2. We have no boys’ dormitory at Straight University, the new Stone Hall being exclusively for the teachers and girls. We need immediately fifteen thousand dollars to supply this want.
3. Funds also are necessary for libraries in at least ten of our different institutions. An advanced school without a sufficient library labors under great disadvantages, and especially so when located amid a people who have but very few books of their own. From ten to twenty thousand dollars for libraries could be used very profitably at once.
4. Our theological departments need better facilities and an increased corps of instructors. The number of students graduating from the different schools at the South is rapidly increasing. Many of these would enter the Christian ministry if sufficiently encouraged to do so. We need funds for the endowment of professors’ chairs at least at three different points south of the Ohio.
5. We need also endowment funds for all our chartered institutions. No colleges thrive for a great length of time without endowments. The work of a missionary society primarily is to plant churches and religious institutions, and to sustain them until they can care for themselves. Its business is, and must be, aggressive. As soon as may be, its churches and its educational institutions must become self-sustaining by their own endeavors, while the society goes forward to new fields. We need now, we surely ought to have in the near future, not less than five hundred thousand dollars for the endowment of our different institutions.
6. We need also ten thousand dollars at once for a suitable steamer for our Mendi Mission.
The negroes in the West Indies, the millions in South America, the two hundred millions in Africa, have their claims upon us. We are of them as a missionary society, and they are of us as our brethren in distress, awaiting such benefits as we have been blessed in bestowing on the few representatives in our own country.
Finally, this Association needs, most of all, the prayers of God’s people everywhere for the guidance of His Holy Spirit, and the sufficiency of His grace to direct its affairs in days to come, and for this your Committee puts forth its most urgent appeal.