s, at the
early stages of mission work in the back country.

[Illustration: MARIETTA CHURCH AND PARSONAGE.]

The picture given herewith of the church, parsonage, and school, in
Marietta, Georgia, illustrates very many of the American Missionary
Association church missions in the South. A neat church, a plain but
comfortable house, with its adjoining school-room, are the type of the
improving influences in both religious and educational service, which
we seek to carry among these shadowed and suffering millions.

In both the Carolinas, as well as in Georgia, there is an awakening in
the hearts of the colored people, both in the towns and in the
country, for a better church life. This is inciting movements from the
centralized forms of church government, with their arbitrary methods
and hard taxation, into independency. Often the poverty of the people
prevents their attaining anything beyond present and scanty shelter
for their new free churches. The accompanying photograph is an
illustration of such a chapel among the plantations of South Carolina.

[Illustration: A SOUTH CAROLINA CHURCH.]

In very many parts of the plantation South, the very idea of a church
free from outside control and allied to education and morality, is
utterly unknown. Neither education nor morality form any constituent
element of the common church life. Their introduction is looked upon
with suspicion by the masses, and is met by hostility in every
possible form of persecution by many of the old-time preachers and
their personal adherents.

[Illustration: SCHOOL IN ANDERSONVILLE, GA].

Nothing more contributes to the introduction of better forms of
church life than do those mission schools which awaken the desire for
something better in religion than the senseless and corrupt "old-time"
ways. Such a school as that in Andersonville, Ga., is the initiative
of a church mission. School education is of little advantage unless it
is linked with moral training; and there is no moral training
comparable with that of a pure and true Christian church. Our mission
school teachers call for and need the re-enforcement of gospel
preaching on the Lord's day, and the faithful work of a pastor during
the week. A great deal of hard work in the school would be frittered
away and lost without the distinctive church work which must
supplement, and confirm it. To send the pupils back into the Egyptian
darkness of most plantation and country churches is, for vas