Heaven in prayer, would call down the power of God for their deliverance. Is it not worse to mash and disable a mind and a soul than a hand? I tell you the prayers of the poor are on our side; and if we had nothing of all this magnificent achievement of this Association to look upon, we could look on those hands raised and those souls crying out from the social bondage of to-day, as they did from the physical bondage of a few years ago, and know that if God be for us we need not care who or what is against us.

I have but a very few words to add to this report. The facts speak louder than any statement of them can. When skirting the Asiatic shore of the inner sea, that lonely traveler, Paul, heard a voice, he looked across to the shores of Europe, and there in the night stood a great colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession of great world conquerors. It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in the might of his strength and cried, like the crying of an infant in the night, the crying of an infant for the light, "Come: come over into Macedonia and help us."

Now, my brethren, this was the cry of the strong for help. This was the cry of the peoples that were following the westward course of the star of empire. And yet, in their strength, they cried as though they were the weakest of woman born. And when that missionary, in response to that call, crossed the sea, though he came to that Macedonian city which had been the battle-scene of the contending forces of the Roman empire, he found access for the gospel into Europe through the open heart of one woman—Lydia, a seller of purple. And there, sitting down by the water course, where prayer was wont to be made, he just grouped those individuals into that unit of God's operations on the face of the earth, the local church. And this church was distinguished among the apostolic churches for its family traits, for the infusion of feminine grace and masculine strength, for the most domestic hospitality and the very faults of the close attritions of human life. There he planted the seed which has grown into our European and American civilization and Christianity.

And so ever at the cry of the strong for help the gospel has had just these three great prime factors to present for the solution of the problems of every age: first, the home, with its priesthood of the father and mother, the sanctuary of the house and the ministrations of family life; secondly, the school; and thirdly, between the home and the school, the church. When our Lord himself, from all possible sources, made selection of the first among the many means he has chosen for the redemption of this world, he chose a trained personality. As the medium for the transmission of truth, no improvement, no change has been found in all the progress of the gospel. By this trained personality—the heart that has been led to live with Christ awhile, and then go forth in his name and filled with his love to the hearts that have place for that love and rootage for that life—this wonderful product of our Christian civilization has everywhere been produced.

And I take it that in no one of the Christian agencies known to us are these three methods so wonderfully unified, so inseparably united, as the home and the church and the school are in the work of the American Missionary Association. They are one and the same. They are indissoluble. The long experience of this Association through this half century of specialized work does fit it, as the report has said, to give an almost commanding opinion in regard to the method of the work to be pursued among these very distinct classes. From the field as well as from the office, and from the experience of those longest at work, we learn that the school finds its ultimate aim only in the church; that, as a Christian agency, we are to work with the school only as a means to the end of building up that body of Christ on the face of the earth which is known by the name of his church. I do not see how the separation to any extent of school and church work can fail to break the unity of administration and hinder the progress of this gloriously on-going work.

I have just one word to add in regard to the reflex influence of this church work upon the home churches. My brethren, there has been a great dearth in candidates for the ministry until very recently. It strikes me that there is no such object-lesson in all our land, inviting men to consecrate themselves to the noblest of purposes, as the heroic ministry of this Association. It needs the heroic element to attract young men. It needs something which is very plainly worth their while to live for and to work for and to consecrate their energies toward, in order to attract them from the allurements of business and material progress to-day. The Indian service of the British Government, and even the service of the great commercial companies, have that element of heroism in it them which has attracted the very best brain and brawn of the English race to India. So it seems to me we will have to hold up these great organizations, which reach down to the hard places of the land, which occupy places that require men to man them, in order to recruit the ranks of our ministers. A man needs to know that he will have to be all the more a man to be anything of a minister now-a-days, to attract him into this great work. And this heroic type of Christian ministry and of Christian manhood and womanhood, shown in the half century of this society's work and existence, is to my mind one of the great attractions upon the best, the strongest, and the most consecrated of those men and women who devote their lives to the service of the church.

Its reflex influence upon every other branch of missionary activity in the church is very plain. It is to-day—I do not hesitate to say it—the hero of our organizations. It takes far less stamina, far less consecration, I believe, to go to India, or China, or Japan than it does to come out at the call of God and of this agency of His divine Providence and enter many a field manned by this Association. In the personnel of our theological seminaries I have long noticed that the choicest spirits, the men with the stamp of courage upon them, those who are not working for place, but for Christ, and him alone, are the men who take up this work. They are the men who, when they come back to the schools of the prophets, thrill our hearts as no other men do with the story of the conquests of Christ in their own hearts as well as out in the hard fields which they cultivate for his sake; and there will be no more glowing missionary meeting of the seminary with which I have the honor to be connected than when the reports of this meeting shall be carried back to the brethren. The prayers of the class-rooms, the prayers of the missionary meetings, the yearnings of the hearts of the men who are preparing to follow in the footsteps of those who have heroically led the way, are the wires for these unseen and yet never unused electric currents which unite the North with the South, the frontier with the citadels of our common Christianity.

We know very well the danger of a false education, of a school without A church, education without evangelization, a university without the heart of Christ beating in it. Great are the joy and confidence felt in the hearts of the constituency of this body that school and church are so inextricably interwoven with each other that if you plant a school it will develop into a church, and if the church comes it will eventually and inevitably re-act, and in a most blessed way in spiritual and often in material resources upon the school. We give largely to the school because there is a home beneath it and a church around it.

I regard these churches of the American Missionary Association with their evangelistic and nurturing agencies, prime sociological factors for bringing in Christ's dear kingdom in this land of ours. It is their mission not only to remedy evils, not only to restore rights, but to be great constructive agencies of a new Christian civilization. For when Christ came, he came preaching, not the gospel of the individual, not a gospel simply to save that man, that woman, that child, but the gospel of the Kingdom, the gospel which this great Association so effectually preaches and not only preaches but applies and administers as well. And the time will not be far hence when this whole subject of the environment of the spiritual life will force itself so imperatively upon the study of the churches at home that they will take the type of their work and the inspiration for their new developments from the leadership of this and kindred missionary organizations which have set them these most brilliant examples of being ahead of the thought and the feeling of their day.

More than fifty years ago De Tocqueville gave utterance to these prophetic words: "The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future existence of the United States arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory." I think that that prophecy has been iterated and reiterated before this convention until we ought finally to let it rest as an established fact. I believe we are menaced by these eight millions of people, who are twice as great in number as were the people of the United Colonies when they broke from the mightiest naval and military power in history; but I believe that the peril that we are menaced by in the presence of this black man arises from his perils. There is a peril from the black man, but it is a peril secondary to the peril of the black man upon this soil. I do not apprehend any uprising by Uncle Tom; but Uncle Tom is dead, and his son is here and his friends of a younger generation. These men are being gnarled and corrupted and imbruted, and are massing themselves, touching elbows one with another; and under the influences of the age in which we live are becoming a factor in our civilization which, unless we modify and change it under our Christian teaching, will render our Southland like that island on the north of the Caribbean Sea where to-day it is said that the name of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the original defender and liberator, is a hissing and a reproach.

It was a fine augury of the future when the work for the ex-slave began at Fortress Monroe in the atmosphere of religion. Mary Peake, meeting the advancing multitudes of refugees, gospel in heart and primer in hand, as by divine suggestion, laid the pattern of all our succeeding toil. Side by side of mutual helpfulness God has placed the alphabet and decalogue, the teacher and the preacher, the school-house and the church. "What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder."

The largest, grandest word in the title of this organization is "Missionary." When that word drops out its work will be done, for its call will have ceased. Our ultimate end and present purpose is, and always should be, simply this—to save. We cannot lift our fallen brother without the leverage of the cross.

No field is wider, none more difficult, than that to which our eyes are turned, embracing as it does four of the five families of mankind. They huddle together in the lap of Christendom, but feel no warmth. They are a demonstration of the fact that civilization never touches barbarism without polluting it. The Indian, finding his highest ideal in the rude and tipsy defender of our flag; the Chinaman, taking home more heathenism than he brings; the Negro, bound tighter by the vices of the whites than ever he was by their iron chains—these three, ignorant of the Christ and grasping the satanic weaponry of our sinful land and age, together form the most discouraging of mission fields. Our laborers are faced by all the serious problems of the foreign land—problems unrelieved by a single romantic charm. When we send our missionaries to Africa they go to labor among the Africans; and when we send them down South they go to teach "niggers."

Notice, then, what the report of this committee signifies in the presence of the fact that our laborers not only grapple with foreign languages, conceptions, idolatries, habits of benighted peoples, but all the time are hindered and assailed on every hand by these Bedouin Arabs of our land—the minions of mammon and the slaves of caste. To gather and hold and save in such a field as this, is task enough for the finest corps in the army of the Lord.

In the presence of these well-known facts, the report of the committee adds another chapter to the Book of Acts. It gladdens our hearts with thrilling music—the music of ringing sickle and reaper's song. From all over this mighty field, from mountain, and savannah, and shore, and plain, we hear the resonant footsteps of advancing troops—a solid regiment of converts marching in the army of our Christ and into the fellowship of his Congregational Church. I want you to notice that this church which we have planted in the South is just the kind of a church to take these people and assimilate them, to save them and to preserve them to their highest usefulness. And why? In the first place, because it is a church that will take them in. I saw the other day this inscription over a great arch erected in honor of our Pan-American guests in the city of Cleveland, "Welcome All Americans." Well, the Congregational Church has put three talismanic letters over the portal of every church that it has planted in the South and in the West, "A.M.A.—All mankind acceptable."

Every convert in our work has cosmopolitan views respecting the brotherhood of man. This means that one thousand people have seated themselves before an apostolic communion table. White, black, red and yellow, side by side in harmony before the broken memorials of the life of love. The spirit of color-caste is a post-apostolic devil. The most eminent convert of the evangelist Philip was as black as a middle vein of Massilon coal. Perhaps that is why they met in the desert and the spirit compassionately caught Philip away. The purest church and the purest ray of sunshine are alike—they absorb the seven colors of the spectrum. When the Creator flung the rainbow like a silken scarf over the shoulder of the summer cloud, he drew his color-line. Pentecostal blessings fell at Jerusalem, and have fallen ever since on the cosmopolitan church.

The second feature of this church that adapts it to ours field is the open Bible. Every convert is armed with the shining sword—the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, like the sword in the hand of the angel at Eden's gate, turning every way at once.

You do not hear of immorality, gross and fearful, within the precincts of our Congregational churches. You do not hear of our people walking up the hills of the beatitudes over the broken tables of the law. The written word, like the Incarnate, goes into our congregations and drives out all the sellers of oxen and of doves. The Word, also, is the protection of these people against their greatest foe of this day—the encroaching power of the Church of Rome. Do you know that that ancient foe of liberty is stalking all across the twelve States of the South? Do you know what it means to have the Church of Rome take in hand these people of lowly and of feeble intelligence? We do not have to crossover to Austria or Italy in order to discern her aims, for the Nun of Kenmare has alighted upon our shores, and her alarming words are running through the land. Rome knows no color prejudice, and the foot of that great despotic power can rest just as easily upon a skin that is black as upon a neck that is of the purest alabaster. And the Congregational Church down South is the only champion against this papal see, for she has an aisle wide enough for five races of mankind to march up to her communion table, while the sword of the Spirit guards her portals.

Again, I wish you to notice this fact: That this Church which we are planting is not only hiding a multitude of sins by saving these lowly people, but it is serving the interests of the State as well. When we remember that the polity of our church is a polity of liberty, that it teaches that rights and duties go hand in hand, that it takes just as much wisdom to elect the pastor of a church as the President of the United States, we can see that the moral influence of this polity of ours is serving the interests of our commonwealth. The Congregational Church is carrying the Pilgrim idea into the soil of the Cavalier. Straight University, Tillotson Institute, and these other schools, are but the outcropping of that old stone down in an Eastern harbor that we call Plymouth Rock. Down South are being planted those two principles upon which the great superstructure of our liberty rests firm—a church without a bishop and a state without a king. This is what Congregationalism is carrying into that land long ruled by aristocracies. It is giving these people who possess liberty the knowledge of how to use it aright.

Finally we not only hide a multitude of sins, we not only serve the State, but we reach forth a long arm to save the world. Awhile ago I was in the study of Dr. Ladd. There, spread before us, were relics of his well remembered cruise along the Nile. There were implements for rude tillage of the soil, there were swords and spears beaten into shape by barbaric artisans, there were the cats and lizards and toads, objects of worship by unnumbered millions. Thus were displayed in object lesson the savagery and idolatry of one of the largest families of man. The Doctor placed his finger on the map at Mendi Mission. "There," said he, "I saw a row of missionaries graves. Their headstones sadly told the tale of the pestilential land. Two months, three months, nine months they survived, and then fell to rise no more. No white man can endure the clime."

Another time I was at a commencement of Fisk University. I saw Professor Spence take two photographs, and hold them up before the gaze of five hundred intelligent colored youths, whose faces fairly glowed as they looked upon the well-remembered features of two of their alumni, who in Western Africa, if I mistake not, are teaching the gospel of Christ and enduring the rigors of the climate. And in the glowing features of these five hundred folk, I saw the prophecy of a splendid recruiting of our feeble forces in that continent which by and by shall not be dark. Ah, this work is grand! We are putting the cross of Jesus into the dusky hands that shall carry it not only to the land of the pyramids, not only to the land of the ancient wall; but, as I believe, there will come a day when some child now in our schools of the West, some Apache or Dakotan, will rise with apostolic fervor, and going southward along the isthmus and over the mountains will put this transfigured cross of Christ into the pampas and the llanos through which the Amazon and the Orinoco pour their majestic streams.

It may be fitting to add a few supplementary words corroborative of the hopeful view taken in this report on the Mountain Work. At first glance it does seem that this is a discouraging field. I need not recapitulate what has been said in the report already before you. It is sufficiently discouraging; the ignorance and poverty are not the worst features. The position of the clergy in many sections—I am happy to say not in all—is full of discouragement. The worst thing we have to face is the apathy of the people. Their phrase, "We-uns never asked you-uns to come here," is certainly most pathetic.

What do we propose to do about it? What do we propose to do with more than two millions for whom Christ died, American citizens, in the very heart of our Nation, around whom the currents of commerce and industry swirl every day? Shall the greatest tidal wave of all time pass them by, and they not feel it for a moment? More than all, shall the great gospel of God, which is life, and hope, and peace, and home, for us, be nothing for them?

I am happy to say that it is not all dark by any manner of means. Your committee is hopeful, the members of this Association are hopeful, our brethren on the frontier are hopeful. There are very many favorable things, and one of the most favorable is their increasing numbers. Do we stop to estimate what two millions of souls means? More than thirty thousand cradles filled in a single year.

These men respect the Bible. They feel a superstitious regard for it; they are not infidel people. They have a simple, childlike faith, and the Bible word is to them final. Many things that many of us have to contend with, the brethren there do not meet I mean in the field of infidelity.

They have great respect for woman if she respects herself. I have the statement of one of our workers in the South that a woman can go even among these men when they are drunk, and if she respects herself and has maintained her character she is perfectly safe in their midst.

This same writer tells me of a young man who went out from one of their schools, and kept school in a certain place during the winter, When he returned, he said: "Nothing would tempt me to go back there again." Not so with the young ladies. It is one of the most astonishing signs of the times that really into the feeble hand of womanhood is given the key of the situation. They respect these girls, they reverence them and give them a place of dignity in their hearts. That makes it possible for these women to do a large and splendid work in the South.

Once let these girls that come under the influence of our Christian Northern women who go there as teachers, and the graduates of these various colleges and schools that we have planted, and are about to plant in the South; once let common womanhood in the South that has been so much under the heel of this oppression; once let girlhood feel the power that has come go girlhood, that to them as young women in the cradle of these hills, under this fair sky is given the power to turn over in not less than thirty or forty years this whole country for God and humanity, for enlightenment and for Christian peace;—once let that idea get into the minds of these girls, and we have not the same problem that we have to-day.

There is good blood there as well. There is a man in Congress to-day, honoring himself and his district and his nation, who went to school there, and I know not for how many years wore but one garment. I call that pretty good blood when from such circumstances a man can come up to such a large place.

There is a transition time with this whole section. New conditions are being put upon them. They feel the outside movement of the world. A friend of mine is now in the South who has brought up a large quantity of lumber in a certain district, and when he finds the right man he will plant a school there. Coal and iron are being extensively worked. My brother here (the Rev. S.E. Lathrop) tells me that near Cumberland Gap four hundred houses have gone up within a very brief time, and over two thousand workmen are pushing into a section not before opened. It will not come in an hour or in a day; but by and by, when these men face the new life of our times, when they have once felt its pressure, and the tremendous disparity between their manner of living and the high kind of life of Northern homes and Northern hearthstones, they will move, and a change will come over the spirit of their dreams. Even now, the native preachers, who have been so hostile to our work, are coming to these, our pastors, and asking for light on the Bible. Furthermore, our pupils are going out and organizing county institutes, and the work is going on everywhere.

There is a dark side to it, but I praise God there is a bright side. It is like a dam. When the dam begins to go, it will go all at once. Youth is on our side. In thirty years we shall not have the same problem we have now—no, not in twenty years. Wealth is coming in. A large tract of eleven thousand acres, containing some of the finest coal that the world knows, is being developed. This means a great influx of population, and this wealth is to be developed, and new material power is coming as an auxiliary to our spiritual power. This wealth is being converted. A man who five years ago was a godless man, and who owns to-day one-seventh of these eleven thousand acres of coal lands, was converted. He was made a Sunday-school Superintendent, but he could not say the Lord's Prayer; yet he was determined that the Lord's Prayer should be repeated in that school, and he hired a large number of small boys and gave them a dime apiece and told them to learn the Lord's Prayer that week. They did so; and when Sunday came, with a chorus to back him, he came on as a solo performer.

A dear girl of my own acquaintance dressed, in one morning, fifteen or sixteen women and children. They came around her and felt her all over, and wondered at the complexity of her garments. I speak of this thing because it indicates that that old apathy is breaking up, and they are coming to look at new things and feel a new interest in the life outside of themselves. And as this same dear girl taught from thirty to fifty of these women, they listened eagerly, and the tears rolled down their cheeks, and they said to her, "Oh, come and tell us more about Jesus, for we want to be different kind of women, different kind of mothers."

There was one girl, coarse enough in fiber, heavy enough in build, gross enough in appearance, who came out to one of our commencements, and went back with the arrow in her heart, saying, "I would give all the world if I had it, if I could write a piece and git up thar and read it like them." She went home determined she would go to college. She was a large girl, fifteen years old, yet did not know a single letter. She walked fifty miles nearly, and came and said to the college president that she wanted to work for her board, so that she could enter the school. What could she do? He found that really she was incapacitated for doing anything; but she said, "I can hoe corn like a nigger." Finally she was set at some sort of work, and that girl, after three or four years, went out as a school teacher into a district where young men dared not go, where her eyes were blistered with the sights she saw—men shot down before her face and eyes by the whisky distillers—and she was asked to organize a Sunday-school there. When any one starts a Sunday-school he is expected to preach, and so that girl had to become a preacher, and to-day she is preaching the gospel of God and spreading the work there. And yet she came from one of the very humblest classes.

There is a peaceful invasion of this people by themselves. This mission of the people to themselves is one of the most hopeful things about this work. And when they realize that they have a mission, Pauline in spirit, unto their own people, then victory shall come to us.

This Indian problem has been largely settled on its civil side. For many years the friends of the Indians have been consulting together, and have done their utmost to influence public opinion. And the Government has heeded the call—as it always does—of a widely extended and wise public sentiment; and, in consequence, our policy with regard to the Indian has been very largely re-shaped. To-day, by reason of the Dawes Bill, land is open to the Indians in severalty. There is a fair degree of law secured for the Indians. The great questions pertaining to their outward circumstances are under happy prospect of adjustment.

But, this being the fact, it simply increases the necessity laid upon us to meet the requirements of the present day. The door is open for the Indian to become a citizen; and in this land, whenever any man receives the privileges of citizenship, it is incumbent upon us to see to it that he is fitted for that sacred obligation by the church and by the school.

This is a necessity of our republic which we have recognized from our earliest day. When our fathers came to this land, they located side by side the school house and the church; and, wherever we have sought to open the privileges of the suffrage, and the dignities, and honors, and joys of citizenship, to any class of people among us, we have always felt it to be an imperative necessity to see to it that they had both these sacred training schools, the educational institution and the religious institution, side by side.

Now to-day we have unusual opportunities. Everything seems to be coming to a focus in regard to our work for the Indians. Never has the time been so auspicious as it is to-day. Never have there been so many things combining to show to us that if we are to improve the opportunity God gives us to care for the Indian—this man who held this land before we came to it and from whom we have taken our possession—we must do it to-day. There are other great needs about us, other races and other classes and other conditions; but there is no other class appealing so intensely to the sympathies of all our people to-day, as is the Indian. This is one great explanation of the remarkable increase of the work of this Association among the Indians. How did it ever spring from an expenditure of $11,000 annually to $52,000, as it is to-day? Partly because the Government has been willing to aid, but still more because our people throughout the land have been intensely interested in the Indian and have been glad to help him. They have said by their gifts that now is the time, and we must leap to improve this opportunity or else it will slip away from us forever.

It is the conviction of your committee—and I can voice it most perfectly—that we must improve this opportunity before it is gone, and that this people who have long suffered at the hands of their white brethren have a claim to our earnest Christian sympathy and to our heartiest effort to put them upon their feet. They are more than ready, they are anxious for our aid, they are crying to us for help.

Now, let me say that the American Missionary Association has always felt the importance of working in evangelistic lines. It would be nothing if it had not the church before it as an incentive. It works primarily through the school; but always with the thought that the school is secondary, and that the church is the one great aim before it. And unless this incentive were before it, unless it recognized that its work was to bring men to Christ, and to bind them together in Christian churches, there would be but little to call for the great self-denials of Christian workers in the field and many Christian givers in the country at large. It is this thought that has ever been held up before it—the thought that the church and the school go together, and that the school is simply the handmaid of the church. We recognize the fact that in Congregationalism especially, out of all forms of religious belief, we cannot hope to make men earnest, effective Christians, caring for themselves, managing their own affairs independently, and having in them the heart to go out and work, unless we cultivate their minds as well. And so this Association has sought, and this body of Christians that represent the Association has sought, by gifts and by teaching, to develop the thought that there always should be an educational work going forward that there may be something to build upon. Christianity needs education in order to give it its largest power.

It was said of Dr. Williamson by an old Indian that he had an Indian heart. I, too, have an Indian heart, and I can lay claim to that possession as but few can. It would take but a very little while to go from here into the very midst of our present Indian field. It took my father and Dr. Williamson, when they first entered the field, some six months to reach it. I could start to-morrow morning, and taking the cars in this city, and reaching Pierre by the following night, could be farther off by Saturday, farther from the border of the mission field, than my father and Dr. Williamson could after they had travelled six months.

I would like to invite you to go with me on a tour of inspection of the mission field itself. I would take my two ponies and drive out to the Cheyenne River, and take you to one of our out-stations, and show you something of the influences at work in the field to-day. As we went up the valley, we would see the Indian village located there, and in the midst, on a rising piece of ground, the mission station. Over some of the houses we would see a red flag flying. That is a prayer, a votive offering; there are sick in that house, and that is a prayer to the gods that healing may come, and that death may be kept from them. Over on the right we would see the dance-house—a great octagonal house with an open roof, in which the Indians gather night after night to dance to the monotonous beating of the drum. That is a very common sound out in the Indian villages, bringing to us always that thought of slavery to evil. As we go up to the station itself, we would see something more of the work than you have as yet been able to see. If it be on the Sabbath, as we go in we would see a young man there, with his audience before him, not a very large audience—old men, old women, boys and girls—gathered on the rough benches, and very much as they are in their own homes. Some of the old women have their hair down over their faces, the boys with dirty hands, old men with their dirty blankets, and yet they are gathered around there to hear the word of life. The preacher, as he stands before them, tells them of God's wonderful love, and takes as his text that most wonderful verse in the Bible, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son."

Then, as you look at the man who is preaching there, you would hardly recognize in him one who thirteen years ago was a savage, a painted Indian. As I look at him it seems a most wonderful thing that such a change has taken place. I knew him as a savage; a splendid fellow he was, and he is now a more splendid man than ever he was a savage; and he is teaching the gospel of Christ to his own people. I have been out there seventeen years, and if there were not another result to show for those seventeen years of work than the lifting up of this Clarence Ward, and making of him a man in Christ Jesus, I should be abundantly satisfied.

There is another influence of which I would speak, the influence of the home. Here in our happy homes we know but very little of what that means to the Indian. An Indian has no home, in our sense of the word. Some years ago I went with a party of Indians 175 miles west of the Missouri River in the middle of winter. We climbed a mountain and looked away to the east. We could see, I should think, 150 miles, and the Indian as he sat there on the edge of a rock, covered his head up in a blanket and cried. Said he: "This is my country, and we have had to leave it." That was his idea of home—such a barren stretch as that, the snow glistening in the sunlight. The Dakota Indian lives in a region, not in a place. The Christian home coming into the midst of a village carries there an ideal of which the Indian knows nothing, and he is taught by the power of example day after day. The Christian woman in that home keeps her house clean, keeps her children clean, and stands there as a persistent example of the power of the gospel of soap, just as the man himself there who has become a Christian no longer steals horses. A party going out into an enemy's country would go as often for the sake of bringing back stolen horses, as they would for scalps. The man who has become a Christian is recognized at once as shut out from that privilege.

Reference has been made to the opening up of the reservation, and the crisis is now upon us in connection with our Indian work. We have eleven million acres of land there just west of the Missouri River to be thrown open for settlement. Do you know what that means? Were any of you down at Oklahoma this last season? It means the rush of a swarm of people, good, bad and indifferent—chiefly bad and indifferent—and these settlers will crowd themselves in as a wedge between the two divisions of the Indian reservation, and we shall have Indians both to the north and to the south. They will be exposed to influences from which they have been kept as yet; influences which will tend to uplift in the outcome, as well as to degrade. I thank God for it. I thank God that he is bringing the white man into the midst of the Indian country. It may seem that this is a heroic remedy. So it is, but it is time for heroic remedies. We need to meet the question as it comes to us to-day. There is a ranchman out on Bad River, who tells me that there is no such thing as an Indian question. "Why," said I, "what are you talking about?" "There is no such thing," said he. I asked him how he explained it. "The simple thing to do is just to treat them as men, and that will be all there is to it. That will settle it, and there will be no such thing as an Indian question." Treat them as men and make Christians of them, and we will settle the whole thing.

Referring to Dr. Goodwin's powerful address, I find myself transported again to China; but the fact recurs to my mind that this is not a foreign missionary society, but a home missionary one, and what we have to do is to open our minds to the conviction that it is possible to do at home plenty of work for the Chinaman. I am glad to give a little personal testimony because what we need most of all is to be convinced of the necessity to give time and strength and labor to win the individual Chinaman to Christ. Not very long ago there came to my knowledge in St. Louis an ordinary Chinaman, comparatively a young man. He joined our church and I knew he desired to be recognized as a Christian man. About a year before, he had been a member of a Sunday-school where ladies were teaching Chinese. Before that our newspapers had created great outcry about a case of leprosy in the city. This Chinaman appeared at my house in great trepidation. He had been two or three years in this country, and had been saving his money in order to go back and see his mother's face before she would die, and he hoped to be able to return to China in the following fall. He had learned that there was a Chinaman, unknown to him, lying ill in a little laundry, of a disease of which nothing was known, without friends and without care. He took care of this man, leaving his own work for the purpose, and at length he came to me asking where he could get a physician to attend the patient. I gave him a note to one of the best physicians in my own church, who went at once and saw the man, and he seeing it was a strange form of disease, went to a specialist of skin diseases, who had the man brought to a hospital in order to watch his disease. Rumors of this reaching the newspapers, the reporters thought it a good opportunity to make a story about leprosy, giving the number and street of an imaginary laundry in the heart of the city. Instantly the patronage of the Chinese laundries stopped. My Chinese friend was in the greatest distress about it, and particularly about me, lest I should think he had brought the contagious disease to my house. I could hardly persuade him to enter, and then he told me there was no truth in the story of the newspapers, and asked what he should do. What was the result of the story? The Chinaman took care of his friend in the house and in the hospital, paying considerable for his care, and when he recovered sent him to San Francisco—in fact, spent about $180 on him, the whole sum he had saved to take himself home to his mother, and he did this for a man who was as utterly unknown to him as to you or me. He also came to me with a $10 bill to pay the doctor, saying it was not enough, but it was all the money he had, and he would add to it by and by. All we want is testimony as to the character of the Chinese. Here was a man not converted by Moody or by any service, but by the ministry of an unknown Sunday-school teacher; as the result of that simple agency he found a charity so Christ-like as to do work like this. That little Chinaman brought to me some of his companions, asking me to do something to help them to be Christians, and as the result of his work a large Sunday-school is to-day in operation. There is abundance of such testimony, I believe, to be furnished throughout our land, which we should have before our heart as an answer to the anti-Chinese mania which now and then sweeps over this country. Help us to carry the gospel to these men of unmeasured possibilities, whom God in his mercy has brought across the seas to plead at our doors.

This audience can help the Chinese in a better way than giving them money. That Chinaman was asked in my house the other day how many hours he slept, and he said, "Two or three." "Are you ever troubled by hoodlums?" "Yes, every day. They break the windows. Last week they broke into my laundry and stole five bundles of clothes, for which I had to pay customers $20." "Do you get no protection from the police?" I asked him. He shook his head—yes, sometimes, but they were no good. The Chinese have the same right to life and liberty that we have, and if we get them that, they'll get the money fast enough themselves. We owe it to the Chinese that they get protection.

I rejoice that I can lift my voice at least in a word of commendation, if such a word seem in any sense to be needed, in the furtherance of this particular kind of work. I remind myself sometimes that this very tone of apology is a tone that ought to set some of us, as ministers and as brethren, to reconsidering our conception of the gospel. Why, beloved, suppose it were an admitted fact that for the next hundred years not a solitary Chinaman would be converted. What then? Do you imagine that that fact would absolve us from allegiance to the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ? You will remind yourselves—I am sure I remind myself often—that in respect to our Christian work, the breadth of it and the particular departments of it, we have absolutely no option whatsoever: that when our Master said to his disciples, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," he made no exception of those that might have almond eyes and yellow faces, nor of those that might have black skins and woolly hair; that he took in, in that wide sweep of his omniscient vision, every nation and kindred under the whole sky, and that should exist until the kingdom itself should come.

If it could be demonstrated that it required ten times as much work and ten times as much money to convert the Chinaman as anybody else, then all the more because of degradation and superstition and idolatry and hardness of heart—all the more must I storm the Gibraltar of that paganism. The Master's principle seemed to be, "Give ye them to eat." The fact of hunger is what lays the law upon the hearts of the disciples; and by so much as men are more hungered—if there be one nation more so than another—by so much as they are nearer to starving for the bread of life, by so much the more are your heart and my heart called upon in the name and in the sympathy of Jesus Christ, to respond to that cause. Those disciples of that early day might just as well have said, "Master, we can not feed all these ten thousand. We will pick out those around us, the nearest at hand. We won't touch that set of lepers just over there from Capernaum; we won't have anything to do with that other set of outcasts and vagabonds drifted in here, some of them from Samaria; we will have nothing whatever to do with these wretches from Chorazin—gamblers and abandoned people of every sort."

What do you think would have been his response to that sort of argument? I think if Peter had given him any such plea as that it would have cut him off hopelessly from any apostleship. There would have been a new band of apostles that would have been instituted then and there that were willing to take the Master's command, take Him as responsible for the authority and for the result. They knew better; they knew Him better; and though they had their little scant loaves that would not give a quarter of a crumb apiece to the great multitude, they said: "That is not our responsibility; ours is to obey. It is His to furnish when the resources fail." Brethren, that is my theory of missions.

Do you remember the little anecdote about Francis Xavier, that before he went abroad as a missionary to China, while he was sleeping with his room-mate one night, he startled him by rising in his sleep and throwing out his arms with great urgency, as he said, "Yet more, oh, my God, yet more!" His comrade wakened him and asked him what he meant. "Why," said he, "I was having a vision of things in the East. I was seeing missionaries tortured; some of them were being burned, some of them were having their flesh torn from their bodies, and in many ways they seemed to be suffering in their testimony for Christ's sake. And as I looked, the tears came to my eyes, and a voice said to me, 'That is what it will cost you if you go on this missionary tour. Are you willing to take the cost?' And I said, 'Oh, Lord Jesus; yet more, yet more, if I may win these perishing souls.'"

Brethren, it is the call of the hour. These people may become, in my judgment, pre-eminently the missionary people. They have been called the Yankees of the Orient. They are scattered every whither, in every quarter of the world. I think it ought to shame us to have less enthusiasm for these for whom Christ died than they of the Romish church in the palmiest days of its missionary zeal. God help us that we may stand true upon the Pacific coast and all through our land, and that for every missionary church abroad there may be a score and a hundred. Dr. Williams said, after thirty years' knowledge of the Chinese, that we might evangelize China from one end of the empire to the other in half a century if we were in earnest. God help us that we may labor and pray for the coming of such a day.

Now I believe this: That, so far as the facts go, there is just as large a percentage of results to be shown for work among the Chinese as for work anywhere. Take it in our city, among some of the Chinese schools; take it in San Francisco, take it in China itself. I received on Saturday last a letter from Mr. Gray, of Hong-Kong, speaking of a young man who had gone out from our church as his assistant in the work there. Said he to me: "He is one of the most valuable helpers I could have. He not only stands fast by his work, but he also seems to have spiritual discernment to meet the peculiar difficulties we have to encounter, and there are plenty of them. Here is a man, for instance, who says he would whip his wife to death if he should hear of her accepting Christ. There is another, a mother, who would let her child starve if she thought it was being taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. But among this people there is no more successful laborer that I know of than Sui Chung." I knew him well. He came into our Chinese Sunday-school, which is held every Sunday afternoon. I remember him distinctly, as giving, so far as I could see, clear evidence of being born of the Spirit. And I bear testimony to these young men now in my church—there are ten or a dozen of them—that, so far as I know them and so far as I have been able to talk with them in imperfect English or through Chinese interpreters, their Christian experience is as satisfactory as that of any others. Nay, I will say more than that. I will venture to say that the Chinese brethren in my church are more earnest. They sustain a Chinese prayer-meeting regularly every Sunday of their own accord in their own language, and have kept it up ever since there were enough of them to be united together. I frequently look in and talk with them; and there is one thing about these Chinese that I greatly respect—I never saw them pull out their watches while I was speaking to them. I never saw any of them going to sleep; I never saw a look in the face of one of them which indicated that he was not profoundly interested. I was in their meeting last Sunday, and I told them about Sui Chung. Most of these Chinese can read. Some of them are very fluent talkers, and some are very intelligent. I suppose we have a thousand or fifteen hundred in this city, and a very large proportion of them, they tell me, can read the Chinese Bible.

Now, I have great respect for this people, if for nothing more than for their history. We have a petty hundred years of history. How many hundred have they? Any nation that can hold itself together for 4,000 years—or shall I say for more?—and that to-day constitutes nearly one-quarter of the population of the earth, certainly deserves our respect. Any people that can take our own handicrafts and beat us at them—and they will do it in a good many directions, and make money, even though you may disapprove of their way of living—deserve our respect. Any people that can furnish diplomates fitted to stand side by side with Bismarck and Gladstone, and our own embassadors say that they can, certainly deserve our respect.

One thing more they desire of the Christian church, if it were only a debt to be paid. I insist upon it, brethren, that at least Christian England and Christian America ought to pay back to them in missionary moneys at least an amount equal to that of which we have robbed them by the infamous opium traffic, and to-day it is people from Christian lands, more than anything else, who are furnishing the difficulties in the way of the introduction of the gospel abroad.

There are values even in this world for which we have no expression, for which we have no definite standard, and of which we have no very clear comprehension. They are values, none the less. But there is one standard of value of which I think it may be safely said the American people have come into a very clear comprehension, that is, of the weight of the working power of a dollar.

Most of us know it by pretty thorough experience. We know what a dollar costs, how hard it is to get, how hard it is to keep, how little we are liable to receive for it when it goes. And, let me say it, I believe there are no people on this Western Continent who have any more exact, definite, clearly defined comprehension of what a dollar is, what it will do, and what it will not do, than the managers of our missionary enterprises.

Then, it is sometimes thought and sometimes said that these men who conduct church work and missionary work do not know much about dollars; that a dollar, a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, is a very indefinite thing; and that they ask for a million dollars, or half a million dollars, with a great deal of nonchalance, as if it were merely a matter of asking. It is not so. When this Finance Committee indorse the recommendation of the National Council that half a million of dollars be raised for the work of this Association during the coming year, they do it from a business point of view, and when the officers and managers of this Association second this demand, they know what it means. They know better than anybody else in the world knows how hard it is to get half a million of dollars. For some years I went up and down through the South and West in the service of this Association. I went in and out of the rooms at No. 56 Reade Street, New York, and I must have been very dull not to know pretty well the inside workings of this Association. I have been among workers on the field. I know how closely everything is reckoned, how carefully every penny is spent; and I know how the demands of the work and the needs press upon the workers in the field, so that they look back to those rooms in New York with the feeling that somehow there is not a very great deal of liberality there, that those officers pare very closely. But these workers in the field have no such experience after all as the officers there at the centre of things. Those members of the Executive Committee, those Secretaries and the Treasurer, sitting there together, and facing the demands of the old work and the new, have rolled upon them every day a sense of the value of money and of the need of economy such as even the workers in the field can not comprehend. I have been there, I am now outside, and I am free to say whatever I please; and I make bold to say to you here that the work which is alive and growing must have the most money. Increased demands must cost. It is a law of nature. Now, then, when this Finance Committee come forward to indorse this recommendation that $500,000 instead of $375,000 be raised for the coming year, they do not at all reach the measure of the need.

There is only one thing necessary to get this money and more. It is a pretty comprehensive thing. If upon the members of our churches in this land as clear a sense of the need of what ought to be done and can be done could be brought as comes to those in contact with the work, the money would be forthcoming. How to make our people realize the facts in this matter is the problem. Money will come when our people know how much it is needed, how profitably it is spent, and how grandly it pays dividends.

Last Wednesday evening at the Prayer and Conference Meeting of the Broadway Tabernacle, one of the office-bearers of the church put this question to me: "Can we hope to be instrumental in the conversion of the Jews, so long as the present prejudice against God's ancient people exists among us?" And that inquiry, taken in connection with the fact that the Annual Meeting of the American Missionary Association was to be held here this week, led me to examine the Word of God, that I might discover what incidental light is thrown on the subject of pride of race by its histories and other contents, and I mean to-night to put the result of my examination before you.

The first and most striking instance of its manifestation which we come upon in Scripture is the treatment given by the Egyptians to the Israelites. "Every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians," so they counted themselves superior to the Hebrews, and subjected them to the greatest indignities, grinding them under the harshest oppression, and exacting from them, by the lash of the task-master, the most arduous labor. But mark how their pride was rebuked and their cruelty punished, under the moral and retributive government of God. Their land was desolated by a series of plagues culminating in the death of the first-born, and the people whom they had oppressed made their escape from the most powerful empire then existing in the world, without themselves striking a single blow. The Lord fought for them. Each of these ten plagues was a Divine protest against that national pride which arrogated to itself the exclusive right to power, privilege, immunity and possession, and which met its merited punishment that day, when "the Lord saved Israel out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore."

But the mention of the Hebrews in this connection may seem to some to be most inappropriate. Were not they, it may be asked, virtually created into a separate and exclusive nation, and taught to look upon themselves as God's peculiar people? Did not they become proverbial for their pride of race, and for saying on every occasion, "We have Abraham to our father," and were they not especially the Pharisees among the nations? Now it must be confessed that all these questions must be answered in the affirmative, but when we widen our view and take into consideration the great purpose of God in the formation and conservation of the Hebrew commonwealth, we may see reason somewhat to modify our opinion. For the settlement of the Jews in Canaan and their restriction within its limits were not ends in themselves, but only means for the attainment of higher ends which were to affect the moral and spiritual condition of "all people that on earth do dwell." The promise made to Abraham was in this wise: "In thee and in thy seed shall all nations of the earth be blessed;" and it was for the purpose of securing the fulfilment of the latter part of that promise that a special and peculiar hedge was planted around the vine which God had brought out of Egypt. It was not meant to be a permanent arrangement, but was designed merely for a temporary emergency, until, as Paul has said, "the Seed should come" to bless the world with his great salvation. It cannot, therefore, be quoted as furnishing a universal example, or as giving any divine approval to that pride of race of which we have been speaking. Moreover, even when the Hebrews were selected by God for this purpose, they were told over and over again that they were not chosen for anything in themselves, and that they had no reason to plume themselves on the fact that they were chosen. And when they degenerated into self-conceit on the ground of their having been so highly privileged, they were finally cast out of the land of promise. Nor is this all. In the system under which they were placed by Moses, they were taught to look with kindliness on those who came to sojourn among them, of whatever race they might be. They were not, indeed, to be a missionary people, or to seek to induce others to settle among them, but if others came to dwell beside them, hear how they were to treat them: "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." "And if a stranger sojourn with thee in the land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Love ye therefore the stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Exodus xxii. 21; Levit. xix. 33; xxv. 35; Deut. x. 19). Lay these commands alongside of recent legislation among ourselves with reference to the Chinese, and then see what God must think of that blot upon our statute book in this age of our boasted enlightenment.

Take, again, the account of the singular retribution that came upon the people in the days of David because of Saul's treatment of the Gibeonites. These aborigines belonged to the ancient Canaanitish tribes, and were so astute as to impose even upon Joshua, and to obtain from him a treaty on false pretenses. Still an agreement was made with them on the terms that they should be permitted to live in the land, but that they should be "hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of the Lord." This contract was faithfully observed on both sides until the days of Saul, who sought to slay them "in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah." And what was the result? A famine lasting for three years, which was only removed at last by the giving up, according to the ancient practices of the Gibeonites, of seven of Saul's sons for execution. Now there is much in that old history that is difficult for us at this distance of time, and ignorant as we are of the customs that prevailed among these tribes, to understand. But no one of us can read it without being reminded of our treatment of the Indian tribes that linger among us still. Have we not broken almost every treaty that we ever made with them? Have we not said, unpityingly regarding them, that their destruction before the advance of civilization is inevitable? And have we not forgotten that the God of the Gibeonites lives to be the avenger of the Indians? If the hewers of wood and drawers of water were not beneath his notice long ago, think you he does not see and chronicle the wrongs of the Indians to-day, and shall not he render to every man according to his works?

Before passing from the Old Testament to the New, I merely mention the fact that among the ancestors of the Lord Jesus Christ we find two belonging to alien races, namely, Rahab of Jericho, and Ruth the Moabitess, whose very presence in that noble line is a prophecy of the glorious truth that the Son of David was to be also the Son of man, the Saviour of sinners of every name and nation, the kinsman of all races, the brother of humanity, and that as he represents them all in his priestly intercession yonder, so in each of them we may see a representative of him here and now upon the earth.

But now what may we learn from Christ himself in the New Testament? It is true that his personal ministry in the world was almost entirely confined to the Jews. It had to be so limited at first, if his gospel was to gather force for its triumphant march over the world at a later day; but even during his life in the world he came repeatedly in contact with men and women of races other than that of the Jews, and always in such a way as to show his sympathy with them and love toward them. I remind you of his long and earnest conversation with the woman of Samaria, at the well of Sychar, and of the fact that she was a descendant of that mixed nationality which sprung from the amalgam of those heathen colonists that were sent by the King of Assyria to take the places left vacant by the ten tribes whom he had carried away captive. I recall to your recollection, too, his eulogy on the Roman centurion, and his constant exposure of the contemptuousness of the Pharisees in their attitude not only toward the publicans and sinners of their own nation, but also toward Gentiles of every description. Think of his dealing with the Syrophœnician woman. She was a Canaanite of the old race, and, though at first he seemed to turn her away, yet ultimately he gave her all she asked and more: and even his apparently abrupt treatment of her in the beginning, if I read the history aright, was meant to be an exposure and condemnation of the feelings commonly cherished toward those of her nation by the Jews of his day. No doubt it tested and strengthened her own faith. But we must not forget that the whole conversation with her was meant to teach a lesson to his disciples also. It was part of their training for their future life work. It was a portion of their preparation for carrying his gospel to all nations. And so he spoke out their own thoughts about the women, holding up a mirror before them in which they might see themselves, when he said, "It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs;" and he ultimately showed them that she was better far than many who would have spurned her from their presence. So from the kindness showed to aliens by the Lord himself, we may learn not only to beware of this leaven of the Pharisees, but also to deal kindly and truly with men of every race, and make them sharers with us in the blessings of the gospel.

But thus far we have not come upon any case where the difference was one not only of race but of color. Even here, however, we are not without scriptural instances to guide us. You remember that of Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian. Jeremiah was, by the cruelty of his enemies, imprisoned in a dungeon or water tank, and was sunk in the mire at the bottom. Ebed-melech, learning his condition, went and informed King Zedekiah of the real state of the case, and obtained a command to take an escort of thirty men with him and deliver him from the dungeon lest he should die. So with great tenderness the Ethiopian threw down rags to put under the ropes which he let down, and by which he was to soften the pressures of the cords under his arms as they drew him up therewith from his filthy prison; and after they had thus delivered him there came to the prophet this message of God concerning him; "Go and speak to Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian, saying, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will bring my words upon this city for evil, and not for good; and they shall be accomplished in that day before thee. But I will deliver thee in that day, saith the Lord; and thou shalt not be given into the hand of the men of whom thou art afraid. For I will surely deliver thee, and thou shalt not fall by the sword, but thy life shall be for a prey unto thee; because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the Lord." Here we have a kindness done by a colored man to Jeremiah, and a message sent from God to the colored man acknowledging and rewarding that kindness; but O! how many debts of that sort owed by men among ourselves to the colored people have been forgotten or repudiated! In the agony of the war, colored people fought in the ranks of the Northern armies; and I have heard those who have belonged to the Confederate side declare with tears in their eyes that the faithful watch kept by their colored servants over their wives and families while they were absent with the troops was beyond all praise. And yet in these days we read every now and then of colored people shot down like dogs on the slightest provocation, and prevented on the merest pretext from exercising the rights of citizens of this free Republic, and men look on and do nothing. But God may say something by and by, and when he speaks men's ears shall tingle! We have another illustration of God's treatment of a colored man in the case of the Ethiopian treasurer. He was returning from Jerusalem, where he had been at one of the great annual Jewish feasts, and as he was riding in his chariot he was reading aloud to himself the book of the prophet Isaiah, when the evangelist Philip, specially sent thither for the purpose by God's Spirit, addressed him, and on being asked to come into the carriage with him expounded to him the meaning of the passage which he was reading, and preached the gospel from it unto him with such good effect that he was forthwith baptized on the confession of his faith, and afterward went on his way rejoicing to found that Ethiopian church which claims to this day to be one of the most ancient Christian churches in the world. He was a man, for he was moved by the truth as you and I have been, and he became a Christian—"the highest style of man"—to show us that, as Peter said, "In every nation they that fear God and work righteousness are accepted of him." That which is highest in any man is his appreciation and acceptance of the gospel! of Christ, and wherever we see that appreciation we have not only a fellow man but a brother Christian, to be treated by us as Paul requested Philemon to treat Onesimus—as "a brother beloved." Nor let any one suppose that there is a single race upon the earth that can not be so transformed and gladdened as this Ethiopian was. Even Charles Darwin declared that after the Patagonians it could not be said that any race is too degraded for the gospel to elevate, and so he gave new emphasis, unwittingly, perhaps, but, if so, all the more strongly, to the words addressed to Peter on the housetop: "What God hath cleansed that call not thou common;" or those of Paul in one of his epistles: "For there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

This topic is at present greatly occupying the attention of the Christian churches in our land. It was before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in May last, and has been again discussed at the meeting of the Council of Congregational churches in Worcester three weeks ago, and in the Triennial Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which has just closed its sessions in New York. I will not seek to criticise or to characterize the decisions at which these bodies have arrived, save to say that in my judgment the Presbyterian Assembly faced the difficulty more thoroughly, and disposed of it more courageously, than either of the others. But I will say that there is only one solution of a question of this sort. Every Christian, when he comes to think on it seriously, must feel that to be the case. No compromise will satisfy either party to it or will please God, and any settlement to be permanent must be in harmony with the inspired statement that "God hath made of one blood all the nations that dwell upon the face of the earth." But such a result can not be brought about either in the state or in the churches merely by legislation. You can not compel either by physical or moral constraint the different races to meet on terms of social equality. No doubt you can, and you ought to see to it, that men of all races stand precisely on the same platform before the law and have the same protection from the law. But to get rid of a prejudice you must take a different method. You can not uproot that all at once. The removal of that must be the result of education and of spiritual growth. But when I speak of education I must add that it is not the colored people alone that need to be educated here. The white people of all our cities, whether North or South, require education as well. They need to be taught that the Negro is a man, for at bottom that is not more than half believed by multitudes. They need to be taught that the Negro may become a Christian, and that there are possibilities of Christian missionary enterprise in his race that are absolutely incalculable. They need to be taught to look upon the different races of Indians, Chinese and Africans among us as dignified and ennobled by Christ's incarnation, and as purchased by his sacrificial blood equally with themselves. They need to look upon the Christianized among them as brethren in Christ, and then the rest will come of itself.

There has been great progress in these recent years toward the result of which I speak. The present agitation concerning the color-line, as it is called, is itself an indication of progress, and the day assuredly will dawn when men of all nationalities and names shall come from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, and sit down with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob in the kingdom of our Father. But if we as a Nation cultivate the spirit of the Pharisees, and continue to despise those who are "guilty of a skin not colored like our own," we may be sure that he who visited the Hebrew nation for their treatment of the Gibeonites will send also some nemesis on us.

I can not but feel, beloved brethren, that in these meetings which to-night come to a close, something has been done to help forward that result which under the guidance of the Scriptures we all believe to be the right one. We have had a series of most delightful conferences. Now let us go back to our homes determined to take the seminal truths which have been presented to us here, and scatter them wherever we are called to labor. The seed may seem to be but a handful, and the soil may seem unpromising as the rocky mountain tops—but be sure the result will be a harvest that will shake like the cedars of Lebanon. And though it may seem a little incongruous to quote from the Scottish poet—would that everything he wrote were of as pure and lofty an inspiration—I will venture to conclude with his well-known lines:

The Annual Meeting of the Bureau of Woman's Work of the American Missionary Association, held on Thursday afternoon in the church during the session of the business meeting in the chapel, was one of unusual interest. Following the Report of the Secretary, there were interesting addresses by missionaries, and a very effective address by Mrs. Geo. M. Lane, of Detroit, Michigan, who presided.

The Report and some of the addresses will be published in separate leaflets, and may be had by application to Miss Emerson at 56 Reade St.

A look backward over the twelve months since our last annual gathering reveals much of interest and encouragement, that should fill our hearts with gratitude that our woman's work has had such an influence in bringing light and gladness to thousands of women and children, whose lives have been cast in the dark portions of our Christian land. So large an element of Woman's Work enters into the plan upon which the field of the American Missionary Association is operated, and it is so interwoven with the entire structure of its missions, that any report of it as separate and distinct can be only partial. And yet with the more systematic organization of woman's work in the raising of funds, we have been able to assign special woman's work on mission ground, with most satisfactory results, for to have a particular school or missionary has stimulated the givers, and has brought courage and comfort to the missionaries who have been thus sustained.

Our Woman's Work. What is it? Whom is it for? Who should do it?

What is it? It is to take to heathen mothers and sisters here in our own country the glorious news of salvation for them; to bring the light and truth of the Gospel to those who are groping in the fog of superstition and a wrong conception of Bible truth; to plant the Christian school; to establish the Christian home as an object lesson; to show mothers how to train their children to honor and obedience, to mingle with the needy and helpless, and by sympathy and tact secure such changes in the homes as will lead to their permanent improvement; in a word, to follow the example of our Lord Jesus, by living and teaching the blessings of intelligence and godliness among those in our home-land for whose improvement and well-being we are peculiarly responsible. The American Missionary Association has ninety-four schools, and in most of these more women than men are engaged. It is the duty of the missionary teacher to avail herself of every opportunity which her relation with her scholars affords, either in day or boarding school, to inculcate Christian truth, to warn against the evils which she finds common among the people, to teach by example and precept the living Word, as manifested in the life of Christ. The wonderful change wrought in those who are brought under the influence of such consecrated missionaries, testifies to the value of woman's work in missions.

But who are these for whom we are peculiarly responsible, and why is there so especial need of woman's work?

They are our eight millions of negroes, of whom probably not more than one-fourth may be said to have felt the corrective influence of the Gospel upon their lives. Perhaps only those who have come in contact with these people for the sole purpose of helping them to manhood and womanhood, can comprehend the tremendous incubus of bad habits, stunted growth, blunted susceptibilities, with which they struggle. It is painful to note the limitations of those even who have had the best advantages. Yet they are ever reaching upward, and the struggle is bringing out noble qualities of character, showing the possibilities of the race. We have had a goodly recompense for Christian labor among them, and does not this increase our responsibility for the three-fourths that are yet to be helped to a good understanding of themselves and their duty toward man and God? And no one will question that in the development of the best womanhood there rests the surest hope of the elevation of this wronged, and even now, greatly oppressed people.

But our woman's work finds also its mission among the needy whites of the South. It seems almost incredible that there should be found, within thirty-six hours' ride of our Northern towns, so dotted with schools and churches and Christian homes, a section of our country where there have been in hiding, in the ravines and on the mountain sides, two or more millions of our American people, in gross ignorance and superstition. But such is the case, and as always, the women are the greatest sufferers. Doubtless the Negroes have the largest claim upon us, because of their past history, their present wrongs, and their great numbers, which have become so startling as to make it imperative that we yield no jot of advantage gained, but rather increase our efforts every year for their intellectual and moral improvement. Yet the work for the mountain whites is just now especially urgent. A missionary of much experience expresses the view, that if we can bring the forces of Christian education to bear mightily upon these mountain people for the next ten years, they will themselves become a power as our allies in the great battles of the future against immorality and false doctrines. A few weeks since I met in North Carolina near the Great Smoky Mountains a mother and daughter, the latter about eighteen years old. A school for mountain girls had been opened there, and the daughter had attended the last year. On entering she could not read a word, but now was in the Fourth Reader, and studying arithmetic and geography. The rich, soft color that came to her cheeks, and the kindling light of her eyes, told of the brightness this school had brought into her life; this Christian school, for here too, she had learned the way of eternal life. Even the mother's eyes sparkled like stars as she looked with admiration upon her "learned" daughter.

But our door stands wide open also towards the Indians and Chinese, and all the arguments that appeal to us so strongly for the disenthrallment of women in heathen lands, appeal with equal, yea greater force for the heathen in our own land, whom the Gospel only can make free.

Such is our great and urgent call for work for woman in the field of the American Missionary Association. Who should do it, and how? Who but the Christian women of our churches, either directly or by substitutes? Some can go, of those who have prepared themselves for the highest and best quality of Christian service. They should be thoroughly trained and disciplined teachers, but not this alone. Every teacher should be a careful and intelligent Bible student, able to instruct from the word of God, practical and earnest, self-sacrificing and co-operative, ready to do what seems most necessary, even though it should not call into action her finest mental qualities. Let those who cannot go, send a substitute, but let none fail to seize the opportunity for a part in this blessed work, for the salvation of our country, and its protection as a Christian land.

There are now twenty-six State organizations for Woman's Work in our own country through our Congregational Churches, which co-operate in the work of the American Missionary Association. Some have increased their contributions during the past year; others have not fallen below the standard they had fixed for this field, but have not made any annual advance. With a very few, co-operation has not yet extended beyond a study of our work. But a study of the field is encouraging, for a knowledge of the need brings responsibility to do all possible to meet it, and soon we trust these also will be contributing Unions. To facilitate the study of our field, our monthly magazine has been sent free to many ladies' societies, our literature has been distributed, and more than sixteen thousand copies of missionary letters have been circulated among the ladies. Would not the value of organization be shown in the larger flow of funds annually for a work of such pressing necessity as this? We rejoice that some have already demonstrated this value of united effort. More than one State Missionary Union, recognizing the importance of this work and remembering that in drawing upon the benevolence of all the Congregational Ladies' Societies in the State, it should not do a small thing, has raised the support of four or more missionary teachers for an entire school. And the officers of the Union have taken pains to stir up the pure minds of the ladies in each auxiliary by way of remembrance of this particular field.

But there are those not in the State organizations, whose help we record, as Sunday-schools and Christian Endeavor Societies. Many such have during the year asked for a special object for their contributions. What can the Secretary do? The particular things that can be accomplished with forty or fifty or seventy dollars are indeed few, but these sums combined may sustain a missionary for a year. So each such contribution is made a share of the four hundred dollars necessary for the purpose, and something definite is accomplished. What is it? This. A faithful Christian woman is sent to the field, where, in a neat cottage, she makes her home life an object lesson to the colored people or the mountain whites or the Indians for many miles around. Their homes begin to improve. Her day school, held in the little church near by, attracts not only children, but young men and women, and even young married people. A Christian Endeavor Society is formed. The Sunday-school and church take a new start under her teachings. Other Sunday-schools and Christian societies are maintained through her influence, and so the small contributions accomplish a large work.

Private individuals also have aided us. What a blessed privilege to be able out of one's own income to put worthy missionaries into such a field.

There has been an increase in aid rendered in sewing, a form of help that is very valuable in keeping our boarding schools and mission homes furnished, our sewing schools provided with basted work, and clothing ready for worthy but needy students. As with money, so with sewing, we could use wisely very much more than has been received.

We acknowledge also the kindness of ladies in furnishing books and papers adapted to the need. The young people, especially among the Negroes, are acquiring a taste for reading, and with their emotional and excitable natures, they take readily to sensational literature, with its startling illustrations. A neighborhood or society collection of books and papers will usually contain some of such a stamp, and you maybe sure they will not always discriminate in favor of the most instructive reading. Therefore select for them as you would for your own sons and daughters, what is attractive and healthful, and withhold all else.

And now we are just starting upon a new year. Four hundred and seventy-six laborers have been called into the missionary ranks of the American Missionary Association. One hundred and ninety missions are in operation, with their widening influence and ever growing needs. Of our one hundred and forty-two churches there are fifty-seven which have not at present any Northern missionary associated with them. The difference in the development of these churches, as contrasted with those which have the influence and help of Northern teachers, is so marked, as to constitute a most urgent appeal for more missionaries—faithful women—to gather in the young people, interest and instruct them, to live among them, an example of economy and thrift in housekeeping, of neighborly kindness, of faithfulness in church obligations and of consistent Christian life. I do not hesitate to affirm that in the field of the American Missionary Association such provision is next in importance to the preached word. Neither can take the place of the other. Either is at a disadvantage without the other. And yet there are fifty-seven of these mission stations this year, now, without such beneficent woman's ministry, waiting only for additional funds, the new money necessary to provide reinforcements.

I appeal to you, Christian women, in your organized capacity as State Unions; and as individuals—stewards to whom perchance our Lord has entrusted a goodly inheritance—for help to the American Missionary Association in this almost overwhelming responsibility. Send us the missionaries for these needy fields.

I appeal to you in behalf especially of the wronged and helpless women and girls of these ten millions of our own countrymen, American born, whose only hope is in the sympathy and the help of the Christian people of our own land. We do not live in the day of small things, but of great needs and large opportunities. Surely now, if ever, is the time to "enlarge the place of thy tent and stretch forth the curtains of thy habitation. Spare not, lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes, that thou mayest spread abroad on the right hand and on the left, and possess the nations of our land."

We would suggest to all ladies connected with the auxiliaries of State Missionary Unions, that funds for the American Missionary Association be sent to us through the treasurers of the Union. Care, however, should be taken to designate the money as for the American Missionary Association, since undesignated funds will not reach us.