Now to-day we have unusual opportunities.  Everything seems to be coming to a focus in regard to our work for the Indians.  Never has the time been so auspicious as it is to-day.  Never have there been so many things combining to show to us that if we are to improve the opportunity God gives us to care for the Indian—­this man who held this land before we came to it and from whom we have taken our possession—­we must do it to-day.  There are other great needs about us, other races and other classes and other conditions; but there is no other class appealing so intensely to the sympathies of all our people to-day, as is the Indian.  This is one great explanation of the remarkable increase of the work of this Association among the Indians.  How did it ever spring from an expenditure of $11,000 annually to $52,000, as it is to-day?  Partly because the Government has been willing to aid, but still more because our people throughout the land have been intensely interested in the Indian and have been glad to help him.  They have said by their gifts that now is the time, and we must leap to improve this opportunity or else it will slip away from us forever.

It is the conviction of your committee—­and I can voice it most perfectly—­that we must improve this opportunity before it is gone, and that this people who have long suffered at the hands of their white brethren have a claim to our earnest Christian sympathy and to our heartiest effort to put them upon their feet.  They are more than ready, they are anxious for our aid, they are crying to us for help.

Now, let me say that the American Missionary Association has always felt the importance of working in evangelistic lines.  It would be nothing if it had not the church before it as an incentive.  It works primarily through the school; but always with the thought that the school is secondary, and that the church is the one great aim before it.  And unless this incentive were before it, unless it recognized that its work was to bring men to Christ, and to bind them together in Christian churches, there would be but little to call for the great self-denials of Christian workers in the field and many Christian givers in the country at large.  It is this thought that has ever been held up before it—­the thought that the church and the school go together, and that the school is simply the handmaid of the church.  We recognize the fact that in Congregationalism especially, out of all forms of religious belief, we cannot hope to make men earnest, effective Christians, caring for themselves, managing their own affairs independently, and having in them the heart to go out and work, unless we cultivate their minds as well.  And so this Association has sought, and this body of Christians that represent the Association has sought, by gifts and by teaching, to develop the thought that there always should be an educational work going forward that there may be something to build upon.  Christianity needs education in order to give it its largest power.