Each will probably remember through life his or her part in the programme; and, from the whole, a very clear outline was furnished to the assembly of the numbers, needs, and capabilities of the Indians, Mongolians and Negroes within our borders.
I was happy to be able to confirm and illustrate some of those statements, and to urge upon that intelligent church, and the flourishing Sabbath-school, from which seventy were received into communion last year, the pressing, may we not say paramount? importance of that department of missionary effort.
If the “four millions” are suffered to live in vice and ignorance, and the superstition which is already seeking to overshadow them like the old fetichism of their ancestors, the American Church—yes, the nation—will find too late what a mistake they have made.
Ten thousand such “Monthly Concerts” as this would go far in the direction of instructing the children and awaking their parents, respecting one of the great duties of the hour. Why not let it be tried?
ADDRESS AT THE BOSTON ANNIVERSARY.
BY REV. GEORGE R. MERRILL, BIDDEFORD, ME.
I am to suggest three considerations which give permanent importance to our work among the despised races. The evangelization of six millions of people, one-seventh of our entire population, cannot be safely left to the enthusiasm aroused by special pleas, but must be grounded in such truth as shall make its prosecution a Christian and patriotic duty of supreme and abiding urgency.
I.—The Test of our Christianity.
If you please, let us call upon this platform four representative men. The first shall be of Anglo-Saxon lineage, the inheritor by birth of our ripe Christian civilization, and bearing upon him the marks of our characteristic civilized vices,—a man self sufficient, profane, intemperate and dishonest. Next him place an Indian, in all the brutality, sottishness and despair to which our guardianship of two centuries has brought him. The next is a Freedman, touched with his ancient race-superstitions, and possessed by the usual vices of a subject people. Last in the group set a Chinaman, just from the Joss House and the opium den.