“The colored preachers and people have taken a ready interest in the Missionary Society because it carried the gospel to them. The preachers were not learned, and the people were poor; but what if the earlier missionary sermons were crude presentations of a world-wide cause? what if but a few pennies were collected in a charge? the people were thus coming into contact with the genius of the gospel, and beginning to have some part in the movement that is conquering the world. Among the many wise things done during the administration of the revered Dr. Durbin as missionary secretary, the one of all others that has affected and will continue to affect our Church the most, was providing for the organization of the Sunday-schools into missionary societies; wise and potential, because thus, in a practical and methodical way, the idea of the world’s evangelization is fixed in the thought of the youth and children, by far the greatest idea touching the human race that can be given to the human mind. “The colored preachers have been learning this fundamental idea of the missionary cause and the purpose of each of the other benevolences of our Church, and in their own way it may be presenting them to their people; but the result has been a measure of enlightenment in these directions, an increasing knowledge of the far-reaching plans of the Church to which they belong, a clearer consciousness that by being brought within her pale they have part in one of the great aggressive Christian movements of the age. Standing as they do in the dawn of a new day, this conscious identification with all the benevolent plans of the Church that brought them the gospel can not do less than enlarge their views of Christian duty, and inspire them with zeal for and devotion to causes grand in themselves and glorious in their results.