Lawrenceville, Va., and the Bishop Payne Divinity School, Petersburg, Va. In these schools we are educating for our part of the South workmen, teachers, business and professional men, and clergymen. We are combining in them education for the hand, for the head, for the heart, and for the spirit of man; we are giving these negroes the education that trains for life in all its phases, fitting them to be workers and leaders among their people. You have heard of the "Church Institute for the Negro." I beg you will give it your hearty sympathy and cordial co-operation. The good purpose of the Institute is to raise money first for these three Institutions, to lift them forward and to so increase the area of their influence that they will do in the Church a work similar to that done outside the Church by Hampton and Tuskegee. After placing these three schools on a firm financial basis, the Institute hopes to continue its good work, helping in the whole South to increase the number and to add to the efficiency of all of our parochial schools.
I should not forget at this point of my address to give brief but hearty mention of the blessed Christlike work for the negroes, which is being done by Mrs. Buford's Hospital and Home in Brunswick County, Va., St. Peter's Hospital, Charlotte, N. C., and St. Agnes Hospital and Training School, for Nurses, a department of St. Augustine School, Raleigh, N. C.
What are we doing to evangelize the negroes and build them up into Christian men and women? I will tell you a little of the work which I know myself, in my own State of North Carolina, in our two dioceses and our one missionary jurisdiction. Bishop Atkinson—our great Church Father during and after the Civil War—felt his responsibility for the souls of the black folk; and he and his successors have been in more or less degree pressing the work of the Church among the negroes. We have now in the State two arch-deacons, thirteen clergymen, 1,400 communicants and 35 parishes and missions. Each arch-deacon goes all about his own diocese, visiting the colored parishes and missions, consulting with the clergy, and opening out new fields. The clergy are doing just the same kind of work among their people that the white clergy are doing in their white parishes and missions, with the exception that the colored clergy are giving more of their time to educational work. I have about the same size classes for Confirmation among the negroes that I have among the whites in the Churches of the same numerical strength. I have been Bishop of East Carolina about two and a half years; and I have confirmed 106 negroes and 644 white people, being an increase of 25 per cent. for the negroes and 18 per cent. for the whites. I am really proud of my staff of negro clergy; they are men of high moral character
and are doing good and effective service. Work like this I have described in North Carolina is going on in every one of our States, larger or smaller as the Church of the white people has been larger or smaller in strength and numbers, and as the Bishop has been more or less interested in this special work.
In this purely missionary field many of us are trying to develop and utilize Catechists, men of age and character without the necessary literary qualifications for the ministry, who can go forth to teach and preach to their people the simple facts of the Gospel, bringing the power of Christ to bear on their daily moral life.
Two special ways in which the Church is influencing the negro race I take pleasure in mentioning. Arch-deacon Russell is holding every summer on his school grounds at Lawrenceville a "Farmers' Conference." The negroes come from all over the county and spend the day together, asking and answering publicly questions about their progress or their failure, their customs, good or bad, praising or criticising one another, and listening to selected speakers, urging them on to the best lines of development for their race. I attended this conference last summer; and I was much impressed and greatly encouraged for the true progress of the negro. Another far different kind of influence is going out from the Church in Arkansas. Bishop
Brown and his Council have made an entire separation between the whites and blacks in his diocese. He has appointed a negro arch-deacon for the negro race, and has given him large power and wide discretion. Arch-deacon McGuire is appealing to the negroes both within and without the Church, attending all large negro gatherings, speaking to them about the Church, her customs and claims. He is getting a large and sympathetic hearing; and he and Bishop Brown have great hope of rapid progress for this negro branch of the Church in Arkansas.
Now, my friends, while the work is slowly going forward, as I have shown, while the average per cent. of growth among the negroes is nearly that of the progress among the whites; yet conditions are not satisfactory. While we can excuse ourselves, if we will, by pointing to the changed conditions after the war; by telling of the days of re-construction, which did more to separate and to make antagonistic the two races than many wars; by speaking of the high moral standard, which we demand and which the negroes in the mass will not accept; by deprecating the use of our beautiful liturgy which they cannot understand; yet we ought to have done, we ought to be doing far more with the negroes than we have done or are doing. We are barely touching the edge of the negro people; just think of it: one in one thousand, while we have among
the whites one in about 121 of the population. In Virginia, where there is one in 50 of the white population who are members of the Episcopal Church, there is only one in 381 of the negroes; in North Carolina one in 115 whites and one in 480 blacks. In South Carolina, where in 1860 the whites and blacks were about equal, the whites have gone forward to seven thousand, and the negroes have fallen back to one thousand. Yet that is not the most unsatisfactory part of the matter. We are not strongly attracting to the Church the element we ought to have; the exceptional negroes, the educated and enterprising, the leaders of their race. Why? Let the facts answer. I have already said that the Church strove to continue after the war the same method of dealing with the negroes as before. She tried to keep the races together; but she has found it impractical, that impracticability growing more and more clear as the years have run on. The races have been steadily drifting apart in all social or semi-social life; the better class of each race is coming less and less into contact with each other; and race prejudice is increasing and deepening in the great masses of both the white and the black people. Soon after the war, wherever the negroes were in great numbers, we found it necessary to build separate churches for them. We admitted their clergymen and laymen to the Councils of the diocese on equal terms