The report of the Executive Committee on educational work in the South, confirms the conviction which must have impressed itself on many minds, that the Association is a divinely-appointed agency for carrying forward a work delegated to us as a _nation_. God calls nations as he calls men, and consecrates them to a special work. Rome had a call, and fulfilled it, under the Divine Providence, and that call was to work out the idea, and demonstrate the necessity, of government, and to cultivate in the minds of men everywhere regard for the authority of law; Greece had her mission, and it was to teach the value of individual culture, both physical and intellectual; the people of Israel had their call to teach the doctrine of God, of his moral government, and of the eternal nature of moral law; and this Christian nation has its divine call, and that call arises from the peculiar relation which it sustains to the other races and nations of the earth. For a long time it seemed as if this land was to be given exclusively to the English race. The Dutch who settled here were assimilated and absorbed; the Spaniards and Portuguese found a congenial clime in South America; the French, by the progress of events, were prevented from gaining a foothold in New England, and with the sale of so-called "Louisiana"--an immense area extending from the Gulf to British America,--France relinquished her last claim to ownership of any part of our domain. The period of history, from the landing at Jamestown and Plymouth to the war of 1812, and later, was the unfolding of events which pointed to the supremacy of the English in North America. Our religion was Protestant and English; our literature took root in English forms of thought; our free institutions were the outcome of principles which had been, and now are, influential in English politics; our common law was English, our traditions of liberty were English, and that union of liberty and law which makes us strong, we inherited from our English fathers. So that in 1820, two hundred years after the arrival of the Mayflower, we were essentially an English nation; old England broken away from old forms and precedents, the natural expansion of England under new forms of government and society. Now it would have been pleasant, to human ways of thinking, if we could have remained always thus homogeneous. But God had a work for us to do. We were not left to sit down amidst the vast resources which the land affords for material prosperity, and just watch and foster our own growing and expanding life, but God gave us four problems to solve. These four problems came to us from the four quarters of the globe, the Indian of America on the North, the Chinaman of Asia on the West, the descendant of Africa on the South, and the emigrant of Europe on the East, who poured, in great masses, through our Eastern gates, the German unbeliever, the Irish Catholic, the Mormon convert, and representatives of every race of Europe.