Excerpt from Official Report of the Proceedings of the Twelfth Meeting of the National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches Held at Saratoga, N. Y., September 20-24, 1886: With the Constitutions and by-Laws of the Conference, and a List of the Delegates

And when with this gift we associate the name of Thomas Whitridge, who left the largest legacy the American Unitarian Association has ever received, the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, we congratulate the city which is so rich in men who have put their liberal faith into such humanitarian works. We congratulate the church which can number two such benefactors among its hon ored members.

Baltimore suggests another name prominent in a very difierent way in our denominational interest. It was there that Rev. Charles H. A. Dall was born, Feb. I2, 1816. In quest of health, he went to India in 1855, at the earnest entreaty of Rev. Charles T. Brooks, who had just returned from a visit to that land and to Mr. Roberts, the son of a native Christian teacher, who was carrying on a little church in the Unitarian faith. From that time until last July, Mr. Dall has been engaged in this Indian mission with an earnestness, faithfulness, and consecration rarely equalled. This body has not known much about this work. It may be confessed it has never had much interest in it, because the motives which lead other religious bodies to foreign missionary enterprises are not active with us. But those who have made any inquiry have known that here a faithful messenger and servant of God was doing his work, and that, in India or in Bos ton, that work was not in vain. So year by year the Association has made its appropriations, and year by year the details of the mission have come back to us. As he began, he continued by laying stress upon school work, upon secular and industrial education, as the best method of bringing a higher life to these people; and no one who has read Mr. Arnold's remarkable descriptions of this land, its worship and its civilization, in his India Revisited, can doubt that there is vast room for the introduction of some higher life, and that just in this direction there is a loud call for us to carry on and increase this work. In a report on the India Mission made to this Conference in 1872, it was stated that, in all, about three thousand one hundred and Seventy persons were the recipients of Mr. Dall's teaching or help and the Objects of his personal interest and care. The school has been larger since then, and his influence has never waned. At his funeral last summer, a vast concourse of natives bowed low over his remains. Some cast garlands of jessamine into the grave; and some members of the Brahmo Somaj made a request to offer prayer above it, all the willing, heart-felt testi mony to a life of unfaltering devotion.

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