Look at history, if you will, and is not the record the same? Take such nations as Greece, for example,—that wonderful land that reached the highest perfection in culture, in history, in song and in eloquence. Yet that land was sunk in the depths of impurity, and some of the crimes that were prevalent in those days I would not dare to mention in your presence. Take Rome,—that wonderful city, that ennobled the idea of law, that produced such marvelous intellects in the Augustan age. Yet in the very triumph of its intellect, as the capstone of intellectual pride went on to that magnificent temple of literature, the foundations of national virtue were rotten to the core and began to tremble, and presently the whole structure fell in ruins. I tell you, my friends, there is no safety in mere secular education; it must be Christian as well. We need to put education into the control of principle; otherwise our education may simply give us a certain evil power over other men, and eventually bring ruin upon us. We need to put principle in control in order that whatever we may know shall be turned in the direction of purity, of uprightness and of helpfulness to our fellow-men. And so here, if we are to have an education for the blacks, or an education for the land, we must not content ourselves with what has been called for by these public men. I say, then, that just here the work of this Association comes in. However much may be done by others, however much a secular education may attempt to accomplish, it can never cover the ground that is absolutely necessary. We have a secular education in the North, and it is doing much, but it has never done a religious work; nor will it ever do such in the future. We cannot expect that it should; and we feel a peculiar sensitiveness in this matter,—perhaps a sensitiveness that is not too great. We cannot trust the State to educate our young religiously. I, for one, confess a profound distrust of all State universities. I too often have seen those universities, in their attempt to be non-sectarian, ministering to the interests of that intensest of sectaries—the infidel. I will go even further than this, although I may carry but few of you with me in this conviction. I fear the methods of higher education in our high schools are not always what they should be. I have too often seen those who were the disciples of Huxley and Tyndall in science, and of Spencer and of Taine in sociology, literature and history, teaching their pupils doctrines that were insidious in their religious influence. I should be glad for one to see a return to the old-time academy system of New England, under which students who valued education enough to pay for it, were taught all branches of a higher learning on a Christian foundation, and trained first of all and most of all in character building.