by their contact in the past with white men of bad character are corrupt and hard to reach. Mr. Hall has an out-station in his care at Devil’s Lake, where Rev. David Hopkins, a Sisseton Indian, is laboring. THE ADVANCE. * * * * * THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH TO THE COLORED RACE. BY REV. LEWIS GROUT. Rev. Dr. J. L. Tucker’s speech on the above subject before the Episcopal Church Congress, in Richmond, last October, has had a very emphatic indorsement from professional and other men in the South, and yet not without severe criticism from some of the colored people, especially in Jackson, Miss., the home of Dr. Tucker, where he made the speech. It seems that Dr. Tucker is a man of Northern birth, that he was a soldier in the Confederate army, after which he became a planter, then a rector, and that he has had much experience and interest in the education of the colored race, as planter, teacher and minister. And yet, with all his acquaintance with that race, there are several important points pertaining to their history, character and welfare, in which he is sadly mistaken. The first mistake of his that I will notice has respect to the character of the native African. In Africa, he says, “human life has no sacredness, and men, women and children are slain as beasts are, and even more carelessly, as less valuable. Human suffering excites no pity, and blood flows like water.” “That what we call morality, whether in the relations of the sexes, or in the sense of truthfulness, or in the sense of honesty, has no lodgment whatever in the native African’s breast;” and that they have “no words” for gratitude, generosity, industry, truthfulness, honesty, modesty, gentleness and virtue, because they have none of these ideas. Now all this, and much more of the same sort, is the baldest of hyperbole, far from the truth. During my fifteen years of labor in that land, I made the study of African character and language a specialty; and I believe that words representing the ideas above named may be found in every language and dialect on the continent. As to humanity and all kindred virtues, they are abreast, if not ahead, of any and every other people that have not had the gospel. For honesty and morality, under pure native rule, in many respects, the Zulus and cognate tribes would put to shame the people in every part of this land of ours. I have no reason to believe that I ever lost a sixpence worth of anything, through their stealing, in all those fifteen years of my stay among them; and as to the relations of the sexes, I believe there are ten illegitimate births here in New England to-day, where there was ever one in Zululand previous to the incoming of the Dutch and English. To be sure, all African tribes may not be abreast of what the Zulus used to be, in these things. And yet Rev. Dr. Crummell, for many years a college