| Total number of Schools | 60 |
| Total number of Instructors | 260 |
| Total number of Pupils | 10,094 |
| Theological Students | 82 |
| Law Students | 10 |
| College Students | 51 |
| College Preparatory Students | 103 |
| Normal Students | 784 |
| Grammar Grades | 2,127 |
| Intermediate Grades | 3,181 |
| Primary Grades | 3,773 |
| In two grades | 17 |
CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH.
Our church work has necessarily been of slow growth. Churches might have been multiplied, had we thought it best to lower the standard near the level of the old churches, and acknowledge wild ravings as belonging in the worship of God. We have believed that our churches should mean new ideas and intelligent worship. We have knowingly lent our aid to nothing else.
These churches are gathered into Associations, and the fine bodies of pastors and delegates which come together in these, present a most emphatic testimony to the value of the work done in the past, and are an earnest of what the future will show.
Revivals—some of them of great power—have been reported to us from the Plymouth Church, Washington, D.C., Fisk University, Memphis, Jonesboro, Sherwood, Glen Mary, Oakdale, Athens and Pine Mountain, Tenn.; Montgomery and Florence, Ala.; Tougaloo and Jackson, Miss.; Straight University, New Orleans, and Corpus Christi, Texas. Many others of our churches have had a quiet work of grace, by which additions have been made to them.
We report new churches at Glen Mary and Athens, Tenn.; Roseland, La; Fort Payne and Alco, Ala. This makes the whole number of our churches in the South 136.
Besides these churches, there are our churches among the Indians and the work of gathering the Chinese into churches in California.
We are praying and laboring for the eternal salvation of millions, the establishment through the grace of God, the atoning blood of Christ, and the [pg 310] work of the Holy Spirit, of character which shall meet the tests of the Judgment Day and the needs of eternal association with purity. In aiming at this ultimate result, our missionaries are doing a work of inestimable importance for the nation and the world. They are successfully working upon some of the great problems of this country, which armies and millions of money have failed, and of necessity must fail, to solve. Nothing but the "glorious gospel of the blessed God," taught from the pulpit and the teacher's desk, and illustrated in the eloquent lives of consecrated missionaries, can change the idol worshiper from heathen China, the wild-man of the West, the half-heathen Negro so recently in the cruel degradation of slavery, those of our own race in the bonds of ignorance and immorality—so that they shall have and manifest an intelligent and worthy manhood and womanhood. Nothing else can meet cruel prejudice, which would forever deny full manhood or womanhood to those called to it by God himself, and pour oil upon its angry waves until they shall be still.
Our plan of work in the South is often misunderstood and often misrepresented. It is not our plan to force the races together. It is not our plan to agitate questions which arouse the prejudices of the Southern people. We do not agitate. Quietly, steadily, patiently, lovingly, our missionaries seek to lift up the degraded, enlighten the ignorant, and bring them all to Christ, well knowing that bitter prejudice cannot forever stand opposed to an enlightened, cultivated, Christian people, whatever may be their color or their past condition. We have nothing to do with the question of social equality in the South any more than we have in the North. We are not even trying to force the races together in the churches. We have no principles which would prevent our aiding two churches in the same town—one with a membership of white, the other of colored people. We have done it. In our church work, we simply maintain that a Christian church should stand ready to fellowship any one whom Christ fellowships, that it should turn no one away because of his color, or because he, his father or his mother was a slave. We maintain that there is no Christian reason why there should be either State or local organizations of churches which will not fellowship churches whose memberships differ in race. We seek to establish churches and other institutions which dare interpret Christianity as Christ taught it, and which will not yield a Christian principle for enlarged statistics. There are caste churches enough in the South. No more are needed. If Congregationalism can go there true to its history, true to its real convictions, true to that gospel which successfully faced the bitter prejudices of Jew and Gentile with the broad invitation, "Whosoever will, may come," then it goes to become a mighty power and to win both a place for itself and other churches, in time, to accept the same broad interpretation of Christianity.
This Association has faith in the power of the gospel, and, under the reign of God, of the final triumph of the right. It is willing to enter the [pg 311] doors now so wide open for missionary work, and to wait, if need be, for that glory of the denomination, which is better than long tables of statistics, the glory of adhering to the right.