If the thought were to reduce our societies to which these interests are intrusted to two, calling for but two annual collections where we now have three or four, it needs no prophet to foresee the effect of that on the amounts collected.  If the suggestion is of the reconstruction, not of the societies, but only of the work—­if it proposes that our educational and missionary enterprises be so divided that no one society shall to any extent conduct both—­it has certainly an attractive look.

But is it more than a look?  The educational institutions of several of our societies were born out of the inmost life of those organizations and lie on their bosom for nourishment to-day.  To ask the American Board, for example, to turn over its colleges and schools to some other society, for that, of course, is involved in the plan suggested—­would be like asking one of our Christian mothers to send her babe to the foundlings’ home.  Some of us are old enough to remember that the venerable and now sainted Dr. Anderson was at first vehemently opposed to the schools planted by the missionaries in India.  It was confounding things that differ.  The work of a missionary society was not to manage schools.  The schools were discontinued.  But the Board soon discovered that it was doing its work with but one hand.  The schools came back and came to stay.  Now we conservatives are rather jealous of our progressive brethren calling for a reconstruction of the American Board.  We know not whereto this thing may grow.

If the colleges and schools of the American Missionary Association were secular, if they had no vital oneness of life with its churches, there might be room for the plan suggested.  But they are as thoroughly Christian in their aim as the churches.  The churches are as indispensably educational as the schools.  As Dr. Strieby remarks, the teacher is often the pastor.  The pastor finds a great part of his flock in the school.  The teachers teach in his Sunday-school.  The prayer-meeting depends on them for its success.  The unseen shuttles of mutual sympathy, flying back and forth incessantly, are weaving the two together, and working out the one pattern of the Divine life in souls, that covers both.  The plan proposed would, at least to the eye, disentangle all complications.  It would lay out the work in the Year-Book with clean-cut precision.  But vital things are not always improved by vivisection.  It would doubtless simplify our apprehension of the organs of a man to lay the lungs on one side of the table, the heart on another, the liver on a third, and the brains on a fourth.  But how far it would enhance the vitality and usefulness of the man is another question.  There is an organism which is often, and without harm, in that fashion distributed.  But it is a mannikin—­not a man.