SECRETARY'S ADDRESS BEFORE

THE ASSEMBLY.

MODERATOR AND BRETHREN :-In attempting to set this great cause before you, I have at this time advantage from two very efficient helpers-steam and eyesight. Men are here who were never so far west before. A few, in coming, have traversed the length of Massachusetts; more have crossed New York or

Pennsylvania, then Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa-each of them large enough to contain no inconsiderable nation-and now, with the muddy Missouri at their back and the Mississippi far behind them, they sit down at home in the midst of the church and the nation. This is Nebraska-a name which, when I was a boy, sounded more melodious, indeed, but scarcely more home-like, than Kamtschatka. What makes this Assembly at home in this new land? The presence of people-some of whom are the church, all of whom need the church. Therefore have you for years been sending hither your ministers, and rearing your church buildings, and establishing all the influences of Christian lives and Christian homes.

THE CHURCH REQUIRES THE SCHOOL. But are preaching and Christian living, indispensable as they are, the only agencies which the church has need to employ in these new regions? No; I am pleading for the people's education, not only by means of the Sabbath and of the contact of piety, but by means of the school. Such education is demanded at the hands of the church by two considerations. First, there is in every community a bulk of common opinion which is either friendly to the church's success or unfriendly. Such opinion rapidly develops. Signs of such development met me last Sabbath on my walk of two miles to my preaching place, as I saw the busy mechanics and the open stores. The communities will learn, whether we teach them or not. And do I need to explain what hindrances may oppose the church's success, if an irreligious press, demoralizing pleasures and absorbing worldliness be allowed to charge the atmosphere in which the church does her work? What institutions of Christian learning can do to qualify common opinion, we have seen in all those older communities which

have grown up within the scope of the Christian schools. Measure, if you can, the general influence of Williams and Amherst and their fellows in New England, of Princeton and Rutgers in New Jersey.

But the church must have her schools for another reason. She must have fit training places for her own agents. Among these are not only her ministers. We do not forget her

imperative need of Christian lawyers, legis

lators, editors, merchants and farmers. None of these can do the church's work of leadership, unless they are drilled in the knowledge of truth in its relations-its relations to God and its relations to men, to time and to eternity. Christian learning includes the sum of knowledge, natural and revealed, sweeping in one sphere up to the throne of God and of Christ.

But as we argue for such an education we are met, and often from within the church, by the statement that the state educates. There is reason, it is admitted, why the church should provide preachers, since the state cannot provide them; but it is insisted that there is no reason why the church should open schools just beside the schools of the state. Any zeal of the church in this direction is likely to be censured as sectarian and bigoted. It is charged sometimes even with disloyalty, as in conflict with what is called the "American system" of education.

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Now, so long as America keeps within the scope of reason, experience and God's revelation, let her name be loved and venerated by all her sons; but when she sets herself against reason and experience and the plan of God, even "America" will prove no name to conjure with." Liberty is good not because America made it. She found it, approved of God and of men. America did not create representative government. She found it in the world, and especially in the church. So she found the education which experience and the Scripture had equally approved, and while she maintained it her steps were safe; but the education that divorces itself from religion has absolutely no warrant from experience or from God. Ponder those last warning words of Dr. A. A. Hodge, by which he declared that this

attempted American system is a thing utterly unexampled in the practice of any nation, heathen or Christian, having its only prototype in the progeny of French atheism. America when bent on such a venture is herself unAmerican. She leaves her path which the wisdom of men and of God had irradiated for her; and unless she returns to it, she plunges. This is not to quarrel with the system of common school education. We must maintain it. We cannot part with it, but we must supplement it and save it by the Christian schools.

CAN THE CHURCH COMPETE WITH THE STATE? We are told, however, and sometimes by Christian men, "It is too late. The state, with its unlimited resources for the provision of buildings, apparatus and free tuition, has occupied the ground. You have no standing place." That might become true. President Fisher, of Hanover, whose good judgment this Assembly has already approved in the matter of his important report, told me on our journey hither that if Wabash and Hanover had left their work in Indiana unattempted till now the state institutions would make their beginning wellnigh hopeless. But they are begun and established, and they will grow.

THE FACTS THUS FAR.

We are not too late! Look at the which map our report includes of the results of our four years' work. To most eyes it will make what our friendly standing committee have called 66 a revelation." See how the western half of our country is dotted with our new institutions. Thirty-five academies and colleges have been aided this last year. See where they are. Then turn to our statistical tables, and see how their property of over a million is distributed among them, and see that nearly half a million of it belongs to the new schools, which but for this Board would not have existed. From this let all understand that Presbyterian people in these new regions love their church and love their children, and, being bent upon their Christian education, are ready, under the church's encouragement, to make their purpose good. Then be it remembered that where we show that millions of dollars, growing, moreover, at the rate of $80,000 a year, the church has invested through this Board but about $70,000 from first to last.

LIBERAL HELPERS AT HAND.

But our hope is not only in this local zeal and liberality, great as it is. We look for the sympathetic help of able donors from a dis

tance. Upon such help Christian schools have always leaned. The strongest eastern colleges are resorting to it now, and we rejoice in their success. It reaches our own institutions too. In addition to our former record of munificent individual giving, I could tell you of multiplying recent proofs that Presbyterian wealth is searching out these young schools. Within a month I have credible tidings of liberal gifts.

These things will grow. It is not possible that they should not. Why did God plant our church along that eastern slope of the Atlantic? Why have those great cities grown up beside their harbors? What mean those humming factories, those teeming mines? The earth that heard that first command, "Let there be light," seems to have drunk up the word and held it in her depths, till now, at length, for the wealth and comfort of this generation, she releases the streaming splendor. Has the church not heard the same command? And will she withhold the response? Cannot and will not a church like ours, in a land like ours, equip and maintain the schools which her Saviour's cause requires?

AN APPEAL TO PASTORS.

Pastors, permit my brotherly appeal. This cause hangs largely on your help. It has a claim on you. It has helped you beforehand. There is not in this Assembly a man educated in a Christian college, be he minister, lawyer, or whatever else, who, if this for which I am pleading to-day be charity, has not been to that degree a charity student. Good men's gifts made possible our education on the terms on which we acquired it. "Freely ye have received, freely give." Let your whole influence serve the cause that has served you, and let not a mere word lead your conscience into error. It is our lot to be the youngest board of the church. A "board" is a human contrivance; and if you allow the issue of your duty to be raised with a "board," you make that issue with the mere wisdom of the Assembly in establishing such an agent. The true issue is with the end, not with the means. Did the Assembly of 1883 spread out these prairies and people them? Away to the west are multiplying the homes in which the babes are born and tended. "Who has begotten the drops of dew?" and if the Board should sink out of being, would they perish with it? "Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world."

Do not reason with me about "the Board." Spell the word larger! Call it "opportunity."

1887.]

God has arranged it. See that track of light by which, from the moment when the wise men set their faces westward, his providence has marched straight forward to this land and to this hour. This work of ours is knit into history, which is prophecy issuing into fact. On the bosom of God's plan it is borne on toward the coming triumph. By no accident does this continent stand between the continents. Here shall the great Teacher sit, and the world shall learn. Teuton and Celt, Scandinavian and Frank, African and Indianalready they gather around him. The almondshaped eyes shall bend over our books; tongues trained in the strange cadences of Asia shall grow fluent in our speech. "Lift up thine eyes round about and see; all they gather themselves together; they come to thee; thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then thou shalt see and flow together, and thy heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall be converted unto thee."

O many-voiced nation,

O fold for every flock,

Safe be thy habitation

Beneath the Eternal Rock! But make thy God thy glory, And take thy tongues of flame, And tell the world the story

Of Calvary and the Lamb.

AN INTERESTING CORRESPOND

ENCE.

It will be seen that the two writers whose letters are here produced were interested, not a little, in what they wrote. Writing that has such a history is commonly not hard to read; and therefore, though the subject has a dry side, and though one of the writers brings forward the correspondence and gives it a name, he takes the risk of promising that a good many readers will find it interesting. The first of the letters was written with no view to publication. For that reason the writer is in no way indicated.

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business is not right. He will spend necessarily the full half of all he gets. Say he raises $1200 in six months in driblets of from five to twenty dollars. Then with $500 salary, or perhaps $350, with say $250 for six months' expenses, and you have fifty cents out of every dollar given used up in collection. It's a horrible waste. He told me that Dr.- of

said he had had ten or twelve men call on him in this same way during the last four months. See what it represents. Can't some way be devised to stop so bungling and burdensome methods of securing and distributing benevolences? My church last Sunday made its contribution to college aid, amounting to about $-.

Yours sincerely,

CHICAGO, June 28, 1887. DEAR BROTHER:-Your letter of the 22d arrived during a brief absence from which I have just returned. I am very glad to receive it, and to reply.

First of all, in regard to the general principle of sending out any canvassers in behalf of the building or endowment funds of particular institutions: There is certainly a much better way. If the friends of this cause will enable the Board to meet, out of its treasury, the imperative needs of the institutions, in the matter of their property as well as of their current expenses, the gain in economy and comfort will be immense. This manifest fact we have set forth and emphasized to the best of our ability. See the whole matter discussed at length and with zeal in our annual report of 1886. Such a supply of our treasury we hope by and by to have.

But meanwhile how can the needy institutions get help in securing their buildings or their endowment? You regard the present method of authorized canvass as "bungling and burdensome," and think it should be "stopped." If it allowed the evils you describe, the terms you use would be even too tender. Ten or twelve canvassers invading the same pastor within four months! I think, if I were the pastor, I would give the second of the twelve such a meeting that the bruit of it would reach the other ten and deter them. If any pastor of a Presbyterian church is annoyed by a succession of solicitors for distant Presbyterian academies or colleges, it is his own fault. Either he has not taken pains to become acquainted with the oft-published methods of his denomination, or he has not used the knowledge which he has. The case about which you