Something, the right thing, can be done.  Fair-minded men, both North and South, realize that all schemes involving fraud, violence, disfranchisement or deportation, are impracticable, but all are agreed as to the value of Christian enlightenment, enabling the Negro to earn property and to become an intelligent and virtuous citizen.  This is the line on which the Association has perseveringly toiled since it opened its first school at Fortress Monroe in 1861, and it is not too much to say that nothing more effective has been done in all these years.  Can anything of a better sort be done in the future?  Amid all the jarring discords at the South, the people there, both white and black, welcome the efforts of the Association.  They feel that we are not disturbers, that we have a single honest aim, and are working at the only true solution of the great problem.  We ask the people of the North, therefore, to come to the rescue once more by practical, self-denying liberality.

3.  But this is not all.  A work so vital to the interests of the nation and of the cause of Christ needs to be uplifted by the prayers of God’s people.  Deliverance cannot come from political parties, governmental authority or theories of industrial reform.  The power of God must be in it.  We therefore respectfully but earnestly ask our brethren in the ministry to remember this work in their prayers in the great congregation, and we ask our fellow Christians to remember it in the prayer-meeting, at the family altar and in the closet.

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“Now, concerning the collection.”  These are not the words of a begging agent, but of Paul the Apostle, and they come from his pen just after he had closed that wonderful fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians on the glorious resurrection and the victory over death and the grave.  These words are fit, therefore, in any assembly and at the close of any discourse however exalted.  Brethren remember the “collection.”

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The Corinthian church seems, like some churches in recent times, to have been remiss in sending on the “collections,” and hence we find Paul, a year later, to be “After Money Again.”  He writes so nobly, so kindly, that we are tempted to quote a few sentences: 

“For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.  And herein I give my advice:  for this is expedient for you who have begun before not only to do but also to be forward a year ago.  Now therefore perform the doing of it.  As it is written, He that had gathered much had nothing over; and he that gathered little had no lack.”

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