institutions alone nearly two thousand students of both sexes are being trained to be light-bearers to their race.  Besides these, each of which is essentially a normal school, and includes a normal department, eighteen distinctively normal schools are sustained at different points of strategic importance.  Two new schools have been established during the year.  Good work has also been done among the mountain whites.  The income from the gift of Mr. Daniel Hand has enabled the Association to enlarge its school accommodations, and to assist more than three hundred students, who, without it, would have been unable to attend schools of any kind.

The committee would emphasize among special needs of the work, funds for a girls’ hall at Tillotson Institute, and for the endowment of a theological school for training colored pastors.  Two facts are pre-eminently gratifying.  The first is that in nearly all the schools of the Association some kind of industrial training is provided, and that the influence of such training is conspicuously shown in improved ideas of home life and comfort among those connected by family or other ties with our students.  The second fact is, that in all our schools the students are taught that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that consequently the separation between religion and morality, which is the supreme danger of the Southern black churches, is perceptibly diminishing.

* * * * *

REPORT ON CHURCH WORK.

BY PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR, CHAIRMAN.

The mission of the American Missionary Association is shown to be a specialty and a unit by its church work.  It is the work of a specialist among Christian organizations that alone could have produced these churches.  To meet the demands of an exigency which could not be met by the pre-existent ordinary agencies, this child of Providence was born of God and the times.  For the accomplishment of ends for which no means had been found, its methods were providentially chosen by a process of spiritual selection.  Its agencies are the accretions of the Divine purpose in its progress toward the salvation of the undermost, and the edifying of the whole body of Christ.  To the production of its unique Christian institutions the exclusive devotion to the study of the peculiar conditions of these entirely distinct communities was necessary.  There have been generated by this devotion and acquired through the experience of nearly half a century a knowledge and skill which claim for this Association the recognition of the world as its foremost expert in the successful application of Christianity to the solution of the most difficult race problems of modern civilization.

And yet in the accomplishment of this great achievement, loyalty to the common faith and to our own polity, as well as to the teachings of experience, demanded only the new application of the old prime factors of God’s own choice, the local church with its evangelism and Christian nurture.