re we
came to it and from whom we have taken our possession--we must do it
to-day. There are other great needs about us, other races and other
classes and other conditions; but there is no other class appealing so
intensely to the sympathies of all our people to-day, as is the Indian.
This is one great explanation of the remarkable increase of the work of
this Association among the Indians. How did it ever spring from an
expenditure of $11,000 annually to $52,000, as it is to-day? Partly
because the Government has been willing to aid, but still more because
our people throughout the land have been intensely interested in the
Indian and have been glad to help him. They have said by their gifts
that now is the time, and we must leap to improve this opportunity or
else it will slip away from us forever.

It is the conviction of your committee--and I can voice it most
perfectly--that we must improve this opportunity before it is gone, and
that this people who have long suffered at the hands of their white
brethren have a claim to our earnest Christian sympathy and to our
heartiest effort to put them upon their feet. They are more than ready,
they are anxious for our aid, they are crying to us for help.

Now, let me say that the American Missionary Association has always felt
the importance of working in evangelistic lines. It would be nothing if
it had not the church before it as an incentive. It works primarily
through the school; but always with the thought that the school is
secondary, and that the church is the one great aim before it. And
unless this incentive were before it, unless it recognized that its work
was to bring men to Christ, and to bind them together in Christian
churches, there would be but little to call for the great self-denials
of Christian workers in the field and many Christian givers in the
country at large. It is this thought that has ever been held up before
it--the thought that the church and the school go together, and that the
school is simply the handmaid of the church. We recognize the fact that
in Congregationalism especially, out of all forms of religious belief,
we cannot hope to make men earnest, effective Christians, caring for
themselves, managing their own affairs independently, and having in them
the heart to go out and work, unless we cultivate their minds as well.
And so this Association has sought, and this body of Christians that
represent the Association has sought, by gifts an