in buying up new land in the northern part of the State, and then put on tenants at will, and finally sway the political destiny of Illinois! The Charter was refused. It was in the same spirit in which Lieut. Gov. Kinney, in the Legislature, as Gov. Ford says, opposed the Illinois and Michigan Central, because it would flood the State with Yankees. And yet this Lieut. Governor was a preacher and a very popular man. And so this first College of the State waited four years for an improvement in public sentiment. Then Mr. Baldwin, reinforced by the new President, Edward Beecher, made another application for a Charter. By this time the Methodists and the Baptists were on hand for college charters. So the three institutions formed a ring. They took the bill, which the Jacksonville men bad formed by a modification of the charter of Yale College. "It was so ordered in Providence," said Mr. Baldwin, in a letter to the writer, "that the chairman of the Senate Committee on Education was Col. Thomas Mather, then of Springfield, but a man of Puritan training under Rev. D. Porter, of Farmington, Conn. So we all joined our forces and agreed to commit our bill to him. But I spent two days in writing out an argument to show the safety of literary corporations and read it in the hearing of the Senate Committee, and of our Methodist and Baptist friends. The committee agreed to adopt it as their argument on the bill, and the result was, that we secured charters for Illinois, Shurtleff, and McKendree Colleges." And yet each one was limited to a quarter section of land, and was forbidden to open a theological department. Thus the Puritan and the Cavalier systems had met upon these prairie fields, and in the halls of legislation. The Cavalier had possession of the country-had picked its position. The contest was sharp and prolonged. But Puritanism now gives law to the Empire State of the interior. The old southern oligarchive, precinct system, at first incorporated into our civil polity, and regnant for thirty years, has, to a large extent, been displaced by that truly democratic, educating and elevating New England township organization; though, in the lower part of the State, from year to year, some of the counties are voting yet whether they will make the change or not. The free-school system, now only twenty years old in the State, has become the standing

order. So, too, the Puritan idea of freedom has had here its conflict and its victory. The first Constitution of the State allowed the old French settlers to retain their slaves. The slave code of the south was transferred to our statute book, as the Black Laws of Illinois. Notwithstanding the liberty proviso of the ordinance of 1787, when the State was only four years old, a desperate effort was made to open it to slavery. In the Legislature of 1822-3, it was by a piece of political jugglery that the one vote was secured as necessary to the requisite two-thirds for ordering an election upon a new constitution that should allow slavery. The canvass for that convention was one of the wildest excitement, and was prolonged for eighteen months. Of the five newspapers in the State only two went for freedom. The editor of one of these two was Hiram Eddy, a native of New England. For the other, the late Rev. Thomas Lippincott, and the late Judge Samuel D. Lockwood were special contributors. Gov. Ford says, that Mr. Lippincott wrote fiery handbills; and he says that, "the old preachers preached against convention and slavery." Rev. Stephen Bliss, of Edwards County, which had a Yankee colony and a Congregational church, himself a missionary from New Hampshire, was run upon the anti-slavery issue and elected to the Senate. Wm. H. Brown, who was one of the free-State workers, says that the great man of the day was Rev. John M. Peck, D.D., a missionary of the Baptist Mass. Missionary Society." "His plan of organizing the counties by a central committee," says Mr. Brown, "with branches in every neighborhood, was carried out by his own exertions, and personal supervision, and was greatly instrumental in saving the State." As an agent of the Bible Society he magnified his office by traveling about to disseminate the Bible ideas of freedom. At the election, Illinois did her best, and turned out 11,764 votes, and it was only a majority of 1,834 that saved the State from slavery. It was not until near the breaking out of the slaveholders' rebellion that the infamous "Black Laws" of Illinois were repealed. As the war came on, portions of Southern Illinois were held tremulously in the balRebel sympathizers murdered a Provost Marshal and were never punished for it. Enlistments were made in the State for the rebel army. But the people had become so im

ance.

bued with the anti-slavery spirit that they sent forth their 258,217 soldiers of freedom. The Congregational Churches of the State furnished for the army, one in four of their entire male membership, including old men, invalids, and boys! It will never be known how much was contributed to this general result by the influence of these missionary pastors, who had ever been the friends of the slave, who helped on the flying fugitive, who, not a few of them, were mobbed for their anti-slavery, and whose deliverances in their general association were always in advance of public sentiment.

In this review, we would put all honor upon the missionary operations of the other Christian denominations within our State. We rejoice in all their accomplished labor, and we claim a share in all their victories, as bringing honor to our State and to the Kingdom of our common Redeemer.

The review of these fifty years would be quite incomplete without an expression of gratitude to the men who came to Illinois from pure home missionary motives. Some of them came when as little was known of the State as is now known of Arizona. Others afterward came because of what was known of need and of hardness to be endured. They have themselves become a part of the history of the State. In large measure they have aided in giving it the character of a mighty Christian. Commonwealth. They have been singularly honored of God with length of days, which shows that frontier life is not adverse to longevity. The missionary who had been at work in Illinois for two years before this Society was born, Rev. E. S. Howe, still survives in a green old age. Of the two who began to preach in 1828, Lippincott left us only five years ago, and Watson, at 76, is still an active pastor. And Hodges, a quarter of a century older than this Society, is yet in pastoral work. Aratus Kent came to the age of 76, and had a fifty years of ministry, with forty of them in Illinois. Of the original twelve, seven continue to this day; and, of the five who have gone beyond, three had filled out more than forty years of eventful ministry - Baldwin, Carter and Farnham-and of the other two, Barnes had sixteen years of missionary joy; and Kirby, in his twenty years of labor, left a name, which is as ointment poured forth. And of those who came later we have not a few, whose gray

hairs are an ornament to this body, whose presence among us is a benediction. We honor them, we love them. Concerning them we take to ourselves the Apostolic aspiration: "Whose are the Fathers." Whatever we may say of raising up men of the West for the West, this we gladly testify that the men who have made the West what it is religiously, and largely in a secular way, were those who came from the East to do anything and to become anything which the good of the West required. Losing their life, they found it. Their lustrous influence has become a part of the history of the cause of Christ in our State.

Such a history as this would lack in completeness without a reference to the influence, the heroism, the sacrifice, on the part of the wives of the missionaries. And yet it is as difficult to find the record of their lives, as it would be to do justice to the same, when found. Searching for their names and their work in the Reports and in the Home Missionary, we do not ordinarily find them until we come to the fragrance of the crushed flower in the brief memorial of the loving life and the happy death. Rarely do we find such a record as that of the founding of the Jacksonville Female Academy by Mrs. Ellis; or the forming by ladies, in 1833, of the Ladies' Education Society, by which a thousand indigent young women have been aided in a course of study, at an expense of not less than $20,000. Yet many, many others have just as truly left their impress upon society, upon the Church, and upon its auxiliaries. Many a missionary who has been blessed in the training of the social life, has said, in honest tribute: "I am myself, largely, what my wife has made me." Much of his courage was due to her Christian pluck; much of his social amenity, to her refining touch; many a piece of his loving pastoral guile, to her instinctive good sense. The Sabbath School, the Choir, the Sociable, the Ladies' Prayer Meeting, each bears the imprint of her thoughtful, patient attention while, as wife and mother at home, she has often been a model of domestic character. As they have been partners in life, so have they been partners in the missionary enterprise. Without the romance, and without the prayerful sympathy which attend the departure of foreign missionaries, they left their eastern homes of comfort and of culture, here to share in the experience of the rude frontier, yet they would be the last to

magnify, or wish to have us magnify, their physical discomforts and the aching void of social life. Rude homes, much of sickness, frequent removals, lack of domestic help and conveniences, maternal suffering and care, pastoral anxieties and labors, wear hard upon them, until the canker eats at the husband's heart as he sees his companion wasting away under the accumulating burden, which he sees no way of easing. I have been moved by the sacrifice of life on the part of the wives of several of the first Illinois missionaries. In the summer of 1833, Mr. Ellis, returning to Jacksonville from a missionary tour, found that his wife and two only children were in their graves, taken away by the cholera, which had swept off seventy persons in that neighborhood. In the same season and place, and by the same fell destroyer, Mrs. Farnham was removed. Then, soon, the wife of Mr. Jenney; then the wife of Mr. Watson; then the wife of Mr. Bascom, only four years after his coming to Illinois;--then the wife of Mr. Sturtevant,-all of whom passed away at the opening of domestic life. "Some of them," says one of the bereaved men, were women at whose death hundreds were ready to exclaim-when shall we see the like again?-women of rare beauty, purity and high culture, to whose services to the cause, justice will only be done in another sphere than this." And yet in this earthly sphere their influence still lives. Of all such, the Saviour's words" She hath done what she could"--are at once a memorial and a benediction.

Turning from this look backward through the last fifty years to a glance forward through the next half-century, what may it reveal of Christianizing influence in Illinois? May we not expect that another half a hundred years, starting with this meas ure of advancement, will witness a great increase in the number and spiritual power of our churches—a corresponding growth in our Christian Institutions-progress in the prevalence and power of revivals-a maturing of the Christian State under the training of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. May we not expect that the Illinois Home Missionary Society, besides doing its own home work, shall become a succorer of many mission enterprises toward the West and toward the South, and shall, of its sons, raise up many who shall go forward as ministers of the Word to help in the founding of other Christian empires in our