This Association has been promoting Christian education at the South in quite another fashion. Gently, without censure or denunciation, by the silent influence of Christly lives, it has been teaching the Southern people that caste is un-Christian. It is a great lesson; it is a lesson hard to learn; and we must not wonder at it: the social maxims and usages of centuries are not changed in a day. But it will be learned by and by; patience and fidelity and sweet reasonableness in those who teach it will have their reward in God’s good time. It only needs that we should quietly bear our testimony and wait; the leaven may be hidden now, but it is working; and the time will surely come, and as speedily as it ought to come, when from churches and from schools the color line will disappear. I do not think that the people who have commissioned and who support this Association in its work—the great Congregational communion, on which it mainly depends—can propose to themselves any better sort of work than that which this Association is doing, or can afford to carry on that work in any other way or by any other hands. It is true, as the figures I have quoted have shown, that the colored people have received most of the benefit of this work, and that the whites have profited by it but little. This is true of the educational work, and of the church work as well. But it is not because the schools and churches of this Association are not open to whites and blacks on equal terms. It is simply because they _are_ open to whites and blacks on equal terms. This is the only reason why the whites do not generally avail themselves of these excellent advantages. It is because the basis on which these schools and churches rest is frankly and thoroughly Christian—because caste is not tolerated in them—that the white people of the South have held aloof from them. For the present, until their convictions and feelings on this subject shall have changed, the white people of the South will, generally, hold themselves aloof from any church or school that rests on this basis, no matter by whom it may be administered. Any society that is as frankly and thoroughly Christian as this society has always been, will have the same difficulty in reaching the whites that this society experiences.