tinguished success as builders of churches and of the State. The only survivor, Dr. Holbrook, whose first distinction came to him as publisher of the "Comprehensive Commentary," at Brattleboro, Vt., is still bringing forth fruit in old age, having served for fiftytwo years the First Church of Dubuque, the New England of Chicago, the Home Missionary Society of New York and the church of Stockton, Cal. The last named of the seven, Asa Turner, having been one of the Illinois Band, and having had his first pastorate at Quincy on the east bank of the river, was just the man to take in the possibilities of the young Iowa, and to be the first man to strike over there and to gather its first Congregational church, the one at Denmark, in 1838. And to whom in the fall of 1843 should the Iowa Band come but to Asa Turner at Denmark for ordination by council in his cabin church, and for counsel and direction as to the locating of their respective fields of labor? They were twelve young men in Andover Seminary who had been drawn together by spirit and covenant to enter the Black Hawk Purchase within the Louisiana Purchase as frontier missionaries. Their names were Daniel Lane, Harvey Adams, Erastus Ripley, Horace Hutchinson, Alden B. Robbins, William Salter, Edwin B. Turner, Benjamin A. Spaulding, William Hammond, James J. Hill, Ebenezer Alden, Jr., and Ephraim Adams. Ripley, Hill and Hammond were detained from coming with the first installment. The ordination was by the laying on of the hands of no ruling bishop, and the designation of their appointment was by no diocesan authority, but by the consentient action of themselves and the original fellow pioneers already named. Two

other men already on the ground, W. A. Thompson and Dr. Granger, were added to the ordination group. Off they go to their allotted charges. They fall to work, each, in the training of experience, rallying the sympathetic elements of his community, and taking hold of the organizing of society in its varied relations. Two of them, Drs. Robbins and Salter, still retain their original charges at Muscatine and Burlington, except that the former is now pastor emeritus and the latter gave a year or two to Maquoketa before taking the place of his life work. All have made good ministers of the word, faithful pastors. More than half of them have passed the semi-centennial of their ordination. The seven and the dozen, coalescing and co-operating, at once gave prestige to their movements all along the front. It is not too much to say that their combined influence has given character not only to their denomination in the State, but to the State itself. Losing their lives, they found them. The first men are the historic men. They themselves have been built into the commonwealth that lies between the two great rivers.

When the band brought out their new idea of a college, they found that the pioneers had also been planning for it, with their Denmark Academy already chartered. It was opened in the historic church in the fall of 1845, and now for twenty-five years has had a beautiful seventeen thousand dollar edifice for its home, having had for its first principal the apostolic Micronesian missionary, Rev. A. A. Sturges, the next our Arnold of Rugby, Professor H. K. Edson, who served it a quarter of a century before taking a professor's chair in Iowa College. This

was opened at Davenport in the fall of 1848, with Ripley of the band in charge. In 1860 it was removed to Grinnell, where, in buildings that have risen up in the path of the cyclone, in the numbers of students, in their mental and moral equipments, in endowments partially secured and in extended and high-toned influence, it has come far along in the attainment of the New England ideal of a Christian college. The Hull Academy is striving to come into the attainment applied in the old academic

name.

Congregationalism in Minnesota has been a growth out of a congenial soil. Its churches, represented in a general association and in eight local conferences, number 204, with 16,448 members. Its Carleton College, like all the others a child of home missions, looks back to the day of its poverty as the day of its glory, when, calling to itself a president-James W. Strong, D. D.-the giving for it, in General Association, rolled up in one day over $16,000, until every home missionary was down for a sum that went beyond the point of feeling it. Up there the thrilling scene abides in thought as a sacred memento. That first strain probably cost. more of sacrifice than the later raising, mostly in the State, of a $200,000 endowment.

Kansas is a State with a history, and one of the earliest records of that history was the fact that the first home missionary to take a hand in its evolution out of troublous times-Rev. S. Y. Lum, locating at Lawrence-was a Congregationalist. That incident has been characteristic of the Congregational development along by the side of the progress of the State.

Its Washburn College bears the Puritan likeness and seeks to honor it. Its Stockton Academy does the

same.

Nebraska, the twin sister of Kansas, was born out of great tribulation; like her, has been making a church

and college history justly to be proud of. The two Dakotas, by their advanced railway system having had a section of civilization dumped every eight miles along the railway lines, have kept up in church institutions with that process of transportation. Yankton College solves the riddle: Out of the eater comes forth meat; out of drought and financial distress, with Dr. Pearsons' aid, comes forth a hundred thousand dollar endowment. And Colorado, the Centennial State, makes