But its highest aim and ours is such a spiritual elevation of the colored people as shall carry all the most salutary influences into their social, political and domestic life. Our honest and intelligent aim is to lift them out of their degradation by bringing them to Christ. Our work among them is with no sectarian, as it is with no partisan political purpose. We propose to help make them intelligent and worthy Christian people. There our responsibility ceases. As to parties and sects, they must learn wisely to choose for themselves. Whatever the shading of their creed, we do care that they should be sincere in their love to God, close in their following of Christ, and honest in all their dealings with their fellow-men. We do care that their moral training shall be such that their religion shall mean not emotion merely, but character; not noise and bodily exercise, which profiteth little, but practical godliness, which leads one to earn an honest living for himself and his household, and suffers the neighbor’s chickens unmolested to roost low; not a religion of the lips and the tongue alone, but of the head and the heart controlling the life. Nowhere is a mere profession of godliness of much account, if virtues tried and true are not the proofs of an intelligent love and a sincere devotion. No creed can be accepted as a substitute for character. Christ must be wrought into the life or we are not true Christians, and the more completely self-deceived we are, the greater will be our surprise, when, by and by, he who is infallible in his judgment shall say, “I never knew you.” The cross worn upon the neck, or perched upon the steeple-tops, or set up at every crossing, is at best a mocking reminder of our impiety; if ever so loudly we profess to be saints, and yet live as though our religion were a polite theory with which to compliment our Maker, and to befool our fellow men, and not a thing of practical worth, to help one stand fire in the conflicts of temptation and in the furnace of affliction. Such a genuine religion, warranted to keep in any climate, is wanted everywhere alike; in the East and the West, the North and the South country. The lofty and the lowly, the honored and the despised, the respectable and the degraded, we and everybody, need it. It is the only kind worth propagating. For it, and it alone, of all the world’s religions, has vital force and saving power enfolded in every root-fibre of doctrine, and in every seed-germ of truth. * * * * * ITEMS FROM THE FIELD. GREENWOOD, S. C.—School fuller than ever before; boarding-school overcrowded. Mr. Backenstose is compelled to make arrangements in neighboring families for students.