But far the most satisfactory statement of the annual report is its record of the religious spirit which guides, controls and pervades this whole educational movement. The information that at seven out of eight of the chartered institutions “special religious interest has been manifest, adding scores and scores of these scholars to the number of the disciples of Christ,” and that, “as yet, but very few have been graduated from our various courses of study who had not become Christians,” is a record of the crowning mercy of God. So may it ever be. The heart and conscience must be quickened with the intellect or there is no good hope for that race, or for any other race. It must be _Christian_ education. The school and the Church must move on together at the South as they started together from Plymouth Rock, and they must extend, as far as possible—certainly must offer—their joint benign influences, not to a portion of the population, but to all classes and races alike. For the part can receive its full benefit only in conjunction with the benefit of the whole. This is no new principle, but the method in which, as our annual reports show, this Association has been proceeding throughout its history. Having always refused to recognize the color-line, it can proceed on no other basis without defeating its own ends, and compromising its own principles. And the recent decision of the Supreme Court has rolled a new burden on the Church. Hence it is that your committee look with much interest upon the experiment, tried and effectually settled at Berea, and now extending thence among the “mountain whites,” of including all classes and races in the purview of our educational and Christian work. We refer to the movement at Williamsburg, a county-seat on the Cumberland River, which is simply a repetition of the movement at Berea of twenty years ago—with this difference, that the abolition of the color-line, both in church and school, at Williamsburg, is fully accepted beforehand by an actual constituency in that place. Here the establishment of an academy to educate teachers for the common schools of the county—of whom, as of the population, but a small portion are colored persons—went hand in hand with the opening of the church to both races alike, and has led most naturally to the establishment of three adjacent preaching places, and the formation of another church at the nearest railway station. This method, when viewed simply on its own merits, seems to be at once the dictate of a wise Christian economy, and an almost necessary sequence, or rather part, of the work of Christian education. Within the particular regions where this Association is planting its schools, exerting its influence and gaining the confidence of the community, it would seem to have peculiar advantages and a special call to leaven the whole community with the institutions of the gospel; while the molding influence of its Christian schools will be left incomplete, except