ings' home. Some of us are old enough to remember that the
venerable and now sainted Dr. Anderson was at first vehemently opposed
to the schools planted by the missionaries in India. It was confounding
things that differ. The work of a missionary society was not to manage
schools. The schools were discontinued. But the Board soon discovered
that it was doing its work with but one hand. The schools came back and
came to stay. Now we conservatives are rather jealous of our progressive
brethren calling for a reconstruction of the American Board. We know not
whereto this thing may grow.

If the colleges and schools of the American Missionary Association were
secular, if they had no vital oneness of life with its churches, there
might be room for the plan suggested. But they are as thoroughly
Christian in their aim as the churches. The churches are as
indispensably educational as the schools. As Dr. Strieby remarks, the
teacher is often the pastor. The pastor finds a great part of his flock
in the school. The teachers teach in his Sunday-school. The
prayer-meeting depends on them for its success. The unseen shuttles of
mutual sympathy, flying back and forth incessantly, are weaving the two
together, and working out the one pattern of the Divine life in souls,
that covers both. The plan proposed would, at least to the eye,
disentangle all complications. It would lay out the work in the
Year-Book with clean-cut precision. But vital things are not always
improved by vivisection. It would doubtless simplify our apprehension of
the organs of a _man_ to lay the lungs on one side of the table, the
heart on another, the liver on a third, and the brains on a fourth. But
how far it would enhance the vitality and usefulness of the man is
another question. There is an organism which is often, and without harm,
in that fashion distributed. But it is a mannikin--not a man.

The one most formidable evil among our colored countrymen is their
deplorable ignorance of the connection between religion and morality--or
rather the fact that religion, on its outward side, is morality. The
sable deacon who, when confronted with a list of his sins as dark as his
countenance, replied triumphantly; "Well, bredren, I'se broke ebery
commandment ob de ten--but bress de Lord, I'se nebber los' my 'ligion,"
was no monster of iniquity. He was only saturated and sodden with the
delusion which submerges Pagan, Mohammedan, and Papist alike, and throws
no little