S.

* * * * *

FORTY-THIRD ANNUAL REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE,

FOR THE YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30TH, 1889.

* * * * *

GENERAL SURVEY.

The American Missionary Association finds its commission in the words of the Master, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

It does not choose its fields of labor because the people in them are black, or red, or yellow, or white; but because they are those for whom Christ died and to whom he commanded the glad tidings of salvation to be preached.  In the fields to which it providentially has been called, it seeks to bring the gospel to every human being who has it not in its purity as an uplifting power.

In nineteen States and Territories we are laboring—­six in the West and thirteen in the South.  In ninety-four schools and one hundred and forty-two churches we have been directly teaching and preaching the gospel during the past year.  In them have 456 missionaries wrought with holy purpose. 12,132 pupils have been taught in our schools; more than seventeen thousand have received instruction in Bible truth in our Sunday-schools; 782 conversions have been reported. $3,160.14 have been reported as given in our mission churches for benevolence, and $21,658.57 for their own expenses—­again over last year of $660.03 in benevolence and $2,322.62 in church expenses.  Besides all this and all that in various ways has failed to be reported to us, have been the vacation work of our students, the large work of our previous graduates, the indirect results of many kinds, and the unknown results and influences of great power and far-reaching importance which have gone forth from our institutions and missionaries whose only possible record is in God’s Book of Remembrance.

* * * * *

THE SOUTH.

In the South, we are directly reaching three classes—­the colored people, the mountain whites, and the new settlers from the North and from the old countries.  Indirectly we are reaching many more.  The schools we plant often incite others to plant schools; the houses of worship we aid in erecting cause others to be erected.  A single neat, but inexpensive building for a country church of colored people has been known to occasion the building or repairing of at least nine church buildings of neighboring white people.  The incontestably good results of our work among the colored people are slowly but surely undermining race prejudice.  In spite of all the race trouble during the past year and the increasingly bitter utterances of some papers and some public speakers, during no other year in the history of our country have so many manly words in favor of the Negro been printed in Southern papers, and sounded from the pulpits and platforms of the South.  It was in a Southern University and before a Southern audience that a Southern man, a Bishop of a Southern church which took the name Southern when it declared for slavery, this year uttered these words: