There are eighteen churches in the city, with an average membership of 350, the three largest having each over 1,500. Over 5,000 children and adults are in the Sabbath schools, and 1,278 children, about one-half in the public schools of the city. There are three lodges of Good Templars among them, having a total membership of about 200. Two lodges of Good Samaritans and Daughters of Samaria have a membership of some 500. The Brothers Aid Society number some 250, and the Brothers of Love and Charity 75. The Gospel Aid Society, Daughters of Bethel, and Daughters of Jerusalem—benevolent institutions—number a total of about 600. The Masonic lodge has some 50 members. There are lodges of Odd Fellows whose combined membership exceeds 600. These institutions have encouraged them to form habits of sobriety and economy, and imbued them with feelings of charity and benevolence. There are five military companies, and they show great proficiency in the manual of arms. * * * * * COMMON SENSE FOR COLORED MEN. [The following letter with the above caption is from the New York _Evangelist_, and was written by the Rev. Moses A. Hopkins, a colored preacher of Franklinton, N.C. It contains so much truth, and good, hard, common sense, that the MISSIONARY is constrained to send it along. This is done with a slight but emphatic caveat in regard to one paragraph, to which exception is taken as misleading. To say “the pinching poverty which drove a few idle and ignorant Freedmen to Indiana, Kansas, and Africa” does not come up to the proportions, as the writer would imply that it does, of a satisfactory explanation of this great movement which has taken more than 40,000 colored people from their old to new homes, at great expense, both of suffering and money. From Florence, Ala., many of the most intelligent and well-to-do of these people exodized. Among those who went to Africa were many intelligent and thrifty men, sufficiently so to send out an agent and arrange for the movement, with means to place themselves in their new home, and they were unanimous in assigning reasons which justified them in the experiment.—ED. MISS.] Many designing men, “filled to the brim” with sledge-hammer rhetoric and campaign eloquence, for more than a decade have “used sorcery and bewitched the colored people” with their “cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive,” till many of the Freedmen thought that the time had fully come when the last should be first and the first last, and were waiting and watching for their turn in the White House and Congress.