THE COLOR LINE IN CHURCHES. There is no place in the country where the question of the color line can be so easily and so fairly tried as in Washington. Here is a population of 60,000 colored people, with sixty-five colored churches. There are also in the District 124 white churches, nearly or quite all of them having one or two colored members, generally the sexton and his wife. But every colored adult in Washington knows that the Congregational Church is the only one in which he stands on an equal footing with his white brethren and sisters, as their great leader, Frederick Douglass, told them, “only one church in the national capital over whose doors is the beautiful inscription, ‘Freedom to worship God without distinction of color.’” And the pastor of that church, Dr. Rankin, is as much beloved and as much trusted by the colored population of this city as a man can be. And the leaders of the colored people all come here. Hon. J. M. Langston, United States Minister to Hayti, Hon. B. K. Bruce, ex-senator and now Registrar of the Treasury, the professors of Howard University and a few others come; and yet I doubt if there are two dozen colored members in this church. There are two colored Congregational churches in Washington without a white man in them, and to them all the colored Congregationalists go. Nor is it to be wondered at. To the great majority of them the preaching would be over their heads. Their education and position in life deprive them of meeting their white brethren on an equality in parish or prayer meeting. They naturally go by themselves, not that they are forced to, but because they prefer it. The emotional demands of their nature are not met in the cooler atmosphere of the white man’s religion. And so it must be throughout the South. Each race will for the present prefer churches of its own color. If two churches are formed in one place at the same time the whites would not care to sit under the imperfect education and narrow compass of thought of the colored preacher, nor would the darker portion of the audience enjoy the more cultivated sermons or prayers of the whites. Until the average education of the black is more advanced let them keep separate. The mixing of the races is sure to come, but it will require generations to do it. All the present can do is to offer them open doors. If they decline to enter it is their own action. But with growing wealth, with education equal to that of their white neighbors, will come social intercourse, and not till then. _W. R. H. in Congregationalist._ RESOLUTIONS OF A. M. A. AND A. H. M. S.