No more significant testimony could be given to this change than a sort of wail in the _Atlantic Monthly_ over the “New Departure in Negro Life,” a lament over the decadence of “the jocund customs of the past,” with its thoughtless levity and hilarity, and over the “half-hearted manner in which the characteristic festivities that remain are gone through with.” What does it mean? It means, says the writer, that “an unmistakable change in the negro character is at hand, and in an advanced state of progress. He is putting away childish things and striving in his own crude way to grasp matters of higher import. The bulk of the race have learned to read after a fashion. His primer, his _vade mecum_, is the Bible. Never before, perhaps, in the history of the world, have two decades brought about such a manifest change in a race. Religion, religionism, forms the staple of his speech by day, and the stuff that his dreams are made of by night.” Would that the picture was more completely true. But, thank God, it is at least founded on fact. The race is aroused, and in earnest. It is bent on accumulation, education, elevation. The world may pay as little heed to the movement as did the Roman world in the time of Tacitus to the Christian Church in the Eternal City; but the time is not distant when the world will see that this quiet work is one of the great movements of modern history. * * * * * CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AT THE SOUTH. BY REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D. The problem that confronts us this morning is that which is presented by the illiteracy of this country, and especially of the Southern States. This is not the only problem before this Association; the problem of the irreligion and heathenism which infest many regions also claims our energies. There is moral evil as well as ignorance to be met and fought and overcome. The Association has an evangelical work as well as an educational work in its hands; and though, as we shall see, these two are properly one, yet it is now convenient to consider them separately. It is the educational work that is now before us. We educate, because education is the servant of a pure religion. We educate, because we are the missionaries of a faith which always adds to itself virtue, and to its virtue knowledge. We educate, because a genuine Christianity always educates; because the work of the pulpit, the work of the Church everywhere must always be, in considerable part, the work of education; but, more especially, we of this Association educate, because the peoples with whom we work are in peculiar need of education; and because nothing but intelligence will ever break the fetters of degrading superstition by which they are held, and lead them forth into the liberty of the sons of God.