Now, my friends, we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the Indian, and we have gained one thing in the history of our treatment of the negro. It has been demonstrated by a sufficient number of individual instances that both these races, having their own peculiarities and their own defects, as the white man has his own peculiarities and his own defects, are fit for civilization, for law, for education, for the family, for the home, for the arts and the industries which belong to civilization and peace. Take the case of the negro, whom we have not all learned to respect as we should. I sat in the House of Representatives with seven members of the negro race, and you could not find seven men in that House, chosen on any principle of selection, who were the equals of those seven men, or who certainly were their superiors, in everything that indicated the conduct of an honorable, sensible and capable representative of the people. I should like to have you take the Congressional Record, and read the speeches of the old slave-masters, and then put by their side the speeches of the slaves! Why, the great orator and statesman of the Southern Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, when he came back to the public service, announced weeks beforehand a speech that he proposed to make upon a political question of the day. The House and the country were in expectation. Mr. Stephens gave months of his best thought and his best care to the preparation of that speech; and when he finished delivering it, a full-blooded negro got up, and, on the moment, answered the argument which had been made by the great champion of the slave-holding race and overthrew it. When our illustrious senator died, his eulogy was pronounced throughout the land from the lips of orator and poet and friend. Massachusetts called to her service, perhaps, the two most brilliant and accomplished orators in the country, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Schurz; and still the one eulogy of Charles Sumner which more than any other deserves to go down into literature and to be found in the school-books of coming generations, is that pronounced by Robert B. Elliot, of South Carolina. It is too late. If you do not educate these black people, it is not because they are your inferiors; it is because, in your selfishness and greed, you prefer to do something else with your money than to expend it for the benefit of these American citizens.
But, my friends, as I have said, I did not come here to enter upon an argument in behalf of a cause in which this audience, at least, is already enlisted. I come to express to you nothing but gratitude, nothing but hope. It is no time for despair. I notice that our friends, especially the clergymen who spoke to us, reexamined, somewhat, the foundations of our religious faith in their speeches, as if they thought that science or unbelief had shaken a little the strength of the old faith in the minds of men. I don’t believe it. Undoubtedly, modern science has stripped our religious faith of some of the frame-work, of some of the imagery, of some of the associations with which the vision and the imagination of our early childhood had surrounded it; but it seems to me that, judging as we should judge of the progress of mankind, by the state and depth of its religious faith, and by the perfectness of its obedience to the moral law, humanity reached its high-water mark on the day of President Garfield’s funeral. Three thousand millions of mankind, at the same hour, in this country and across the sea, bowed their heads in a common grief and rose up to do a common honor to the simple qualities of love, courage, religious faith, obedience to the will of God, exhibited by one man and by one woman whom freedom had called to her high places.
Why, my friends, you know how it is. Every speaker and every auditor knows how an emotion is multiplied by the size of the audience that feels it. You utter a jest to your neighbor which will hardly create a smile, or you make a remark with pathos in it, which will hardly move him; but say the same thing to a great audience of three or four thousand people, and in every man’s heart that feeling is multiplied and intensified by the knowledge that the same feeling is experienced by every other person. You all know how that is. Now, science, the telegraph and the press enabled the emotion of human sorrow, at the time of Garfield’s funeral, to be felt over the entire civilized world. Do you think, speaking of science having injured the cause of religion or Christianity, that the telegraph and the printing-press are the products of cold, hard science—that there is no religion or morality in them? Yet, of what evil passion would they have rendered the service of conveying it to the whole of mankind at once? Could any base man, could any mere intellectual power, could any man of wealth, could any Napoleon, could any conqueror, have swayed mankind as this simple President of ours and his wife did on that day? The power in this universe that makes for evil, and the power in this universe that makes for righteousness, measured their forces. A poor, feeble fiend shot off his feeble bolt; a single human life was stricken down; and, lo, a throb of Divine love thrills a planet!
But, my friends, those of us, young or old, who are enlisted in the service of God’s moral law, who pour out their wealth or do their work in life in obedience to the doctrine, “He that hath done it unto the least of one of these, hath done it unto Me,” works in the service of the Master, who never will be shaken on His throne, and whose rewards are sure.
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.