It was a fine augury of the future when the work for the ex-slave began at Fortress Monroe in the atmosphere of religion. Mary Peake, meeting the advancing multitudes of refugees, gospel in heart and primer in hand, as by divine suggestion, laid the pattern of all our succeeding toil. Side by side of mutual helpfulness God has placed the alphabet and decalogue, the teacher and the preacher, the school-house and the church. "What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder." The largest, grandest word in the title of this organization is "Missionary." When that word drops out its work will be done, for its call will have ceased. Our ultimate end and present purpose is, and always should be, simply this--to save. We cannot lift our fallen brother without the leverage of the cross. No field is wider, none more difficult, than that to which our eyes are turned, embracing as it does four of the five families of mankind. They huddle together in the lap of Christendom, but feel no warmth. They are a demonstration of the fact that civilization never touches barbarism without polluting it. The Indian, finding his highest ideal in the rude and tipsy defender of our flag; the Chinaman, taking home more heathenism than he brings; the Negro, bound tighter by the vices of the whites than ever he was by their iron chains--these three, ignorant of the Christ and grasping the satanic weaponry of our sinful land and age, together form the most discouraging of mission fields. Our laborers are faced by all the serious problems of the foreign land--problems unrelieved by a single romantic charm. When we send our missionaries to Africa they go to labor among the Africans; and when we send them down South they go to teach "niggers." Notice, then, what the report of this committee signifies in the presence of the fact that our laborers not only grapple with foreign languages, conceptions, idolatries, habits of benighted peoples, but all the time are hindered and assailed on every hand by these Bedouin Arabs of our land--the minions of mammon and the slaves of caste. To gather and hold and save in such a field as this, is task enough for the finest corps in the army of the Lord.