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
foundl
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