unto salvation, may present to the world no mean type of
Christian life. Apart from the knowledge received through the regular
preaching of the gospel by the best preachers of the Southland, it
was not unlawful to impart verbal instruction to slaves, in
Sunday-school exercises and, under other circumstances, in regard to
any number of things which have to do with conduct and character and
human comfort, so long as nothing was said to endanger the institution
of slavery. But some Baptists appear to have given some measure of
literary training to Negroes attached to their churches. Andrew Bryan,
in one of his letters to Dr. John Rippon of London, England, in 1800,
speaks of the fact that certain white friends in Savannah, Georgia,
had purchased a man of color of many excellent qualities, the Rev.
Henry Francis, and had given him his freedom that he might be a
teacher to his people. Bryan himself then opened a school for the
slaves on his plantation outside of Savannah. George Liele established
a school in connection with his church in Jamaica, hoping to develop
the minds of his communicants that he might properly edify their
souls.

The First Baptist Church (white), Richmond, Virginia, moreover,
conducted a school for the literary training and instruction of its
Negro members. For several years Lott Cary was a student in this
institution. The church at Williamsburg, Virginia, which was a Negro
Baptist church from its beginning, that is, from 1776, must have done
something for education, for it kept correct church records, in the
handwriting of its own members. Many of the Negro Baptist preachers of
the South, moreover, obtained some degree of scholarship by private
instruction and so won the respect of the people among whom they
lived. The close of the Civil War brought together a group of
scholarly men, from the North and West, men of purpose and
consecration, preachers of great power who were an inspiration to
their less cultured and less scholarly brethren in the South, and
these invaded our Southland to help forward the new order of things in
the churches as well as in civil life.

To-day the Negro Baptists of America have more than 20,000 churches,
with about two and a half million members and church property valued
at more than forty million dollars. They are conducting orphan
schools, homes for the aged poor, and institutions of learning, and
are as zealous as ever in sending the gospel to people in foreign
lan