“With this illustration before us of the general principle that a people may and must be instrumental in their own evangelization, let us study some of the results of our itinerant system among the freedmen—of our itinerancy and its auxiliary agencies. All understand our itinerancy to be the general superintendency and the pastorate; by auxiliary agencies I mean our sub-pastorate, in which the class-leaders stand, our Church literature, and our Sunday-schools. The mere suggestion of the fact leads you at once to see that the real function of each and all of these is to re-enforce both the general and the particular work committed to the itinerancy or three fold pastorate—the bishops, presiding elders, and pastors of our Church. The very fact of taking this comprehensive system to a people who had no system, of beginning at once to build them up into it, could not be without producing some marked and favorable results. I mention the more obvious of these: “(_a_) The freedmen who were recognized as having a call to preach could do little more than exhort, but they were put into the pastoral relation; a great Church committed to them a new and solemn trust, and laid upon them grave responsibilities; they were under the leadership of the superintendents of the missions—good, prudent, self-sacrificing men—men who in their devotion to duty represented the highest life of their Church. Such things could not be without affecting these untutored preachers. Crude as all they did may have been at first, their pastorate benefited the people they served, and was to themselves a means of training, of real and rapid progress; and there are still in the effective ranks of the conferences which came from such beginnings many pious, able, and successful preachers, who were thus transferred from the cotton and rice fields and sugar plantations to, and trained in, our itinerant ministry. “(_b_) As the work progressed, these colored men acquired by observation and experience, and such study as was possible with them, a wider knowledge of their work; and in due course the bishops began to appoint some of them as presiding elders, investing them with all the honors and responsibilities of this important office. It should also be stated that the Church that acted thus through her bishops was constantly displaying to them an encouraging interest in them by furnishing means to aid in the support of their Church work.