Is there any light? When Judge Tourgee wrote his first book, “The Fool’s Errand,” there appeared to be a sort of hopelessness in all the air; but the next book, “Bricks without Straw,” let the light through the crevices. He discovered and unfolded the remedy. It is educate! Educate the masses by educating the children! It is the fear of God and the love of man in active operation which make the individual his brother’s keeper, his brother’s helper. It is by expanding the individual conscience to take in fully and largely his individual responsibility, and re-awakening it among those who are more or less enlightened already. The American Missionary Association is the mother of a big household. She is pure, sweet-tempered, patient and persevering. She entered the field of contest early and is proud of her scars. She has stood at the doors of church pews which would not open, and endured the contempt and derision of the unthinking in her school-house receptions; her sons have lost arms and legs and lives in her service; but she looks ever forward for her final reward, when vast multitudes shall rise up to call her blessed. My friends, give help to this Association, and you help in the most direct way the cause of Universal Education. But let me say a word for Howard University. It has received pronounced commendation from both the friends and the enemies of colored men. A representative friend says of it: “It recognizes the complete manhood of a man and the complete womanhood of a woman.” An enemy says: “It makes gentlemen and ladies of niggers!” It duly claims for itself equality of rights for all men, and limits knowledge not to color but to capacity. May the Lord bless and prosper it till its students and graduates shall be honored in all the world! The Fisk University will ever be memorable for the wonderful struggle, perseverance and final success of the Jubilee Singers. Theirs is the history, in a brief compass, of their race. It is a prophecy to which we of this generation should take heed. Here were slavery, emancipation, want; then journeyings almost without hope—none except in God; then the dawn, broadening and widening till the full day came! Turned out of hotels in hate; pushed from railways in disgust and blasphemy; then received with delight and honor by kings and princes, queens and princesses everywhere; men, women and children crying with joy at the plaint of their song, and clapping their hands by the thousands in their praise! May we not take this bright history as a harbinger of good—as a spur to more and more activity to the pupils’ foster-mother, the American Missionary Association—as a call to individual duty on the part of us who make up its membership—yea, as in some degree an offset to the grievous evils that afflict our land? Ah, may we not, resolving to be better and do better ourselves, look steadily forward, and, like your own poet, say: