Excerpt from Minutes of the Forty-Fourth Annual Session of the Alabama Baptist State Convention: Held at Selma, November 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, 1866

The report of the Board of Trustees of Howard College has been read before the Convention. Lf success e on] to the above has not crowned your efforts in building up your (eioliegc for the education of our young men, it is not because you have failed to make liberal con tributions for these objects. The report of the same Board for 1800, shows that the College possessed, in property and funds, 20. A large portion of this fund has been lost, as you have heard, in Con federate securities, and the remainder is not now available. All has been engulfed in that same vortex which has devoured all else of your worldly possessions, except honor. You have in this enterprise to be in anew. Your resources are limited, and your labor must be great, an your expenses enormous. But if on will resolve to persevere in this glorious undertaking with renewa and becoming vigor, the results will not disappoint your expectation. Do this in humble dependence on God, and you will realize, even in these enterprises, that it is not by might or by power, but by the spirit of tbc'lcrd.

And in order that you may be prompted 'to the acts of yet greater self-denial, to which you must be called in this good work, it becomes you to consider that you are laboring for your own loved State - yea, or a part of yourself, for bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. The sacrifices which you are called upon to make are in behalf of your children, and children's children - your sons and grand-sons who are to come after you, and into whose hands you must, in the ordinary course of Providence, soon commit the dearest interests of the church. Your relationship by blood, and by political and religious ties, clearly indi cates your duty, and rrrges you forward to its performance. God has bestowed upon you your capabilities and invested you with the over night of the young and rising generations, and you can not escape the responsibility. Nor should you wish to escape; for no public enterprise in which we are engaged, whether we consult the obligations of Christi suity or patriotism, can, in its importance, stand by its side. If you fail here, you bring yourselves, in one sense, under the withering rebuke of the a stle: you neglect to make provision for those of your own househo d; you deny the faith, and are worse than infidels.

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