EXTRACTS OF ADDRESSES RELATING TO GENERAL WORK.
Value of Consecration.—Christ honors alabaster boxes that are broken, and in a moment their costly ointment is shed forth and lost forever. He honors a service not according to its commercial value, not according to the results that appear in the reports of societies, but he honors a sacrifice for the purity of the principle in which it is made and the completeness of soul with which it is rendered. I believe that the church is a unit; I believe that the church is one—the body of Christ, and that Christ calls upon his body to be a living sacrifice to himself. As any blemish on the lamb that was brought to the temple for offering neutralized its value, so any blemish in our hearts, in the withholding of a complete self-sacrifice, is a blemish on that “living sacrifice” which the Lord Jesus Christ calls upon us and prompts us to make. Nay, more, I believe that the very offering of one has its effect upon all, and that there is this vicarious suffering and this vicarious holiness, and that God Almighty looks down into the dark places of the world, and He regards those places a little less dark and a little less dreadful when He sees the light of one poor flame burning upon one solitary altar.
Let this, then, be the principle on which you go. You can do very little; we individually do very little in this world; but you can put yourself into it, you can give yourself to it, and then you have made the grandest possible consecration and offering.—Rev. E. N. Packard.
The Reward of Work for the Lowly.—I remember to have read of a traveler who was shipwrecked. He seemed to have been a dissolute, young Englishman, though of culture enough to read and write. He was held captive on one of the South Sea islands for several years, the natives keeping him out of sight whenever a vessel was near-by. They saw that he was of a superior culture to themselves, and they had built him a hut and given him everything to make him happy. They waited on his instructions and he taught them many things, and for years he had blessed them as much as a dissolute, immoral man could. Finally, however, he managed to escape. One day he saw a ship approaching the island, and he got behind some rocks and put off in a canoe. The natives saw him and made after him. It was a race for life. He finally succeeded in getting so near the vessel that they threw him a rope and pulled him on board—a strange looking creature, all his clothes in tatters and his hair unshorn. He was in great agitation, but as soon as he could speak he told them his story, and there was this fleet of canoes crowding around the vessel to corroborate his account. And the natives took up a wail, that he was going away from them, he, their only link to the civilized world, was going to leave them, and their hearts were full of sorrow. They wanted him to come back and give them one farewell embrace; but he would not trust himself in their midst. But they did this: the sailors tied a rope around him and lowered him over the side of the ship, and then the natives rowed by in their canoes and kissed the poor scoundrel’s feet in token of gratitude.
Oh, what a blessing it is to be permitted to lift others! How thankful those colored people at the South are for their teachers and helpers! It is a success, thank God! See the gratitude that swells up in their hearts; see their eagerness to follow their instructions; see the endeavors they make to copy the examples that are set before them.
* * * We are enabled to be personal sharers in this work; and we can, by prayer and alms, thus express to Him who is over all, God, blessed forever, our thanksgiving.—Rev. A. H. Plumb.
Hope for the Future.—[This veteran friend of the Freedman, after enlarging upon the evils to which the country is exposed by prevailing ignorance and vice, continued as follows:]
Is there any light? When Judge Tourgee wrote his first book, “The Fool’s Errand,” there appeared to be a sort of hopelessness in all the air; but the next book, “Bricks without Straw,” let the light through the crevices. He discovered and unfolded the remedy. It is educate! Educate the masses by educating the children! It is the fear of God and the love of man in active operation which make the individual his brother’s keeper, his brother’s helper. It is by expanding the individual conscience to take in fully and largely his individual responsibility, and re-awakening it among those who are more or less enlightened already.
The American Missionary Association is the mother of a big household. She is pure, sweet-tempered, patient and persevering. She entered the field of contest early and is proud of her scars. She has stood at the doors of church pews which would not open, and endured the contempt and derision of the unthinking in her school-house receptions; her sons have lost arms and legs and lives in her service; but she looks ever forward for her final reward, when vast multitudes shall rise up to call her blessed. My friends, give help to this Association, and you help in the most direct way the cause of Universal Education.
But let me say a word for Howard University. It has received pronounced commendation from both the friends and the enemies of colored men. A representative friend says of it: “It recognizes the complete manhood of a man and the complete womanhood of a woman.” An enemy says: “It makes gentlemen and ladies of niggers!”
It duly claims for itself equality of rights for all men, and limits knowledge not to color but to capacity. May the Lord bless and prosper it till its students and graduates shall be honored in all the world!
The Fisk University will ever be memorable for the wonderful struggle, perseverance and final success of the Jubilee Singers. Theirs is the history, in a brief compass, of their race. It is a prophecy to which we of this generation should take heed. Here were slavery, emancipation, want; then journeyings almost without hope—none except in God; then the dawn, broadening and widening till the full day came! Turned out of hotels in hate; pushed from railways in disgust and blasphemy; then received with delight and honor by kings and princes, queens and princesses everywhere; men, women and children crying with joy at the plaint of their song, and clapping their hands by the thousands in their praise!
May we not take this bright history as a harbinger of good—as a spur to more and more activity to the pupils’ foster-mother, the American Missionary Association—as a call to individual duty on the part of us who make up its membership—yea, as in some degree an offset to the grievous evils that afflict our land? Ah, may we not, resolving to be better and do better ourselves, look steadily forward, and, like your own poet, say:
“I have not seen, and may not see,
My hopes for man take form in fact;
But God will give the victory
In due time; in that faith I act”?
—Gen. O. O. Howard.
Elevation of the Degraded.—When I received an invitation to speak at this meeting, I had arranged my business engagements for the week, and I sent word back that I could not come; but I was asked to reconsider it, and so I have canceled two of my engagements for the purpose of being here, not that I am to interest you with a speech, but to show my earnest love for the great movement carried on by this society.
When a man steps out from his own specialty, he generally makes a failure of it; and I don’t know but I shall make a failure in attempting to speak to you on this theme to-night.
But this meeting and all these meetings are a grand contradiction to the infidel utterance, that those who love God the best love their fellow-men the least. We give such a sentence as that the flat contradiction as an abominable and outrageous falsehood. What is it that prompts men to endeavor to ameliorate the condition of their fellow-men? There is no benevolence worth anything that does not come from the New Testament Christianity. Love for Christ, it is that which induces us to bring those who are straying away into the fold. And this is the idea of this society, if I understand it.
Now you know as well as I do that a reformed drunkard can operate upon a drunkard better than a man who never was an intemperate man; and a converted thief will do more good among thieves than a man who has always been honest; and one who has been converted from the lowest grade of sin can go down into the very depths to lift up those who are as debased as he or she was.
With regard to educating the colored people, I have heard people say: “O, there is no use trying to educate them.” I have heard the remark that they are “a stupid lot.” No, they are not! If you know anything about them, you know they are not stupid. They will say wonderful things. I grant you a good many of them are ignorant; but I tell you, although they may be ignorant, utterly ignorant, yet you will hear brighter, smarter things from them than you will hear from the ignorant in the North, as a general thing. Why, what do you think of the negro who, when asked why he didn’t fight in the time of the war, said, “Because I don’t want to fight.” “Well, but they are fighting for the negro.” “I know they are; but did you ever see two dogs fighting for a bone?” “Yes.” “Well, did you ever see the bone fight?”
There is something, I say, in the education of the colored man—though why they call him “colored,” I don’t know. A man was once asked if he was colored; he said no, he was “born so”—something to build on in themselves. And then there is their desire for education. We here in the North can hardly conceive the earnest desire of those people to learn. When Straight University was burned, I received a letter asking me for some books; and I had the privilege of sending some two or three hundred volumes to them. I was told in the letter that on the very morning after the fire the scholars assembled, and, standing among the ruins, they sang, “Hold the Fort,” and then formed themselves into classes all around about the ruins that they might not lose their lessons.
I have an idea—I shall get bewildered here a little, because I am talking about education, and I never was educated myself—that education may not make a man a better Christian, but it will make him a more useful Christian. One poor woman, living in a smoky cabin, when asked how she could endure to live in such a smoke, said: “Why, honey, I’se thankful to de good Lord to get anything to make a smoke of.” There was a good deal of ignorance, but there was true thanksgiving. Another one said: “God whips you and leaves you alone sometimes, to see if you won’t work; but la, it’s just like a baby—as soon as you cry He hears ye!” Some of the most beautiful sentiments have been uttered by those who are the most ignorant; but when we are appointing men to preach the Gospel, my opinion is that education is needed, and we must so arrange the machinery of the American Missionary Association that hundreds of thousands of men who are now waiting the opportunity to preach the everlasting Gospel intelligently shall be brought into the field of labor.
O, it is a glorious work, this lifting, lifting up of the low, this ministering to those who are poor, this helping those who have no helper! It is a grand work, and I thank God that there is such an Association as this, stretching out its hands and its arms in every direction to lay hold on those for whom the world has cared so little.—John B. Gough, Esq.
The Negro Worth Saving.—It may be put down as a sure thing that our estimate of men, in the long run, determines what we do for them. Our theories of human nature are the measure of our philanthropies. I am not going to sacrifice much for any man whom I reckon as utterly and hopelessly insignificant. Christian philanthropy is not a sentiment, nor an emotion, but a practical principle; and principles are ideas vitalized and set in movement by convictions. Suppose, for instance, that you assume that men are incapable and cannot be made capable of self-government. I think your political philanthropy will not take a very democratic type. If a colored man—black, red, or whatever—is not fit, and cannot be made fit, for the political suffrage, then we shall have white men’s suffrage, and the question of fitness will inevitably determine the whole matter. If negro suffrage had any rational ground, and was not a wild and desperate venture, it was grounded in the theory that the negro could be made capable for the exercise of the political suffrage, and the men who had faith enough in him to give him the suffrage, assumed that there would be found men who would have faith enough in him to fit him for the exercise thereof.
Again, suppose you assume that the Christian churches are incompetent to manage their own ecclesiastical affairs within the limits of a true Christian and ecclesiastical fellowship. I think your ecclesiastical fellowship will not take a very Congregational type. Of course, we must have a strong central government that will manage the affairs of such incompetence. It has been assumed that the colored people of the South are unfit for the superior intelligence of our Congregationalism, or that Congregationalism is not sufficiently spectacular and sensational to fit the primitive wants of the colored people. I will not characterize such heresy as that as it seems to me it ought to be characterized. At any rate, I think it a most beggarly begging of the whole question; and if it be true, then the occupation, ecclesiastically at least, of this society is gone.
The truth is, friends, our ecclesiastical, like our political philanthropy, is grounded on faith in men—intelligent, Christian faith in the manhood, capacities and possibilities of men; and when that faith is gone, the bottom is out and we must have new foundations.
Or suppose we assume that the children in our homes are only animals, or are fit only for the mechanical drudgery of life. I think our domestic and educational philanthropy will not take, to say the least of it, a very civilized type. Yung Pow says that it is of far more importance whether an angel or a devil educate the child than whether a learned doctor or a simpleton teach him; that is, the virtue that educates is of far more importance than the intelligence that instructs—which, in a certain way, of course, is true. But what is the use of debating the relative importance of virtue and intelligence where they are co-ordinate? The highest virtue demands intelligence, and the highest intelligence demands virtue. But suppose it to be true that the child is very likely to find the doctor or the simpleton, as well as the angel or the evil demon, what then? Of course, we want the angel in our homes and in our schools; but I submit that we want the doctor, too, or his equivalent. We have got to look out for the devil in our homes and in our schools; but I submit that we have got to look out for the simpleton, too. It is not virtue, it is not goodness alone that educates; it is intelligence as well; and what we want is a broad, noble, manly and Christian intelligence that estimates aright the manhood possibilities of every man—that will assume the Christian standard of estimate, which is not, I submit, the materialist’s estimate, nor the secularist’s estimate, nor the politician’s estimate, nor the Pharisee’s estimate. We want a faith in men that will not prejudge either case against them, and undertake to determine on à priori grounds just the precise measure of men’s capacity, and just what they are able to accomplish. We want a faith that understands that we are not dealing with material substances nor merely mechanical aptitudes, but with a higher range of powers that are to fit the coming man or woman for a worthy service in the social and political world, and in the kingdom of our God.—Rev. L. O. Brastow, D.D.
A Glance at the South.—There is something interesting, as you go through the South at the present time, in watching the progress of events. It is a region, speaking of it as a whole, that strikes the Northern man with many peculiarities. One is, where is the population that made that stern resistance to the Northern arms? The cities are all small; there are no villages; whence came that force that withstood us so many years, and withstood us with such might? And then again, you are struck with many things so different from what we find at the North. You may ride whole days and find very few Southern people with whom you can have any opportunity of conversing. There is usually a car on the train which the colored people devote to themselves, but they only ride from station to station. You find but few of the white people traveling, and yet since the close of the war there has been a visible growth; and I am a firm believer in a new South that is dawning. There is coming to be a gradually renewed intercourse between the people of the North and the people of the South, and step by step we shall find new interests awakening and a closer linking than there has been for many a year.
But one of the most interesting phases of the South, from whatever stand-point, is the colored population. They are a remarkable people. They number six and a half millions by the last census. You know that it used to be said that when slavery should take away its fostering care, we should find large inroads made upon their numbers, and like the Indians, they would gradually waste and disappear. But what is the story of the two censuses of 1870 and 1880? The increase of the whole population of this country for the past ten years has been a little over 30 per cent. Of this, the white population has increased 28 per cent. and a fraction over, and the colored population 34 per cent. and a fraction over. So that, although the white population has been benefited by the enormous immigration, of which we so often speak and boast, yet by almost six per cent. the colored population has won in the race.
I met the president of a railroad within a month, who has recently constructed a long road in the South against time. I asked him, “With what help did you construct this road?” He said, “With colored men entirely.” “Were they satisfactory?” “Entirely so.” “Would they do as much work per man as the railroad laborers of the North?” “Not quite as much per man, but there was no danger of a strike. They were cheerful, hearty and willing, and I was entirely satisfied with them. I completed my road many days before the time given me, with every man in the South prophesying it was impossible to accomplish that result.”
I said to a policeman not long since in the city of Savannah, “Have you any colored men on your force?” “Not one; and if a colored man were placed here, every one of us would resign.” I then asked him about the colored people in the South and in that city. He said, “They are orderly and well-behaved; we have no fault to find with them.” “How are they getting on in the schools?” “They are beating our white children in the public schools.” “How is that?” “Well, our people do not altogether patronize the public schools, and the colored mothers take much more pains to have their children prompt and constant in attendance than the white mothers; and when the children of this generation come to stand up face to face ten years hence, we are going to be put to shame by the intelligence of many a black boy that to-day walks our streets barefooted and ragged.” That is the statement of a man who said he would resign if a colored man was put upon the police force of which he was a member.
There are many things about the colored people we must be patient with. They are ignorant, and ignorant beyond what we realize. It is an ignorance which we must not be surprised at; it is an ignorance which we must be patient with. It is our duty to give them education—and not merely the duty of us who are here to-night, not merely of this generation, but of generations to come. It is a duty that is patriotic beyond what we are apt to consider. At the close of the war we gave to the colored population the ballot; but it has been the proud claim of New England always that back of the ballot must be intelligence, and that it is not safe in a republic that he who casts the vote that decides the fate of the nation shall cast a vote that he cannot read. Yet to-day there is that enormous vote of the South, a vote which the man casting it cannot read. We sometimes wonder that, in a state like South Carolina, where the colored population is almost double the white, it is possible that they should be deprived of the franchise; but you can judge how timid a man is as to his rights when he cannot read his ballot nor count it after it is cast. Therefore, as I say, that question must be a slow one as it works itself out; but it is as citizens of this nation, as patriots, that we must see to it that intelligence is furnished to that people at the earliest possible day, to enable them to both read and count the ballots which they cast.
—Henry D. Hyde, Esq.
[The Colored Man.—Fifteen years ago Gen. O. O. Howard asked a colored school, “What message will you send to the friends North?” Richard Wright, at that time a lad of thirteen, responded, “Tell ’em we’s risin’ sir.” Mr. Wright has since graduated from Atlanta University, and for several years has been engaged in teaching and editing a local paper in Georgia. Those who heard his admirable address had abundant evidence that his statement has been verified in his own case, at least. We regret that we can give our readers so small a part of it.]
You cannot imagine how much it rejoices me to stand before those who helped to shape the events whose tremendous logic forced the great patriot and philanthropist, Abraham Lincoln, to sign that necessary war measure which resulted in striking the shackles from the four million unfortunate human beings whom I have the honor to represent at this meeting.
I come to tell you that your labors have not been in vain. The colored man, whose cause you have espoused, is worthy of your efforts. Numerically, the colored people form about one-seventh of this great nation. Their natural increase is greater, probably, than that of any other branch of the American family. In the South they constitute nearly one-half of the population, and in the cotton states even more. Nine-tenths of the manual or menial labor of the South is done by colored men. Freedom has not made them lazy, as has been stated by their enemies. Besides making ten million more bales of cotton than during any fifteen years of slavery, they have, during the last fifteen years of freedom, acquired in the South over one hundred million dollars worth of property. That eagerness for an education which characterized them when your first missionaries were put in the field has not left them. In 1878, Gen. Eaton reported as being in the public schools of the South 675,150 colored children, and about 100 schools devoted to secondary, normal, collegiate and professional training among the six and a-half million colored citizens. Such, in brief, is the strength of a people who are to help shape the destiny of this republic.
Ignorance, intellectual and moral, is our main weakness, a curse for which our forefathers were not responsible, but for which we, of the rising generation, are compelled to atone under the manacles of political proscription and religious and social ostracism.
It could hardly be expected that the slaveholders of the South would in their straitened circumstances undertake the education of those whom they had looked upon as their property taken violently from them. So the North, as it has abolished slavery, must also abolish ignorance.
The first need of the colored man is Christian training. The old preachers, fettered by slave habits and filled with superstition and sectarianism, will hardly be able to make their flocks much better than themselves. The colored people need spiritual advisers whose lips and lives express the holy gospel they profess. There are in the South thousands of colored preachers, controlling large congregations, too, who are unable to read correctly a single text from the book which they undertake to expound to their followers. The colored people are naturally religious and nominally Christian. They are ready to be led by the Christian teacher or the scheming Romanist, by the true patriot or the plotting demagogue. As clay in the hand of the potter, they can be made vessels fit for the Master’s kingdom, or they can be left to grow more vicious and more corrupt, and thus be lost to Christianity.
The colored man needs the facilities for becoming educated. He has the inclination, but not the means, to make a good and useful citizen. The A. M. A. has done much, and will, I hope, do more to arouse this whole nation to see the threatening danger that lurks in the ignorant masses of the South, and to feel the necessity of removing the danger by educating this element. The black man is not to blame for his hard lot, nor is he of his own accord an American; but 250 years of toil and hardship have wedded him to this soil, and here he means to stay. Docile and tractable, his industry has made the Southern wilderness productive and beautiful. He has produced the cotton, tobacco and cane of this country. Any attempt to supply his place as a laborer in the South will prove utterly futile. He is there a laborer, citizen and voter, part and parcel of the American nation, and I trust the American nation will recognize him as such. The full, complete recognition of the right and privilege of the colored man to be and do whatever any other citizen is and does, is what the republic must settle down to. The question whether the colored man shall live in this republic, on terms of perfect equality, protected in the enjoyment of every privilege and immunity accorded to any other American, is a question which has postponed the progress of the South, and will continue to until the nation shall have solved this problem. Sooner or later the republic must see its solution. Like Banquo’s ghost, down at your beck or wane it will not. It will present itself at your churches, your theatres, your legislative councils and your court rooms. It is the one question that will not and cannot be settled until it is settled rightly. It is a question embracing the development of an irrepressible race, one that cannot be starved out, driven out or killed out. When the people of the South, together with the people of the North, shall approach this subject, under the guidance of intelligent reason and an enlightened conscience, they will see that the true way to solve this vexing question is to educate the colored man and treat him as a citizen. But, aided or unaided, helped or hindered, the negro will have an influence in the government of this country, and there is now no power in the arm of the American people to keep him down. He will rise to help make this republic the grandest and noblest that has ever dotted the face of this globe, or he will sleep on a common burying-ground with his white oppressors, amid the ruins and ashes of this republic. Inseparably united with the fate and fortune of America, the words of the Hebrew maiden to Naomi express his adhesion to the white man. “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.”—Richard Wright, Esq.
Africa and the Africans.—Mr. President: Africa and the Africans is the subject assigned me. But before entering upon it directly, it is fitting, perhaps, that I should say that for the last six and a half years I have been in Great Britain as the Secretary of the Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury is President and Lord Kinnaird is Treasurer. The British people have been largely interested in aiding the American Missionary Association in preparing and sending out to Africa colored teachers, missionaries and general helpers for that great work so wonderfully opened up in that dark land. And it is well known that the Jubilee Singers, who went through Great Britain under the patronage of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, or we may say its President, the noble Earl of Shaftesbury, received very generous aid for Fisk University from our British friends. They have also aided liberally in the support of colored missionaries at the Mendi Mission on the West Coast of Africa. But latterly they have become greatly interested in the Arthington Mission, projected for the Upper Nile valley, toward which field two white missionaries have gone forth, Rev. H. M. Ladd, and Dr. Snow, of Western New York. For this mission, Robert Arthington, Esq., of Leeds, England, has given $15,000; others in Great Britain have given $15,000 more; so we have $30,000 of the $50,000 needed for the mission from our British friends. One London gentleman, after hearing a statement of the case in Scotland, sent for the speaker and gave him $5,000, as he said, instead of a legacy. Note that. A young man, who is a butler in a gentleman’s family, sent at another time $50. When asked if that was not too much for him he said, “I gave £10 a little ago, to help a friend out of a difficulty, and I can give £10 for the good of a vast continent.” A good woman, who had been a governess for some years, also handed to the Secretary £10 for herself, and her sister gave £10 more; and they agreed to give together £15 ($75) a year right on for colored missionaries for Africa. These were deeds of self-sacrifice. Are there not generous young men, and older men, and noble women in America, who will do as well for that dark continent, which our ancestors so cruelly plundered? We need, we must have $20,000 more, very soon, for that Arthington Mission. We want a steamer on the Upper Nile waters also. We must besides have a steamer, the John Brown memorial steamer, for the Mendi Mission on the West Coast at once. In that country there are no roads, there are no beasts of burden. Human beings have to be the carriers of all burdens for hundreds of miles. And our dear missionaries have fallen, many of them, in early death, in those perilous journeys through swamp and jungle, on their errands of love to the poor suffering millions of Africa. We cannot believe that their friends and our friends will hesitate and delay their giving for this steamer for the increase of good and the saving of precious lives.
If we recall the abuse and the needs of Africa, we can but see and feel our duty and privilege in this connection. Africa has been for five hundred years the hunting-ground for the bondmen of the whole world, and to this day the slave trade covers an area nearly equal to all Europe, in Northern, Central and Southern Africa. This accursed trade is to the East, and mainly to the Mohammedan countries; and it is said that from some of the Eastern ports a traveler may wend his way, without a guide, into the very heart of Africa, by following the line of human bones and the skin-covered skeletons of the poor slave victims who have fallen in that terrible march to the sea. And that this crime should have been permitted by the Christian nations down to the closing part of this 19th century is an astounding fact! And it ought not to need an argument to show any man that a people who still demand slaves, and buy human beings therefor, ought to be hounded out of the very pale of the civilized nations; for it is generally known that for every slave delivered in any country, four and often six human beings have fallen in death in the attempts to capture them, or in the cruel journey to their doom. And this trade will never be stopped till the better nations learn to treat the demand for slaves as a huge crime, as well as the act of supply. To meet and combat this crime boldly and persistently in both demand and supply is the call of God to the Christian nations out on the morning and the midnight air.
Now we may do both. Africa is open to us, and travelers are penetrating her vast territories; the steamer’s screw and paddle-wheels of reform are stirring her waters and also the thought of her people; commerce is tapping her mines of wealth; geographers are correcting her maps; scientists are studying her various climates and testing her remedial agents. Christianity, of which it was said in a meeting of the International Society for Africa, made up of distinguished travelers, learned and scientific men, “History shows that Christianity has special virtue for rescuing savage races from barbarism, causing them rapidly to over-step the first barriers in the way of civilization”—Christianity, we say, is now challenging Paganism, the Moslem curse, and the accursed slave trade, on that long plundered continent of Africa. And now we have a potent factor for the work not available a little ago. We have more than six millions of Africa’s sable children, from which people we may select educated Christian young men and women for the great work given us to do. And these are the people for Africa. They can live in hot climates; they are by blood relations and common sufferings in sympathy with the people to be reached and saved; they can touch the heart, stir the thought and lift up their own race as no other people can ever do it.
For this they are developing a peculiar type of piety on a grander scale than we have yet seen among the Anglo-Saxon race. The Pauline we have had—the intellect and conscience carried by an intense conviction of duty, so that the man would go to the stake for his principles. But the loving, trustful type of piety belongs to these sable children of the sunnier and more genial climes. Shall we, then, know our day and dare to take our opportunity with these ex-slaves for the redemption of Africa from ignorance, superstition, slavery, war and woe? We want the John Brown mission steamer. We want, we must have, in addition to all the generous and noble gifts for our Southern work, the sum of $20,000, already pledged by the committee of the A. M. A., for the Arthington Mission in the Upper Nile valley, frightfully ravaged by the villainous slave trade to this very day!
Who, then, of all God’s dear people, will rally to this standard, and come at the call of the Divine King to this momentous work, with hand and heart and money, to take possession of that vast continent of Africa, with its 200,000,000 of people, for Christ, and for the good of all nations?—Rev. O. H. White, D.D., Sec. F. M. A. Soc., London, Eng.