The General Assembly. By Prof. L. H. Atwater, D. D. [pp. 424-442]

430 The General Assemnbly. [JULY,
upon its own merits before the Church, and we are sure
a more generous response will be returned than if all or part
of them were mixed together in a promiscuous presentation.
2. The board charged with the conduct of any branch of
Church work should be charged with the collection and disposal of the funds requisite to carry it on. All these elements
in a cause mutually interwork. They act and react on each
other, and are more safely conducted in unison than separately. The manner of conducting missions, foreign or domestic, for example, determines the power with which an
appeal can be made to the Church, and the degree of support
accorded to them conditions the manner in which they must
be conducted. No parties can so effectively represent to the
Church the wants, the urgencies, the encouragements in
their respective fields as those who superintend them, who
know them most thoroughly, and are most profoundly interested to sustain and invigorate them. If they have no responsibility or agency in raising the funds, it will most seriously
weaken their responsibility for the successful administration
of the whole work, absolutely dependent as it is upon the
funds. We have not the slightest doubt of the truth of these
considerations. They are urged not merely on a vriori
grounds. They are enforced by a long observation and experience.
3. As God's Spirit divideth to each one severally as Ilie
wills, so Ile gives to different persons different degrees of
light in regard to the merits of different causes. Some of the
heartiest and largest givers will be more touched and wrought
upon by the claims of Foreign, others of Home Missions.
Some will be deaf to all pleas for Ministerial Education who
will yet be most generous to Ministerial Sustentation. And
so of the whole circle of causes, of which some will make this
and some that their specialty. The most distinguished layman
with whom we have had to do gave as much to Home Missions as to all other causes combined, because his doctrine was
that on the christianization of this country depended its temporal and eternal salvation, and with it that of the world. His
nearest neighbors, not one whit his inferiors in intelligence
and liberality, gave most largely to Foreign Missions, on the
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