our
experiments, experience and methods, before this people, upon whom
the duties of free men have been thrust, can successfully discharge
them. There is call for great patience, for far-reaching plans, for
large beneficence. This question of the training of these eight
millions of people is one of the most difficult set before the
American people, and is worthy of the best thought of statesmen,
patriots, philanthropists and Christians.

For our encouragement is the ardor of the people themselves; their
readiness to receive an education; their position in a republic now
far advanced; the progress already made; the growing interest in the
States where they are most numerous to provide for them the means of
a common school education; the army of teachers already in the field.

Believing in a wise Providence over-ruling the present and the
future, we regard the problems before us, though great, not insoluble
to faithful, wise and patient Christian effort along the lines upon
which this Association has wrought.

We commend the wisdom and the foresight of this Association in the
planting of these institutions of learning in favorable positions,
its judicious economy in their management and its great skill in
steadily advancing their scope and capability with insufficient
resources and equipment. Upon these foundations the work should be
carried on, and large and permanent universities should be reared;
and we commend these to the Christian people for increased annual
gifts and larger permanent endowments that the great undertaking fail
not.

* * * * *

REPORT ON CHURCH WORK.

BY REV. DAVID GREGG, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

The report of your Executive Committee on church work submitted for
our review is very brief. There is a statement or two and a few
figures. It puts things in the very best light, and uses figures in
the most telling way. Its very brevity should act as a call to the
churches for more means, and more men, and more prayer, and more
enterprise. If the churches had done more there would have been more
to tabulate.

The report reads: Four new churches organized; 972 added to Christian
fellowship; 2 church edifices built; 1 church edifice enlarged; 2
parsonages built; a one-year-old church the centre of four
Sunday-schools filled with scholars who never before attended
religious instruction, and ten churches blessed with a revival of
religion.

Four new churches organized! Only