In five years after the close of the war, besides the three John G. Fee churches in Kentucky, which had flung themselves upon the serried ranks of the slaveholders, compelling a vast region to behold what sort of stuff this Puritanism was made of, the Association numbered _eleven_ churches among the sable brethren, whose teachers and preachers usually joined with them in fellowship. In ten years these had come to number _forty_. And now, eighteen years after the war, the total is _eighty-nine_, an average of five for each year. Nor are these merely nominal or skeleton churches. Their average membership is _sixty-five_, while that of all our churches west of the Mississippi is _thirty-five_. Nearly every one has its own place of worship and its own pastor. Their own ministers have had to be grown, converted and trained up from the alphabet, while multitudes have been prepared in our schools for service in the old-time churches, the small number that we have taken (a half hundred, besides several foreign missionaries) serving only as the toll for grinding the grists. A high wisdom was that which was displayed by the early workers in seizing upon the strategic points, so that one can now hardly go to a principal city of the South without finding there a fully-working Congregational church, such as those at Washington, Hampton, Charleston, Raleigh, Savannah, Macon, Atlanta, Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham, Meridian, Jackson, New Orleans, Austin, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Louisville. So it seems that this work has gone on in every State of the South, for in Florida, which might seem an exception, the noted church at Jacksonville was organized by one of the actuaries of the A. M. A., and nourished by another. Nor have these churches been left to the weakness of an isolated independence. For the better training of them, and for the consolidating of their strength, they have been organized into regular State associations, which have sought to introduce the methods of the North, which in their varied services often come to an intellectual and spiritual glow that astonishes us, and which come to a consciousness of their national fellowship when they each elect their delegates to the annual meeting of the A. M. A., and to the National Council, one of their own members having served at the last triennial as an assistant moderator. These State bodies now number _eight_, which nearly cover the whole South. So, then, the physical geography of the land is quite well mapped out, Congregationally. There remains much space for filling.