If the general government gives this needed help, it will be in the interest of the whole country, although the Southern States may get, for once, the lion’s share. For we are a large part of this country; we are in the Union and intend to stay there—if we have to whip somebody in order to do it. But, in the nature of things, this sort of help must be temporary, and, as I suppose, should, like the educational work of the State governments, be carried on, for the most part, in the common schools. The thing that must be done, if our work is to stand, is to train up among the negroes, as well as among the whites, men and women who can teach the children of their race—teach them in homes, in school-houses and in churches. This cannot be done by the State as it should be done. For if, as one has said, the “negroes need educated Christianity,” it is also true that they must have Christianized education in order to get it. This the State does not and cannot give. To achieve this most desirable and necessary result the school-house and the church must work together. There must be Bibles in the schools that are to train teachers among this people, and there must be Christian men and women in them who both teach and practice religion. This, as it appears to me, is what you and others like you are trying to do for the negroes. Your annual reports show that your Association is doing successfully, and on a very broad scale, this most necessary work. I do not particularize; your Secretaries have covered all that ground. You are raising up in these schools men and women who, in the years to come, can, will and must teach the children of their people. Hundreds of them are doing it now. I say must; for Christianized education must, by its instinctive and divine impulses, perpetuate itself and diffuse itself. Christian education, whether in Christian or heathen lands, is the most aggressive and formative influence that is now shaping the destiny of the human race. When you send out from Nashville, from Berea, from Atlanta and New Orleans young men and women who are both educated and religious, you send into the very masses of these untaught millions those who must teach what they have learned both from books and from Christ. Again I say must, for the spirit that is in an educated Christian man or woman is, as the old Methodist preacher used to say, “a fire in the bones,” and it will blaze out. The author of the Declaration of Independence wrote, it is said, in 1782, this prediction: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”