REPORTS OF COMMITTEES.

REPORT ON EDUCATIONAL WORK SOUTH.

BY REV. WM. BURNET WRIGHT, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

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.

REPORT ON CHURCH WORK.

BY PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR, CHAIRMAN.

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.

REPORT ON MOUNTAIN WORK.

BY REV. D.M. FISK, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

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?

REPORT ON INDIAN WORK.

BY REV. ADDISON F. FOSTER, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

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.

REPORT ON CHINESE WORK.

BY REV. E.A. STIMSON, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

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.

REPORT OF THE FINANCE COMMITTEE.

BY F.J. LAMB, ESQ., CHAIRMAN.

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.

REPORT ON SECRETARY STRIEBY'S PAPER.

BY REV. G.B. WILLCOX, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

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."

REPORT ON SECRETARY BEARD'S PAPER.

BY REV. H.M. TENNEY, D.D., CHAIRMAN

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.