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