sum of $668,000, exceeding by the sum of $469,000 its available bonds and mortgages.

It is well known that the greater part of the city below Chambers Street is devoted to purposes of business, and that private dwellings have given place to stores and warehouses. The wealthy portion of the population has gone to the upper districts, and most of the churches of all denominations have followed them. The North Dutch, which is still engaged in useful spiritual labors in the neighborhood of St. Paul's; the Methodist church in John Street, unhappily rent by internal strife; and St. Peter's, a Roman Catholic church, in Barclay Street, still maintain their ground. With these exceptions, Trinity Church, St. Paul's, and the church in Beekman Street, formerly St. George's, purchased and now entirely supported by Trinity, stand alone in this great deserted field of labor. The same process is going on above Chambers Street, and in a few years there will in all probability be no churches below Canal Street but those of Trinity parish. Notwithstanding this exodus of wealth, a vast population, the inhabitants, in great part, of alleys, garrets, and cellars, estimated to exceed 120,000 souls, occupy the field it has abandoned; and if Trinity Church had followed the same instincts which have drawn off the other religious societies of the city to its more attractive districts; if she also had abandoned to their fate the poor and necessitous, whom wealth and fashion have bequeathed to her, the lower part of the city would have presented an example of religious destitution unparalleled in the history of Christian civilization.

It was in view of this great change in the condition of the population of the city that I introduced into the Vestry, on the 10th of April, 1854, the following resolutions :

Resolved, That the Standing Committee be instructed to report a plan by which the expenditures of the Corporation shall be limited to its income. Resolved, That the said Committee be instructed to inquire into the expediency of making the scats in Trinity Church, and in St. Paul's and St. John's Chapels, free.

Resolved, That the said Committee be instructed to inquire into the expediency of establishing free schools in connection with Trinity Church and its chapels.

Resolved, That the said Committee be instructed to inquire into the expediency of devoting the funds of the Corporation, as far as may be practicable, after making provision for the support of the new chapel in Twenty-fifth Street, to the education and religious instruction of the poor of the city.

The last resolution, as originally presented, was confined to the poor of the city below Canal Street; and, on the suggestion of a member of the Vestry, it was, in view of future contingencies, amended so as to embrace the whole city.

This is the plan which nearly four years ago I deemed it my duty to bring before the Vestry. It was supported by a somewhat labored argument, which was not committed to paper, and which I will not tax the patience of the Committee by attempting to recall to remembrance. I trust, indeed, that no such exposition is necessary, and that the resolutions sufficiently explain their purpose. Their design was to rescue the lower part of the city that portion which has not only an immense body of resident poor, but which receives into its bosom the greater part of the destitute who seek a refuge here from hardship in other countries to rescue this combined mass of permanent and temporary indigence from the utter spiritual abandonment with which it was threatened by the removal of those to whose wealth and liberality it had been accustomed to look for sympathy and pecuniary aid to more congenial districts. The plan comprehended not only the spiritual instruction of the adult inhabitants of this deserted district, once the seat of nearly all the wealth of the city, but the education of their children, and, to the extent of the means of the Corporation, a ministration to their temporal wants. Trinity Church, with its endowments— fortunately growing more valuable with the progress of the city was to stand in the place of the individual opulence which has fled from a district where its tastes could no longer find suitable fields for indulgence, and established itself in others, where it has rivalled Genoa in its streets of palaces, and where, in all its appointments and manifestations of in-door and outdoor life, there is a concentration of refinement, luxury, and splendor unequalled excepting by a few of the great capitals of Europe.

It is possible that I may have looked upon this plan with that undue partiality which individuals are apt to feel for sugges tions originating with themselves. But it seemed to me to have been among the designs of Providence that Trinity Church should have been planted in this great district, ready, with her ample endowments, to make provision, when the emergency should arrive, for those whom individual wealth has left upon

her hands. I hold this to be the great mission of Trinity Church; and I have pressed on the Vestry, on all proper occasions, the duty of preparing for it, and of commencing the work with the utmost diligence. Though the plan has not been formally adopted, it has been practically acted on; and it is due to my associates in the Vestry to say that they have responded to all appeals in behalf of the destitute districts below Canal Street by as liberal an expenditure as the income of the Corporation, crippled by a heavy debt and burdened by large annual contributions to other churches, has admitted. The clerical force of the parish has been nearly doubled; the Sunday-schools have been greatly enlarged; parish schools for the gratuitous education of children have been established; by far the greater part of the pews in Trinity Church, one hundred and four out of one hundred and forty-four in St. Paul's, and a large number in St. John's, are free; efforts have been put forth to bring into the church those who have not been accustomed to attend any religious worship; Trinity Church is opened twice a day throughout the year for divine service; a mission office has been established to receive applications for aid; lay visitors are employed to seek out want and relieve it; missionary agencies have been instituted in connection with the Commissioners of Emigration; the whole lower part of the city has been virtually made a field of missionary labor; and a degree of energy has been infused into the ministrations of the church, temporal and spiritual, which compensates in a great degree for the lost support of the religious societies removed to other districts. In the midst of all this earnest effort, with five of her clergy residing within this neglected field of labor, conversant with little else than its destitution, and devoting themselves to the relief of its wants, Trinity Church finds herself assailed as faithless to her trust by those, for the most part, whose lives are passed amid the social amenities of the upper districts, and in an atmosphere redolent with indulgence and luxurious ease.

It was not supposed by me when this plan was brought forward that it could be fully carried out until a considerable portion of the leased property of the church should become available for the purpose. It was only expected that a beginning should be made, and that the plan, in its great outlines, should have a practical adoption. However earnest the desire to put

it in operation at an earlier period, the unexpected augmentation of her debt not only renders such a desire hopeless, but manifests that it may be even farther postponed, or possibly defeated, without a prudent husbandry of her resources.

For the better illustration of this point I annex a statement of the revenue and ordinary expenditures of the Corporation for the year ending the 30th of April, 1856:

1. Parish expenditures, including (besides those obviously such) charges upon and expenses of management and care of the property of the church, necessary diocesan expenses, and annuities to families of deceased clergymen, or to officers of the parish.....

2. Interest on debt......

3. Allowances, donations, and loans to other churches.

Deduct revenue....

$67,359 53

6,998 50

13,259 41

4,155 92

$91,773 36

$71,344 22

36,522 15

32,053 42

$139,918 79

91,773 36

Leaving a deficit for the year ending April 30, 1856, of..... $48,145 43

The deficiency for the year ending the 30th of April, 1857, was estimated on the 1st of May last at $40,638 66. The grants actually made by the Corporation to clergymen and churches, to be paid during the year, in addition to the regular allowances, amount to $11,640, and the appropriations for building school-houses and renovating and enlarging St. John's Chapel to $28,000—

Making together.....

Deduct cash on hand May 1, 1856.

Add estimated deficiency......

Leaving a deficit for the year ending April 30, 1857, of......

$39,640 00

10,016 38

$29,623 62

40,638 66

$70,262 28

This deficit can only be met by selling real estate. The deficits of the last ten years exceed $270,000 (without including

.

the cost of Trinity Chapel), and the Corporation has provided for them by selling lots, and applying the proceeds to the augmentation of her insufficient income. While she is assailed as niggardly in her donations, and as engaged in a systematic accumulation of her capital, she has, in fact, for years been selling her real estate, and meeting with the proceeds the pressing demands on her-a large portion of which have grown out of her contributions for the support of other churches. The estimated expenditure of the present year continued till 1862 would consume so much of the Lispenard lease which becomes disencumbered in that year, and embraces a large and valuable part of her real estate, as to leave her a balance insufficient to pay her debt

to be provided for by sales of real estate—a sum exceeding the highest estimate in the report of the Committee of the value of the Lispenard lease; and unless the prices of real estate become greatly enhanced during the next five years, nothing will remain of the lease referred to, after discharging the pecuniary obligations above specified, a portion of which must be provided for by the sale of other property.

The expenditures of the parish cannot be materially abridged without prejudice to its interests; and the Vestry are unwilling to reduce the annual allowances to other churches, believing that such a reduction would cause great inconvenience to the recipients, and in some cases impair, to a serious extent, the efficiency of the parishes thus assisted.

In regard to the necessity of allowing the capital of her endowment to be consumed by the current expenses of the Church, I have differed in opinion with a majority of the Vestry. While they have deplored it, and yielded to it as a necessity, I have been in favor of meeting it by retrenchment, and bringing down the expenditure, as nearly as may be, to the standard of the inI have urged this duty on the Vestry as one demanded by every maxim of financial prudence, and with the less hesitation, as the inconvenience to result from it would be of short

come.