73
In two grades 17

_CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH._

Our church work has necessarily been of slow growth. Churches might
have been multiplied, had we thought it best to lower the standard
near the level of the old churches, and acknowledge wild ravings as
belonging in the worship of God. We have believed that our churches
should mean new ideas and intelligent worship. We have knowingly lent
our aid to nothing else.

These churches are gathered into Associations, and the fine bodies
of pastors and delegates which come together in these, present a most
emphatic testimony to the value of the work done in the past, and are
an earnest of what the future will show.

Revivals--some of them of great power--have been reported to us from
the Plymouth Church, Washington, D.C., Fisk University, Memphis,
Jonesboro, Sherwood, Glen Mary, Oakdale, Athens and Pine Mountain,
Tenn.; Montgomery and Florence, Ala.; Tougaloo and Jackson, Miss.;
Straight University, New Orleans, and Corpus Christi, Texas. Many
others of our churches have had a quiet work of grace, by which
additions have been made to them.

We report new churches at Glen Mary and Athens, Tenn.; Roseland, La;
Fort Payne and Alco, Ala. This makes the whole number of our churches
in the South 136.

Besides these churches, there are our churches among the Indians and
the work of gathering the Chinese into churches in California.

We are praying and laboring for the eternal salvation of millions, the
establishment through the grace of God, the atoning blood of Christ,
and the work of the Holy Spirit, of character which shall meet the
tests of the Judgment Day and the needs of eternal association with
purity. In aiming at this ultimate result, our missionaries are doing
a work of inestimable importance for the nation and the world. They
are successfully working upon some of the great problems of this
country, which armies and millions of money have failed, and of
necessity must fail, to solve. Nothing but the "glorious gospel of
the blessed God," taught from the pulpit and the teacher's desk, and
illustrated in the eloquent lives of consecrated missionaries, can
change the idol worshiper from heathen China, the wild-man of the
West, the half-heathen Negro so recently in the cruel degradation
of slavery, those of our own race in the bonds of ignorance and
immorality--so that they shall have and manifest an intelligent and
worthy manhood and womanh