The cause of temperance has been kept near the heart of our members. One church, the Pilgrim, at Woodville, has a large and influential Band of Hope. All preach temperance and require its practice among their members. We are deeply convinced that the habit of intemperance is the devil’s best grip upon the poor and lowly people among whom we have our lot and our work, and that total abstinence is the only consistent rule for Christians. In a community where pastors and officers and members of Protestant churches indulge in the practice of drinking liquors, we feel called upon to bear an unremitting and uncompromising testimony against this violation of the spirit and the precept of the Gospel. We are confirmed in the wisdom of the union of the school-work and the church-work in our evangelizing process. The school prepares the way for the church. It brings along the young and hopeful material for the church membership. The church garners up such fruit. It reacts upon the school and the community by its educating and elevating influence. In our ideal, both unite in the one purpose of saving and edifying the souls of men. We desire to express our sincere gratefulness in view of the devoted and self-denying labor of the teachers in the schools associated with our churches. The higher schools and colleges within our bounds have gone along upon the plane of their former success. The Avery Institute, at Charleston, has passed through a change of administration without any diminution of its members or lowering of its high grade of scholarship. The Normal School at Greenwood, S. C., has held on in its beneficent way, enjoying the fine building and campus of an old time Baptist College. The Beach Institute in this city, with its cultivated and consecrated corps of seven teachers, with its fine body of pupils, with its thorough discipline and its decided moral and religious tone, is a power for good in this community and in this part of the State. The Dorchester Academy at Midway, the Lewis High School at Macon, and the Storrs School at Atlanta, have kept steadily upon the line of their extensive and beneficent influence. The Atlanta University maintains its high position as to classical and normal scholarship, and as to moral and religious tone, approved by the authorities of the Commonwealth and also by the favor of Heaven, in the enrolling during the year of a couple of score of its students among the disciples of the Great Master. Its independent Union Church, with 67 members, although not belonging to our body, is to us a sister in Christ, for whom our prayers and sympathies shall ever abound. Its Faculty consists of three graduates of Yale and one each of Harvard, Dartmouth and Amherst Colleges, and of half a dozen cultivated ladies. To these it has just added Prof. A. W. Farnham, who is introducing the most approved normal methods, not only for the benefit of the normal scholars but of all in the University. More than a dozen of its