can take up such work. In these
little Congregational churches that have been planted, we have educated
ministers, who are able thus to work, especially among young people. We
do not have people at our hand as other churches have, but we are trying
to get hold of them. In Fisk University there were last year, I believe,
510 students, of whom, perhaps, there were 100 Congregationalists. So,
after all, it is Methodists and Baptists that you are educating there.
This is all right, because the great masses of the people are found in
those churches. If we had a Congregational Theological School we could
reach these people just as well through the pulpit as we reach them in
the schools.

I was asked to give a little of my personal experience. I dislike to do
this: but if narrating any of my personal experience will give an
insight into the work that the American Missionary Association is doing,
I will gladly consent. My story is the story of hundreds of young men in
the South. Only in the larger cities can we get a good English
education, except we go to schools established for us by this
Association. I went eight years to Fisk University. I have a brother
there now in the senior college class. This is his tenth year, and I
have a sister who is also in her tenth year there. It takes a long while
to get through. My father had no money to send me to school. In his
slavery days he had stolen a little bit of learning, and had learned how
to write and read and a little arithmetic. I was about four years old
when the stroke for freedom was made. My father began to teach me
arithmetic, and many a day in his shoemaker's shop, as I sat and kept
the fire going, he would teach me and carry me as far as he could; and
he put into me the idea of getting an education. At fifteen he told me I
might have my own time. At that age I had advanced far enough to pass
the examination of the district school, and, having passed, I made my
way to Fisk University. I had not known that there was such an
institution in the land, or such a thing as the Missionary Association;
but going once into an adjoining county, I happened to fall in with some
Christian young men from Fisk, and they told me about that school. I had
always had a great desire to be educated, and so I went down there. When
I arrived there, I thought it was a strange place. I was familiar with
white people, but I think I had never up to that time had one of them
shake hands with me. When