Converging lines of providential purpose have met. In 1856 Burton and Speke began the first movement in the great line of modern discovery in tropical Africa; in 1858 they first sighted Lake Tanganyika. In 1860 Speke and Giant set out on the second expedition from Zanzibar; in 1862 they caught their first glimpse of the Victoria Nyanza. Thence onward moved the heroic procession—Sir Samuel Baker, Winwood Reade, Col. Gordon, Livingstone and others, till last of all Stanley emerged at the mouth of the Congo in August, 1877. A marked line of American convergence also began in 1856 with the first shedding of blood in the struggle with the slave power in Kansas. John Brown’s raid came in 1859. The rebellion began in 1861; the slaves were proclaimed free in 1863, and their education began almost with the war. Other societies have their own coincidences in this great work, but this Association having the distinction of opening the first school among the Freedmen, it is a matter of special interest with us that about one month after Stanley reached the mouth of the Congo, we sent out our first company of colored missionaries to Africa, all of whom had been born in slavery, were educated since emancipation, and, moved by the love of Christ and of their fatherland, had gone thither to preach the Gospel. This is to us the beginning of the other part of the great work to which this Association is called, for Africa and for America.
We have the appliances for the work in our schools, our theological departments and in our churches; in our experiences in tropical Africa of the terrible death-rate of white missionaries, and in the comparatively good health of the colored. Moreover, our decks are cleared for action by the removal of the debt that has so long hampered us. We can now handle our sails and our guns. May the winds of heaven waft us on our course! Then again we see a way of relief from the retrenchment enforced upon us by the debt and the hard times. Buildings were needed—some to be enlarged, others to be newly erected—but all such claims had to be sternly denied, much as it cost us to deny; but now, in the good providence of God, the generous benefaction of Mrs. Stone comes to our relief to supply just such buildings. The return of prosperity to the country encourages us to hope that the added expense in sustaining the enlarged work will be met. That return of prosperity—shall it be a curse or blessing? Shall it be the mad rush of muddy waters urged on by avarice and ambition, and bearing on its turbulent surface only reckless adventure, wild speculation, extravagant personal expenditure, unscrupulous public plunderings, ending at last and again in the dead sea of stagnation, bankruptcy, and, worst of all, in the wrecking of character, imprisonment, insanity, or suicide? Shall it not rather be consecrated, that it may be sanctified and perpetuated—like the beneficent waters of the Nile carried out into channels of benevolence, purified as it is quietly borne along and broken in smaller rills, bearing everywhere over this sin-parched earth the streams of salvation, making it to bloom with the beauty and fragrance of holiness and to bear fruit to the glory of God? Christian people ought to begin with the rising tide of this prosperity to enlarge the streams of their benevolence, lest, before they are aware, they be swept into the irresistible current. Especially do we ask the friends of this cause to recognize this auspicious era and plan to meet in some adequate measure the vast work before us.
The hour and the call have come. The nation is re-awakened to its great duty to the late slaves; they are themselves awaking to the glorious opening for them as citizens and Christians in America, and they are enthusiastic to aid in redeeming the land of their fathers. The possibilities of African regeneration are enkindling the hearts of Christians in Germany, in Great Britain and in America. God’s providence is opening the way and sending His commands along the lines. Well may it be said to the Church of Christ in America as Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
THE PROVIDENTIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA.
REV. E. H. MERRELL, PRESIDENT OF RIPON COLLEGE.
The significance of the negro in America cannot be understood without study in the light of the providence of God. It is not presumption to seek in the course of events the divine thought; it is rather presumption to assume that events occur without a divine purpose. “They that love to trace a divine hand will always have a divine hand to trace.” It is true that men have committed unspeakable folly in attempting to force the thoughts of the great God into the channels of their intellectual pettiness. Philosophies of history written with a provincial scholarship, under the eye of an unsound philosophy or the extravagancies of religious enthusiasm, must from the nature of the case be unsound; so a too particular and minute description of the ways of Providence in the interest of a preconceived theory of life, or of some specific reform or “cause,” leads to fanaticism and exposure to contempt. There are sins committed only by the good, if the solecism may be tolerated, and among them is a profane assumption of knowledge in regard to the purposes of God. But, on the other hand, it is greater folly to assume that God has left the world out of His thought and providential care, and that the course of the world is not made by the efficiency of His word. It is absurd, also, to assume that great providential courses are undiscoverable by the intelligence of man. “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for the sky is red and lowering. O, ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but ye cannot discern the signs of the times.” We may make ourselves quite ridiculous in attempting to literalize the tails, wings, breastplates, teeth, hair, faces, crowns, shapes of the horse-like locusts of John’s apocalypse; but it is quite within the reach of our faculties to find the key to his book and to unfold its prophetic instructions and consolations. The use of the tabernacle as the dwelling-place of Jehovah’s glory it is possible to find by a simple exercise of the ken of philosophic interpretation; but the symbolic import of the coverings of fine twined linen and woven goats’ hair and rams’ skins dyed red, we must leave to the dogmatism of unlettered exegesis. It is not our fault, then, that we are looking too intently for the ways of God through the history of the world, but rather that we do not look aright. * * * * If it be true that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will;” that “He changeth the times and the seasons; He removeth kings and setteth up kings;” that “promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south; but God is the Judge; He putteth down one and setteth up another;”—if it be true that the Lord “that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth” by Himself also, “frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad;” that He “sayeth of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure,” surnaming him, and girding him, though he knew him not;—if, in short, the Lord is God, and His providence extends over nature, over nations, over individuals, over free acts, and over sinful acts,—surely we shall not gather the significance of any great matter in the world’s progress without such a study of the facts, and such an interpretation of them as shall disclose the main trend of the divine purposes.
I think I hazard little in saying that the foothold of the Negro in the United States is providentially significant in relation to a great onward movement for the evangelization of the world. And in this statement I have more in view than the Christianizing of the dark continent. In relation to this, it may signify much; but in relation to the whole kingdom of Christ, it signifies more.
(1.) The truthfulness of this statement holds our conviction when we view the facts in relation to the great end of all history; and this is no transcendental or visionary gaze. It is the perpetual characteristic of human folly to see events only in their immediate relations; whereas, the present moment can interpret nearly nothing. Philosophy concerns itself with remote causes and ends. “Providence,” says Guizot, “hurries not Himself to display to-day the consequence of the principle He yesterday announced. He will draw it out in the lapse of ages. Even according to our reasoning, logic is none the less sure because it is slow.” God’s thought is from eternity; but it is only because God has purposed that a science of history is possible, or the end of history discoverable. Its philosophy is often based on the assumption of the unity of the race; for the unity of the race it is better to say, the unity of the divine purpose. Said Augustine of old: “God cannot have left the course of human affairs, the growth and decay of nations, their victories and defeats, unregulated by the laws of His providence.” And as the latest deliverance of philosophy we have from Professor Flint, “The ultimate and greatest triumph of historical philosophy will really be neither more nor less than the full proof of Providence, the discovery by the process of scientific method of the divine plan, which unites and harmonizes the apparent chaos of human actions contained in history into a cosmos.” Suppose we assume, as the end of history, the establishment of a kingdom of righteousness, or the perfection of the members of the race for an endless society; that the increase of wealth, the extending of knowledge, the refinements of culture, have ultimate value only in relation to such a kingdom or society; that the method of procedure toward the attainment of this end involves the encouragements and chastisements, the rewards and disciplines, the pulling down amid building up, the slaying and making alive, which belong to the law of discipleship for character. Suppose, further, that we find ourselves living in a period when the Christian world is peculiarly stirred with missionary enthusiasm, and laboring to bring the whole world to membership in the everlasting kingdom; and yet, again, that we have brought to the midst of the most Christian nation millions of the most barbarous people, and put in such relation to that nation that the questions concerning them necessarily involve religious and missionary aspects—assuming all this, and taking into view the profound agitations, the vast numbers of beings involved, the enormous commercial interests that have been staked, the slow uprooting of inveterate race prejudices, the transforming of societies, the hot wrath of God in sweeping commonwealths with the besom of civil war, it becomes easily credible that the Negro in the United States signifies a great providential on moving the conversion of the world. To find in this Negro problem nothing but the lust which brought him to our shores, or the instrumentality of the wealth which he has been the means of accumulating, or the object of a sentimental pietism which would colonize him, or a nuisance for progressive abatement, is to attempt to solve the puzzle of a bewildering maze without the exercise of wisdom, or to have exit from a labyrinth without a clew. But, with the right end in view, all the mysteries of it are easily solved.
It has been recently said, by an able English writer, that the great plague of 1348-9 “is a totally new departure in English history, incomparably more important in its permanent effects than the conquest of William, the civil war of the fifteenth century, the civil war and the revolution of the seventeenth. It has left abiding results on the present condition of England. To it we owe the peculiar position of the English aristocracy and the equally peculiar position of the peasant. It created the poor law and the trades’ union. It was the origin of Lollardism, which was itself the precursor of the Reformation. Fortunately, it occurred after representative institutions had become a necessary part of English political life, or it would have destroyed them.” Under Providence, Lollardism and the Reformation were the final cause of pestilence, and it might have counted far more if the end had been more exactly understood at the time of the desolations.