THE CHRISTIANIZATION OF OUR COUNTRY FOR THE SAKE OF THE WORLD.
That is the loftiest argument for home missions. God evidently intended that this should be made a great missionary nation. If it had been discovered and settled much earlier we should have had simply a transference of the old world civilization, with all of its spiritual despotism. As it was, South America and Mexico did receive that inheritance, and our territory, once claimed by the Pope, and actually recognized as belonging to the Catholic countries France and Spain, as appears from old maps and globes, has barely escaped by the overruling of Providence, which has given it to the English-speaking Protestantism, and by the evangelism developed through American Christianity.
Prof. Phelps was right when he wrote: “Were I a missionary in Canton, my first prayer every morning would be for America in behalf of Canton.” This idea gives a grandeur to the march of the American Home Missionary Society across the continent. The course of missionaries is now largely changed. Once they set sail from our shores eastward, now they cross our national domain to go westward. We cry, all hail, to that right wing of Immanuel’s army that is sweeping the land from ocean to ocean. Already our own American Board is finding the West its best hunting-ground for missionaries to go abroad. It is even going into the cabins of the frontiersmen, as well as to the Western Theological Seminaries, to find its consecrated men and women. And this is proving to be choice material to make our Lord’s world-conquerors out of. Men who have lifted up axes upon the thick trees, and have come into contact with affairs, have the hardy stuff needed in the work abroad.
So the American Missionary Association is the left wing of the Congregational corps that is seeking to subdue this realm to our King, the Christ. To this end was its former work at the West, where it had its seventy-nine home missionaries. To this end is its scheme for helping in the evangelizing of the Aborigines, who have made way for us to build up our nation. To this end is our movement in behalf of the six millions of our colored fellow-citizens; a movement which, as we are humbly grateful to be able to say, God has made great. To this end is our mission among the Chinese, whom God has wondrously brought to our door to receive the Gospel.
Now, all of this, primarily for the sake of our country, is clearly, in the divine purpose, also for the sake of the world. Why did God just now make such a junction as that of the marvelous opening of Africa to science, commerce and the Gospel, along with the emancipation of the African slaves in our country? Everybody says, it must have been that these Christianized Africo-Americans might have an open way for carrying back to their native land, as pilgrims, the same blessings which the original pilgrims had brought to this new world from the old. Nothing could be grander than this process of helping our brethren of the South on to a degree of attainment that will fit them to become the Puritan element that may yet leaven that dark continent. Not simply may we send over there the cultivated professional men and helping women, but who knows but that, by and by, as Ireland has been emptied several times into this country—live freight being easier of shipment than dead—so may masses of our “Americans falsely called Africans,” as Lewis Tappan used to say, go over with intelligent purpose to take Africa for their home, almost transporting civilization in bulk.
So our whole work on the California coast is a grand training school to fit native missionaries for China, not simply to raise up nominal preachers and teachers to go back to father land, but to make Christians of the many, who, by virtue of their discipleship, shall be commissioned of the Lord to go forth bearing the Gospel, even as the early Christians went forth everywhere preaching the Word. Such an infusion of Gospel leaven will be one of the most hopeful features of the Christian propaganda in the Celestial Empire.
And so here we find the confirmation of the field and the work of this Association. We are put in trust with the care of these three depressed races dwelling by our side—in trust for their good, for our country’s welfare—in trust for the sake of Africa and China and all the world. As these three peoples are here to stay, and as they will ever need the foster care of their more favored brothers of the common family, we find herein the justification and the demand for far-sighted and long-continuous plans on the part of this body for the lifting up of all these three classes of lowly poor, in order to their own elevation, in order to the evangelization of our country, in order to the salvation of the world.
Equally clear providential indications may yet point the way to a work among the Southern white people, as soon as the caste prejudice shall melt away under the benign influence of Gospel light and love. And thus all the races—as in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free—shall be united not only in Christian sympathy and fellowship at home, but in the blessed work of carrying the pure Gospel of Christ to all the lands and peoples of the world.
A gentleman, who for a dozen years has been a member of the Senate of Maryland, drops in at our rooms occasionally from interest in our work. The last time he was in he spoke of a colored young Catholic, who was among the number of those who were taken over to London to be educated for the priesthood and to be returned to labor among the freedmen in that office. The Doctor said that the young man had returned with a fine education, but had abandoned the idea of taking orders. He was now teaching school, but his highest ambition was to become a porter in a large library. As this is the first and only one of those young men, of whom so much was said at one time, to be identified by us, we are glad to hear from him. Of course, this one case does not carry the whole, but surely it does not augur much for a Romish propagandism among our colored fellow citizens.