I think the question is very much, to-day, with reference to the Freedmen of the South, as it would be if the Christian of the second century could have been taken out from his persecution, from his sense of that other world, from his prayer for the speedy coming of Christ, and plunged into the hard, practical uses of this nineteenth century. We have taken the Freedman out of his Heaven where he was living with something of joy; we have brought him before the great duties of this world and this century. How is his religion fitting him for the change? I have said that his religion has been a religion of joy, fitting him to bear, fitting him to endure; but life has become something more serious than suffering—life has become to him a practical work. What De Tocqueville said to Charles Sumner in his youth, may be said to the young Freedman to-day: “Life is neither a pain nor a pleasure, but a most serious business, to be taken up with courage, to be laid down, if need be, in self-sacrifice.” The nation has made a change necessary in the type of his religion. He must be refitted religiously to the work which attends citizenship, its rights and its duties. How is he fitted for it? If we do not answer this question practically, ten years will show us how he is unfitted for it. Meanwhile, too, we, as an Association, through our educational work, have been robbing him of his past religion. We have been letting in the light upon his superstitions; we have dissolved his dreams; we have put his Heaven a little farther off—he cannot fly into it so quickly as before; we have let in the strong, hard light of this world. We must give him something. If we simply give him education, even though it be so much of religious education as may be given in the schools, we are doing no more than sowing the seeds of scepticism—as when the Romanists of the old country lose their faith, it were better for them to stay in their faith with its tinge of superstition, than simply to be sceptics. We cannot afford to have this pure, tender, loving, spiritual life, developed during these last years, caught up by the scepticism of this century and hurried on into ruin. We have sceptics enough at the North; we have sceptics enough through the South; the nation is drifting fast enough into that way. Let us keep what religious sense there is in this race trained of God, pure, by making it strong, hard, substantial enough to stand the difficulties and the trials of their present condition.