will save us, and make us what other people are; and we must have a
theological seminary to aid us toward that end. You have given us
colleges, normal schools, industrial training schools, and schools of
common branches, and we have now young men and young women filling all
the schools through the South. We can get good teachers for our schools
in the remotest places, in Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi, or anywhere
else. So it is not a question as to what kind of teachers we will have.
But the churches have not in their pulpits ministers well prepared to
preach the gospel of Christ. They have not kept up with the young people
in the work done by the schools. In the North, one of the pleasant
things we find wherever we go, is that in all your churches there is
something for the young people to do. You have Christian Endeavor
Societies, and various organizations by which the young people may be
reached. Therefore, you gather them in from the beginning and have them
trained so that they can take your places as soon as you are ready to
step out of the work. It is not so with our churches. Our ministers have
not advanced to that degree where they can take up such work. In these
little Congregational churches that have been planted, we have educated
ministers, who are able thus to work, especially among young people. We
do not have people at our hand as other churches have, but we are trying
to get hold of them. In Fisk University there were last year, I believe,
510 students, of whom, perhaps, there were 100 Congregationalists. So,
after all, it is Methodists and Baptists that you are educating there.
This is all right, because the great masses of the people are found in
those churches. If we had a Congregational Theological School we could
reach these people just as well through the pulpit as we reach them in
the schools.

I was asked to give a little of my personal experience. I dislike to do
this: but if narrating any of my personal experience will give an