There is a transition time with this whole section.  New conditions are being put upon them.  They feel the outside movement of the world.  A friend of mine is now in the South who has brought up a large quantity of lumber in a certain district, and when he finds the right man he will plant a school there.  Coal and iron are being extensively worked.  My brother here (the Rev. S.E.  Lathrop) tells me that near Cumberland Gap four hundred houses have gone up within a very brief time, and over two thousand workmen are pushing into a section not before opened.  It will not come in an hour or in a day; but by and by, when these men face the new life of our times, when they have once felt its pressure, and the tremendous disparity between their manner of living and the high kind of life of Northern homes and Northern hearthstones, they will move, and a change will come over the spirit of their dreams.  Even now, the native preachers, who have been so hostile to our work, are coming to these, our pastors, and asking for light on the Bible.  Furthermore, our pupils are going out and organizing county institutes, and the work is going on everywhere.

There is a dark side to it, but I praise God there is a bright side.  It is like a dam.  When the dam begins to go, it will go all at once.  Youth is on our side.  In thirty years we shall not have the same problem we have now—­no, not in twenty years.  Wealth is coming in.  A large tract of eleven thousand acres, containing some of the finest coal that the world knows, is being developed.  This means a great influx of population, and this wealth is to be developed, and new material power is coming as an auxiliary to our spiritual power.  This wealth is being converted.  A man who five years ago was a godless man, and who owns to-day one-seventh of these eleven thousand acres of coal lands, was converted.  He was made a Sunday-school Superintendent, but he could not say the Lord’s Prayer; yet he was determined that the Lord’s Prayer should be repeated in that school, and he hired a large number of small boys and gave them a dime apiece and told them to learn the Lord’s Prayer that week.  They did so; and when Sunday came, with a chorus to back him, he came on as a solo performer.

A dear girl of my own acquaintance dressed, in one morning, fifteen or sixteen women and children.  They came around her and felt her all over, and wondered at the complexity of her garments.  I speak of this thing because it indicates that that old apathy is breaking up, and they are coming to look at new things and feel a new interest in the life outside of themselves.  And as this same dear girl taught from thirty to fifty of these women, they listened eagerly, and the tears rolled down their cheeks, and they said to her, “Oh, come and tell us more about Jesus, for we want to be different kind of women, different kind of mothers.”