(1). It has peculiar power and fitness to elevate the despised races. First, because we know so little of the capacity of either of these races. In the geographies of twenty years ago the centre of Africa was marked "Unexplored Region." The race that dwells there is still unexplored. When we say Persia, Greece, Rome, the word represents not only a people but an idea. Each of these nations has flashed forth before the world and left its mark upon it. But of Africa we have heard nothing; it has not displayed itself or impressed itself upon the world outside. It has given nothing of civilization or religion. And so of the Indians. Of their predecessors we learn much from the mounds they built; of themselves we know little. We know more of the former from their graves, than of the latter from their lives. The Chinese we have called our antipodes, in spirit as well as locality, and let them go at that, with this meager record, that grown men spend their lives in carving toys and find their pleasure in smoking opium. To lift up these races we want that power which conquered the conquerors of Rome, and put the destiny of the world into the hands of the Anglo-Saxon. We want the power which shall convince them of manhood within and God above, and bring them face to face with the Almighty. (2). We want Puritanism brought to these despised races, because there is in them such a tendency to degradation. This is seen abundantly in all of them; let us speak of it especially among the Freedmen. The Association has no feelings of mere romance in doing its work. Those who have been engaged in it for years look with open eyes on depths of degradation which you at a distance can hardly comprehend. In the cities, the colored people are influenced by the civilization around them. In some cases they have made excellent progress by themselves, as in the old Dorchester settlement in Liberty County, Georgia. But as a rule, when left alone, there is a terrible settling downwards. It is seen in Louisiana on remote sugar plantations, where their cabins, if before the war like cattle-pens, are now pest-houses; in Mississippi swamps, where their worship is fetichism and their lives savagery. Slavery was a great leveler; it leveled many down, but it also leveled many up in physical condition. I sat one memorable week, day after day, in company with teachers who had spent eight or ten years in hard work with these people. As they gave their accounts of those outside their influence, it seemed like standing on a jutting crag at night, an inky sky above, an inky sea below, and wave after wave rolling in, black, with scarce a gleam of brightness. No ecclesiastical polity, no scenic shows, can do anything for a people sinking like this. We need a faith which grasps with intense reality the fact that sin leads to remediless destruction; that it needed the Son of God to die for its victims, and believes the Son of God did die for