THE INADEQUACY OF THE SUPPLY.

But, as the disciples said in regard to the five barley loaves and the two fishes, “What are these among so many?” The means in both cases are utterly inadequate, and the need of multiplying is as imperative here as it was on the shore of Galilee.  We have a Negro population of eight millions, which has doubled in the last twenty years, and increases at the rate of six hundred per day—­requiring, if adequately supplied, the founding of a new Fisk University or Talladega College every twenty-four hours.  There are 1,500,000 illiterate voters in the South, and how can the North, while admitting with President Harrison, that if the public security is threatened by this ignorance the remedy is education, withhold its share of the necessary means?

How can the churches of the North, who know that the future destiny of these ignorant masses depends upon their religious far more than upon their secular education, refuse the needed gifts for that purpose?  Here is where the miracle wrought on the shore of Galilee needs to be repeated.  Our Lord and Master is not here now in bodily presence, and he entrusts to his church the duty of multiplying the bread of life for these vast perishing masses.  The churches of the North must awake to this great duty.  If done at all, it must be done promptly.  Present means are wholly inadequate.  Every individual Christian at the North should feel his personal responsibility and should respond by a great increase of his contributions for this purpose.  It is not too much to say that the religious influences sent from the North in school, in industrial training, in the preparation of Christian ministers and teachers, and in the planting of Christian churches, will well-nigh constitute the pivotal point of the whole movement.  A loss now can never be regained, but the achievements of the present should be a stimulus for the future.  The North withheld neither treasure nor blood to save the Union and to free the slave.  Treasure and toil will now save the South and the Nation.

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SOME CURIOUS AND SUGGESTIVE FACTS.

What proportion of the funds contributed by living donors to missionary societies comes directly from church collections?  We presume the answer from a large majority of the contributors would be, three-fourths or four-fifths.  But the curious fact is, that, for the three years, 1886, 1887 and 1888, the average contributions to the American Missionary Association from church collections are forty-seven per cent., from Sunday-schools seven per cent., from Woman’s Missionary Societies five per cent., from individual donors forty-one per cent.  It thus appears that less than one-half the total sum comes from collections in the churches.  Another curious fact is, that these receipts directly from the churches are uniform, not differing to the extent of three per cent. in the past three years.  So that, with all the importunity and pressure, the plate collections in the churches have not increased.