I rejoice that your Association has its eye and heart upon Africa. I saw two photographs in the chapel of Fisk University last May that stirred my soul; they were the faces of two missionaries who had gone from that great Christian school to Africa. One Sunday evening I preached in the chapel. A youth from your Mendi Mission, a native of Africa, getting ready to be a missionary, sang for us in his home language a familiar Sunday-school song, “I Have a Father in the Promised Land.” Some day they will be singing Christian songs in every village of the Dark Continent. How the thought of the Divine fatherhood and of the brotherhood of the eternal Son has changed Europe and made America. Some day these thoughts will change Africa. What we call civilization can’t do it; the gospel of Jesus Christ can. The Christian negroes are getting ready for their work, and you and others working in the same fields, are helping them to get ready. The missionary fire is beginning to burn in their hearts. When they go forth, bearing the sacred symbol of our Lord’s love to men, every Christian man and woman in our land should help them. That movement—and it is coming—will, at no distant day give your colonization and missionary societies all they can do. Was there ever a greater need or a more hopeful field, a greater duty or a brighter promise of success? Mr. President, you may be sure that from thousands of Christian hearts all over the South the prayer goes up, “God bless the work of the American Missionary Association, with all others who are preaching the gospel to the poor.” * * * * * FROM ADDRESS OF GENERAL CLINTON B. FISK. The American Missionary Association is one of those societies that has long been near my heart, having a large place in it. From its very beginning I watched its growth, but had no idea in the years before that I should ever have such intimate relations with it. Being in the South at the close of the war with the care of two or three millions of colored people thrown on my hands, I naturally looked about to see what was being done for schools and what for Christian culture. I found the American Missionary Association on the skirmish line. They were gathering up the broken fetters of the slaves, selling them for old iron and putting the money into spelling-books and Bibles, building school-houses and sending self-sacrificing, earnest Christian men and women to the South to teach these people; and I naturally fell very much in love with them.