Now, do you, who represent the Christianity of the nineteenth century, stand before them with the gospel in your hands. Man of God, look upon these slaves of sin! Nations and languages, look on this man of God! and do you tell us what Christianity can do for these. What can it do for this white man? Triumphantly, you answer, “It can save him; can break down his self-sufficiency and pride, redeem him from his cups, make him an honest man, and, if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.” What can it do for the Indian? “It can save him; make him sober and industrious, a servant of God.” What for this Negro? “It can save him, lift him out of his race-corruptions, and save him to God and man.” And what for this Chinaman? “The same. It can make him a man, reverent and devout to God, and useful to his fellows. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to Mongol, Negro and Caucasian, and no barriers of race avail to hinder it.” Is this all? Has your gospel nothing more that it can do for this company? Then is it not the true and full gospel! That full gospel at the first gained wondrous victories. The proud pharisee and the despised publican, they of Cæsar’s household and the bond-slave—Jew and Gentile alike—came under its power. The Christianity of that day, the full gospel, not only saved them as individuals, made each one an heir of eternal life, but also fused and bound them into a true brotherhood.
The Christianity of the nineteenth century is on trial as to whether it can do this. Its power to redeem the individual has been grandly illustrated before our eyes, and now the other question comes forward. Its answer will have many forms indeed. One of them is the attitude that Christian capital and Christian labor take to each other. But its marked test, the most illustrious triumph or conspicuous failure, is to be here among the despised races, whose representatives are before us. God has reserved for American Christianity this grand opportunity to show the world, that after eighteen centuries the gospel is shorn of none of its honor—that under its inspirations we are able to bind these despised races, regenerated and lifted up, into a true fellowship with ourselves. The American Missionary Association is your representative and servant to this end, and worthy such support as the gospel itself should receive.
II.—The Test of our National Life.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, in a recent essay, uses these words: “When we talk of man’s advance towards his full humanity, we think of an advance not along one line only, but several. The Hebrew race was pre-eminent on one great line. The Hellenic race was pre-eminent on another line.”
Taking for truth the conception involved in these words, but with a Christian interpretation, it follows that a true Christian patriotism will not have respect to the permanence of party or the development of resources; these are means to its nobler ends.
It will see in all history the developing thought of God, and in its own history a particular increment of that thought.
These eighteen centuries, and those that are to follow, are the development of Christianity, and that development covers three zones, which circle and complete the globe—God’s relation to man, man’s relation to God, and man’s relation to man. During the five centuries nearest Christ, about the centres of Alexandria and Constantinople, influences rose and were moulded whose resultant was that view of God in his relation to man which is the common property of Christendom. For eleven centuries following, Divine Providence was shaping especially under the impulse of the Reformation, the confession of the scriptural relation of man to God. Then, with the seventeenth century, history passed into the third zone, in which is to be illustrated the Divine idea of man’s relation to man, which is, that the race is an organic brotherhood, because having one father, God, and one elder brother, Jesus Christ.
From the first planting at Plymouth, God has been shaping our national experiences to draw the confession from us. Little by little the problem has grown upon us, as we were able to meet it. Two centuries and more were required to illustrate, through us, how the sublime socialism of the New Testament, could blend together in one brotherhood, representatives of all the white and dominant races of the world. And it is done, though not perfectly, indeed. English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dane, German and Russ—all over our land—are companies of them cemented into the equal brotherhood of a Christian Church and a Christian State. And now the deeper conditions of the problem are upon us. Within our borders are three races, neither white nor dominant. They are men; the Saviour died for them; the Holy Spirit calls them, one by one, into membership in the kingdom of God; they are our brothers by New Testament law. We are to make them organically one with us in a Christian state. Here, in the despised races, is the test of our national life.
The American Missionary Association appeals to you, not only as Christian men in the name of the Christianity that is on trial as to its social power, but as American men in the name of God’s thought for the land, which it is working out as to the Negro, the Chinaman and the Indian. It says, “One is our Master, even Christ, and all we are brethren.”
In the jail record of one of our cities, there are these entries after a convict’s name: “Occupation, Statesman; Religion, None.” Is it not a reproach to our Christianity, waiting for its grandest testimony; to our Christian patriotism, on which is laid the thought of God for the land, that in these years we have been so content to leave the care of the despised races, these “wards of the Almighty,” the elect for His noblest purpose, to those whose fit record is: “Occupation, Statesmen; Religion, None”! Two hundred and fifty years have been given us with the Indian to carry out “the great hope and inward zeal” of our fathers, a score of years almost with the Freedman and Chinaman. How long can we expect the Divine patience to delay ere it shall take away our opportunity, and give it to a nation bringing forth the fruits of righteousness?