Now, of all things that are most needed to be done for us, we need a good theological seminary in the South, where the ministry can be educated among us.  It is only an elevated Christian citizenship that will save us, and make us what other people are; and we must have a theological seminary to aid us toward that end.  You have given us colleges, normal schools, industrial training schools, and schools of common branches, and we have now young men and young women filling all the schools through the South.  We can get good teachers for our schools in the remotest places, in Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi, or anywhere else.  So it is not a question as to what kind of teachers we will have.  But the churches have not in their pulpits ministers well prepared to preach the gospel of Christ.  They have not kept up with the young people in the work done by the schools.  In the North, one of the pleasant things we find wherever we go, is that in all your churches there is something for the young people to do.  You have Christian Endeavor Societies, and various organizations by which the young people may be reached.  Therefore, you gather them in from the beginning and have them trained so that they can take your places as soon as you are ready to step out of the work.  It is not so with our churches.  Our ministers have not advanced to that degree where they can take up such work.  In these little Congregational churches that have been planted, we have educated ministers, who are able thus to work, especially among young people.  We do not have people at our hand as other churches have, but we are trying to get hold of them.  In Fisk University there were last year, I believe, 510 students, of whom, perhaps, there were 100 Congregationalists.  So, after all, it is Methodists and Baptists that you are educating there.  This is all right, because the great masses of the people are found in those churches.  If we had a Congregational Theological School we could reach these people just as well through the pulpit as we reach them in the schools.

I was asked to give a little of my personal experience.  I dislike to do this:  but if narrating any of my personal experience will give an insight into the work that the American Missionary Association is doing, I will gladly consent.  My story is the story of hundreds of young men in the South.  Only in the larger cities can we get a good English education, except we go to schools established for us by this Association.  I went eight years to Fisk University.  I have a brother there now in the senior college class.  This is his tenth year, and I have a sister who is also in her tenth year there.  It takes a long while to get through.  My father had no money to send me to school.  In his slavery days he had stolen a little bit of learning, and had learned how to write and read and a little arithmetic.  I was about four years old when the stroke for freedom was made.  My father began to teach me arithmetic,