Now, my friend Dr. Haygood is a wonderfully modest sort of a man. They chose him only a few weeks ago to be a bishop in his church. And they did a good thing. Nearly all that great conference of Southern Methodists voted for this man to take the highest place in their church, notwithstanding all his grand utterances, his earnest words, on many a Northern platform. They indorsed him and said, “Come up higher!” He took over night to think about it, and wrote them a letter declining to take such place as that. He said, “God has called me to be an educator, and an educator I will be.” To a man who turns his back upon a bishopric of the church and then accepts the Secretaryship of a fund to promote the education of the colored people, we can all give the right hand of fellowship. Now, let us all go out of this meeting with a new covenant of love and service for the Master.
It has well been said that the world itself is a musical instrument not yet fully strung; but when every coast shall be peopled by the lovers of our Lord Jesus Christ; when every mountain barrier shall be overcome; when every abyss shall be spanned, for the uninterrupted progress of the King’s highway of holiness, and the people of the earth shall flock together, as in the prophetic vision, to the mountain of the Lord’s house; then this world shall give its sound in harmony with the infinite intelligence, and angels and men shall shout together, “Hallelujah, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.” Between that glad day and us there are years of toil and travail. But there shall come the triumph. Truth is marching on, steadily—slowly, sometimes, through the centuries, but ever marching on, as resistless as the tides, whose each succeeding billow washes further up the sands. It may be
“ ... weary watching, wave on wave;
And yet the tide heaves onward.
We climb like corals, grave on grave,
But pave a path that’s sunward.
We’re beaten back in many a fray;
Yet newer strength we borrow;
And where the vanguard rests to-day,
The rear shall camp to-morrow.”
Let us go forth, with our faces to the stars, and do something each day of our lives to bring the world nearer to Christ, who died for it.
FROM ADDRESS OF REV. A. J. F. BEHRENDS, D.D.
There are a few themes so great, so charged with living importance, that an earnest man never wearies of their study. Like the rays of the sun, they are invested with perpetual freshness and force. Of these themes, the very greatest is the conquest of the world to Christ by the preaching of the Gospel and by the power of the Holy Ghost. But foreign missionary societies, whose special aim it is to carry the Gospel of Christ to the millions of heathenism, are not the exclusive guardians of this great trust. They are the advance guard of the army of conquest, clearing the way and widening the field, but their very presence as the scouts and scattered outposts of Christianity proclaims the presence of a greater army of occupation, pressing close upon their leadership. Back of your foreign work is that of home missions, the religious care of the ignorant, vicious, and neglected within our own borders; back of home missions is the manly culture of our professedly Christian constituency, the care and compact handling of our local churches; back of your local church life and work are those of your separate homes—influences secret, subtle, but all-pervasive, for in the Christian homes are the primary historic sources of all great inspirations and achievements, both for personal character and for social improvement. Far out on the world’s great battle-field, separated from each other by many a league, are the pickets of the army of the Lord; its great and growing supports are in the Christian nations, the Christian churches, the Christian homes.
Reinforcements at any point of the long line must increase the efficiency of the entire body. But the law of solid progress must be from the home, as the training school of personal devotion, through the church and the nation, to the broad world. I am afraid that we have not fairly estimated the importance of the third factor in the solution of the complicated problem of the world’s Christianization. We are not lacking in an appreciation of the value of domestic piety. We are not blind to the evangelistic vocation of the church, though the energetic revival of this conviction may be said to date from the close of the last century, and it has as yet only partially leavened the great body of nominal Christendom. But we are even farther from having mastered the thought that nations are born of a divine purpose, and summoned to missionary service.
God is marching on, not simply for the salvation of individual souls, and their preparation for a future heaven, but for the moral regeneration of nations, and the conversion of the world into a kingdom of righteousness and love. In this great task nations will yet be called to take an active part. Having ceased to be obstructive, having passed beyond the line of moral indifference, they are yet to prove themselves to be among the mightiest of positive forces for the world’s regeneration. And I confess that I have wholly misread the signs of the times if the Anglo-Saxon nationalities are not summoned and destined to bear a conspicuous part in the future of the world’s moral history. For you and for me there can be no call of greater urgency than that this youngest of the nations of the world, in which we are proud to claim our citizenship, whose birth is the marvel of history, whose development is the amazement of our time, whose guidance and discipline seem as clearly providential as were those of ancient Israel, shall be Christian, in order to the assimilation of all the heterogeneous elements of our population, and the consequent use of our united forces for the good of the race. No duty crowds us more closely than that we prove ourselves worthy of our ancestry, equal to our opportunities, building up on this new continent a compact commonwealth, whose glory it shall be that its streams of beneficence gladden all lands and enrich all peoples.
We cannot render the most effective Christian service to the world until we ourselves have become thoroughly leavened with the spirit of the Gospel, and any plan involving the Christianization of the American people must provide for the solution of that great problem with which this Association deals. You have not succeeded in making the white man the Christian he ought to be until he and the black man can clasp hands in the brotherhood of Christ. National unity must remain incomplete until all antagonisms have vanished, and the reconciliation is complete; and our moral influence on the world cannot be what it may be and ought to be until we have amicably and finally settled our domestic difficulties. American patriotism and Christian philanthropy—these are the two great considerations by which the work of the American Missionary Association appeals to the prayerful and practical sympathies of the Christian public.