As a study of sympathy with people in low conditions, of faith in the possibilities of those who have been degraded, of the application of Christianity to the prejudices of caste, of fidelity in witnessing to profound convictions, of prophetic insight as to the trends of God’s providences, of heroic self-denials among the oppressed and ignorant, together with the continuity and cumulative power of these far-reaching influences, this may stand for a concrete exhibition of the kind of work which we here are trying to do, and possibly may bring some new hope and courage to ourselves and some fresh sympathy to our devoted Christian workers who, removed from the world’s observation and sometimes from due Christian appreciation, are consecrating their lives to the same uses. In the time when George III was King of England and our great-grandfathers were opposing the Stamp Acts, there lived in a house which still stands in Strasbourg, in Alsatia, a wise father and a mother of remarkable endowments, who trained their son to habits of conscientious economy, self-reliance, to the sense of responsibility to God and to man, and of the obligations which possession has towards human necessities, and to habitual benevolence. Led on through youth to aspire to a learned profession, at the age of fifteen years he signed his name, John Frederick Oberlin, as a student of the University of Strasbourg. Three years later he was a Bachelor of Arts, and five years later, a Doctor in Philosophy. Ordained as a minister of the Gospel in 1760, seven succeeding years were held sacred to the conviction that large usefulness means large preparedness; so that he was still in his study at the age of twenty-seven years, when a missionary who had been trying to save needy souls in the mountains of the Vosges, ministering to the spiritual necessities of a people passed by in the movements of a world’s life and remote from civilization, came into Oberlin’s room and urged him to take up this service.