Mass., to do missionary work at Big Grove, Ottawa, and Jacksonville. Rev. J. A. Reed, takes Warsaw, and then goes over to superintend home missions in Iowa. Dr. David Nelson, the converted infidel, a revivalist, and the founder of "Mission Institute," at Quincy, is commissioned for Adams County." Elijah P. Lovejoy, the photo-martyr of freedom, comes to Alton from a two years missionary work under commission in Missouri. John J. Miter, works up Knoxville as a missionary, and then goes up to become one of the fathers of the churches in Wisconsin. Jairus Wilcox, brings on the church and the academy at Genesee. Familiar missionary names of that period are those of Chauncy Cook, Milo N. Miles, Amnon Gaston, Lucius Foot, Levi Spencer, Darius Gore, Daniel C. Rockwell, A. B. Hitchcock, Wm. B. Dodge, Joseph H. Payne, L. G. Wright, L. H. Parker, the founder of many of the churches in Central Illinois. G. S. F. Savage, who, at St. Charles, in the three years of his commission, reported two revivals, the building of a church edifice with a bell in it, the doubling of the church membership, and the four-folding of the Sabbath school, and then went on to fill out a twelve years pastorate, from which he was called to these sixteen years of public service for the churches and the country; and, without commission, Horatio Foot, who, after an early career as an Evangelist, to the Quincy pastorate, and yet abides to rejoice in what God hath wrought.

When, in 1860, our Presbyterian brethren withdrew from the society, its total number of missionaries fell from 1,107 to 863, a diminution of 244; in Illinois the number fell from one hundred to eighty-three, a dropping of seventeen.

During the score of years between 1840 and 1860, the society had in Illinois an average of ninety-six missionaries. For the sixteen years since that separation it has had an average of seventy-five Congregational missionary pastors in the State.

In the whole fifty years the society has sustained in the State an annual average of sixty-six missionaries-has planted and trained four hundred Presbyterian and Congregational churches, in about equal numbers-and has expended upon the field not less than $600,000.

There are now in Illinois 482 Presbyterian churches. There have been organized in Illinois 311 Congregational churches.

Of these, sixty-five, by consolidation, or by change of center, or by a death that glorified God, have disappeared from our roll. Of the present number, 245, one hundred and sixty-three have been organized in the last twenty-five years, since the first Congregational in Chicago took its rise. In the last fifteen years, since the Presbyterians withdrew from the society, 85 churches have been organized, and 124 houses of worship have been built.

But these figures can convey no adequate conception of the amount of labor performed, of the extent of good accomplished. We are to consider that this work has been done for the two denominations in all the leading cities of the State, as well as in all the smaller communities. Kaskaskia, and Vandalia, and Springfield, and Jacksonville, and Quincy, Decatur, Danville, Urbann, Peoria, and Ottawa, and Rock Island, Aurora, St. Charles, Geneva, Galena, Freeport, Belvedere, Elgin, and Chicago, have all been home mission beneficiaries. And the influence of this body of churches upon Illinois we do not realize until we consider them as the repositories of the organific force which Christianity imparts to social life and the civil State.

An essential part of the home missionary scheme is its system of superintendence-an agency for exploring, for organizing churches, for promoting the building of houses of worship, for doing evangelistic service, for supplying missionary churches with ministers, for raising funds, for inspecting and endorsing applications,-in short for aiding the beneficiary churches and their pastors by all feasible means-eyes and ears to the society, hands and voice to the field. Besides all the work of administration, the superintendent usually preaches every year more gospel sermons than he would deliver in any pastorate.

We find that five of the Illinois Association have served the State in this capacity: Baldwin, Hale, Boscom, Kirby, Jenny. Indeed this agency, as a method of the society, was inaugurated here. It grew naturally out of the ideal of the band, which was not simply to plant the college and around it the cordon of supporting churches, but to put in motion throughout the State all civilizing and Christianizing influences. In order to this some one must take the field to explore and superintend.

Mr. Baldwin was the first agent, entering upon his work in 1833, and continuing in it four years. A specimen of his work was a tour, made in that first year, on horseback, in company with Mr. Hale as assistant, from Jacksonville to Chicago, a trip of seven weeks, and of seven hundred miles, on which they preached fifty sermons and held several four-days meetings. Arriving at Chicago, which they found to be a town of three hundred and fifty inhabitants, with twenty-two doggeries, they were glad to find that the society had already sent forward the missionary, Jeremiah Porter, for whom they preached five times within a week. During that same year Rev. Aratus Kent come across from Galena on horseback, lodging nights upon the prairie, as he found only one settlement on the way. He came over to see if it was not time to start a mission work at Fort Dearborn, and was also glad to find Mr. Porter, and to welcome him as his nearest neighbor. He reported to the society: "I have rarely addressed a more attentive and apparently devout congregation than that which I met on Sabbath morning in the garrison, and which, combining the people of the village and gentlemen of the army, constituted a large assembly for this country. It is an important station, for he will have opportunity to visit several settlements just forming in the vicinity, which are entirely destitute of Presbyterian preaching. And if the pier now commencing should be permanent, and the harbor become a safe one, Chicago will undoubtedly grow as rapidly as any village in the western country." With twenty-six members, all of whom were Congregationalists, except Dea. Philo Carpenter, the First Presbyterian Church was organized. On their way back the two agents fell in with Mr. Bascom in Tazwell county, and held an open-air four-days meeting, using an ox-sled for a pulpit. Mr. Hale, following Mr. Baldwin, took the work for five years, associating with himself Mr. Bascom, who soon took the work in the northern part of the State, in connection with his pastorate in the First Church at Chicago. He organized the churches of Ottawa, Bloomingdale, Millburn, Elk Grove and others. Mr. Hicks followed him in northern Illinois, and Wm. Kirby in central and southern; and these in turn were followed by Aratus Kent and Elisha Jenney. The last named, in his ten years before 1868, had to do with

the organizing of forty-one churches; with the building and dedicating of thirty-nine houses of worship, with the graduating of twenty-one churches into self-support, and with promoting numerous revivals of religion. Rev. H. D. Platt came between him and the present superintendent for southern Illinois. It is a further illustration of this work that in one year my associate, Rev. M. K. Whittlesey, besides the ordinary labor of his office, has preached one hundred and forty-seven sermons and has delivered fifty addresses; and that in each year he has been permitted to labor in several revivals of religion.

Consider also the relation of these home missionaries to higher institutions of learning in our State. The members of the Illinois Association" came along and founded their college. Some became trustees, some instructors, all, enthusiastic supporters. One gave to it his life-work, and the fruit thereof is the abundant reward. The Home Missionary for April, 1830, says of the young Rev. J. M. Sturtevant: "He writes that, having performed about two months' missionary service, he was appointed instructor in the Illinois College and had entered on his duties. We learn from other sources that this college, in which the friends of Home Missions in this part of the country have taken so deep an interest, has commenced its operations with the most encouraging prospects." Mr. Baldwin, after his experience in founding this college, and after his six years of principalship in the Monticello Seminary, which he had developed, and which must have educated not less than 2,000 young ladies, became the originator of the College Society and attained the title of "the father of the western colleges." John M. Ellis and his wife planted the Jacksonville Female Academy, which is a tree of life. Knox College was a child of a missionary colony, and was nurtured by the missionary churches round about. "The Mission Institute," founded in 1837, within the precincts of Quincy, was intended by Dr. Nelson and his coadjutors mainly as a school for training male and female missionaries for the home and foreign fields. The Catalogue for 1849, which I have on hand, reports Rev. Horatio Foote as the President of the Board of Directors, and Dea. Willard Keyes the Secretary and Treasurer, the same, on account of whose benefactions to the Chicago Theological

Seminary, its "Keyes Hall" was named. That Catalogue also reports the names of fifty who had already gone forth as the ambassadors of Christ. Of these, there were fifteen male and nine female foreign missionaries, who were located among the Sioux Indians, in Jamaica, in West Africa, in India, in New Zealand; and among these were Rendall, thirty years in the Madura Mission; Mellen, twenty-four years in Africa; Geo. Thompson of the Mo. Prison and of the Mendi Mission; and Doane, 21 years in Micronesia, and now in Japan.

Beloit College and Rockford Female Seminary, twins, were born of the enterprise of home missionary men and churches. Wheaton, a child of the anti-slavery reform, has had its home and its nurture among the churches of home missionary planting. The man who conceived the idea and the plan of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and who set it agoing, Rev. Stephen Peet, had been a missionary and an agent of this Society, while it was the home missionary work in the Northwest that made it possible for such an institution to come into life and power,-itself at once the child of, and mother of, home missions. Of its 197 graduates, and of the 319 who have been in connection with it, ninety-one have labored in Illinois, of whom fifty-two are now pastors in the State. And so, for the different denominations, Illinois College has already raised up 100 ministers; Mission Institute, 50; Knox, 50; Beloit, 106; Wheaton, 17; and then each one about half as many more from students who did not graduate,—in all about four hundred. And in many other ways these institutions have been vast home evangelizing forces-such is the mutual relation of home missions and the higher schools of learning.

An item of home missionary service to all the Colleges of the State ought here to be put upon record. In 1830, while Mr. Baldwin was a home missionary at Vandalia, as a Trustee of Illinois College, he applied to the Legislature, in session there, for a Charter. Those enlightend Solons were terribly afraid of the Yankees, and of corporations of an ecclesiastical sort. In the hearing of Mr. Baldwin, one of them arose in his place, and said that, "if they granted a Charter at all, he was in favor of restricting the corporation to one quarter section of land, for, otherwise, those College men would use their immense funds