is the church
which creates the environment necessary to the Christian homes, to which
the graduates are sent back again to live their lives, and from which,
as the heart's fulcrum, their saved lives can best lift up the lost.

These little church groups of evangelized and educated families are at
once the prime sources and the constituent elements of the new Christian
civilization which already heralds the coming of the kingdom to those
neglected, outcast peoples, to secure whose human rights, Christian
privileges and church fellowship is the first, loudest, longest call
upon the Congregational Churches of America.

Therefore, in the name of this Association, whose heroic type of
missionary and teaching service makes our whole membership and ministry
the more attractive and ennobling; in the name of its schools which
became churches, and its churches which are schools; in the name of
their 8,400 professing Christians, and their 15,000 Sunday-school
scholars, and the 1,000 converts of the year; in the name of the races
of three continents to whom the Father is sending these our brethren as
we are sent to them, we pledge the fidelity of the American Missionary
Association to the two-fold agency of its one work, the discipling of
these races by the evangelizing church, and the Christian nurture of its
schools. And we re-echo the call which the National Council makes upon
our churches for the $500,000 required by the exigencies and
opportunities of this year's work for the neediest and most helpless of
all our fellow-countrymen.

* * * * *

REPORT ON MOUNTAIN WORK.

BY REV. D.M. FISK, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

The formal report of your committee can without injustice be brief; not
because the field considered is narrow, or the work unimportant as a
missionary movement, but from the fact that a certain unity pervades
both, making it possible to comprehend in one view even the diversities
of a population of over two millions, and an area of above one hundred
thousand square miles.

The official summary of the year's work, on which we report, once again
sets before this Association the situation and its involved problem; a
situation full of contradictions, a problem at once serious but not
hopeless.

Here is the amazing spectacle of a self-isolated people, begirt with the
active life and thought of our eager times, yet sharing neither. Here is
an empire that is content to live in the past: havi