Page:Eleventh annual report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia.djvu/29

25 wherever they may be needed, under the approval of the Bishop and the Rectors in whose Parishes they may be located. Ten Missionaries are employed in this Diocese who labour in part or altogether for the negroes. From the Parochial Reports, there are 1636 colored communicants, 930 colored children catechized by Rectors and 1454 in the colored Sabbath Schools. More than one half the communicants are colored: and the colored Sabbath School scholars, exceed the white by 450.

There are ten Parochial and one Missionary Report in the Journal of the Diocese of Georgia for 1845. Five Rectors have Sunday Schools for colored children and two devote a portion of their time to the negroes on plantations and act as Missionaries. A Mission to the negroes has been established on the Ogechee River.

There are nine organized Parishes in the Diocese of Florida: six supplied and three vacant. In two Parishes are Sunday Schools for the negroes. An application was made to Bishop Elliott, Provisional Bishop of Florida, between Monticello and Tallahassee for a Missionary to unite a congregation of whites with services on the plantations for the negroes. The Bishop of South Carolina, at a private residence in this State, baptized 47 colored children.

We have nine Parish Reports in the Diocese of Alabama. Three have Sunday Schools and other instruction for the negroes. The Rev'd. N. A. Cobbs has recently been elected Bishop of this Diocese, and without doubt will devote special attention to the great number of negroes who will fall under his charge.

I have no specific information from the Dioceses of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, but presume that the Bishops and Clergy of these Dioceses will not fall behind the zeal and activity of their Brethren in the older Dioceses of the South and Southwest in this good cause.

.—The "Minutes of the Annual Conferences for 1844—1845," give 150,120 colored communicants: of whom 13,546 are in the Free and 135,604 are in the Slave States. The increase of colored Members has been almost entirely in the slave States: for in the 17 Conferences in the free States which reported a colored membership, 11 reported a decrease: 3 reported for the year and no comparison drawn with previous years: and 3 reported an increase of 23 in the whole! Besides the attention paid to the negroes by the Travelling Preachers,