as well as the black.  We are the debtors of Christ to both races.  Leave these two races to themselves without the gospel of Christ, and the conflict between them is inevitable, and it can be but terrific and protracted, and a dark blot upon the Christian name and civilization.  Dr. Beard has well said that the problem can not be solved by historic precedents.  All talk of slavery or peonage for the inferior race, or migration, or extermination, or amalgamation, is idle and morally repugnant and politically dangerous.

The problem set for our solution by Almighty God is just this—­as stated in this missionary view of it:  How, being free, two races as dissimilar as are the white and black races, now equal before the law, can live side by side under the same government and live in prosperity and peace.  This problem must be solved, and it must be solved aright.  And we may be sure that the ultimate solution of blessing for both races does not, and can not, lie in any retrograde movement toward the old darkness and bondage, but forward in the direction of the larger light and truer liberty of Christ.  If the colored race, as a race, seems to have reached a point when “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” its hope and ours lie not in a return to ignorance and degradation, but in pressing on to that larger knowledge and truer wisdom, the beginning of which is the fear of God, and the fullness of which is a hearty recognition and cordial acceptance and discharge of the obligations and trusts of a Christian manhood and Christian citizenship.  The condition of the colored race, indeed, is but a necessary stage in its upward and onward march.  It is no other than we have always had reason to expect would be reached.  That the mile-stone of to-day marks so great progress is cause for profound gratitude.  The new features of the situation and the fresh difficulties are those, and those only, which are incident to progress.

There is but one solution for the Southern problem, and that is the solution for which this Association has labored from the beginning, and which this paper urges.  Christianity in its highest forms, an intelligent Christian manhood, is that solution.  It is an impressive thought that it is the mission of this Association, more than all other institutions and agencies, to develop that Christian sentiment among the colored people, and indirectly among the whites, which shall create a balance of power which shall save the races and the nation from that conflict which without it seems inevitable.  This fact is a trumpet call to us to press the work of the Association in its schools and colleges and churches with renewed vigor and devotion.