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178

and with the best intentions unconsciously waste the bread of life for want of which many are perishing.

If you had, in Norfolk, a colored congregation, and if your school was strictly parochial, the scholars coming from families of your communion, then your school could easily be excepted from a system, on that ground. But that is not the case. By far the greater part are from families of other communions, who in going to your school have no reference at all to its being under one church or an other. It is a public school as all the others are.

Could you not teach Christianity to the masses, not of your communion, in one section of the city, as well as to the same number scattered throughout its whole extent? All scholars from families of your communion might be excepted from a district arrangement and permitted to go to your school as their parochial school. Thus an efficient school system would be possible, many evils escaped and, I believe, no harm done and no opportunities of usefulness lost.