And so ever at the cry of the strong for help the gospel has had just these three great prime factors to present for the solution of the problems of every age: first, the home, with its priesthood of the father and mother, the sanctuary of the house and the ministrations of family life; secondly, the school; and thirdly, between the home and the school, the church. When our Lord himself, from all possible sources, made selection of the first among the many means he has chosen for the redemption of this world, he chose a trained personality. As the medium for the transmission of truth, no improvement, no change has been found in all the progress of the gospel. By this trained personality—the heart that has been led to live with Christ awhile, and then go forth in his name and filled with his love to the hearts that have place for that love and rootage for that life—this wonderful product of our Christian civilization has everywhere been produced.
And I take it that in no one of the Christian agencies known to us are these three methods so wonderfully unified, so inseparably united, as the home and the church and the school are in the work of the American Missionary Association. They are one and the same. They are indissoluble. The long experience of this Association through this half century of specialized work does fit it, as the report has said, to give an almost commanding opinion in regard to the method of the work to be pursued among these very distinct classes. From the field as well as from the office, and from the experience of those longest at work, we learn that the school finds its ultimate aim only in the church; that, as a Christian agency, we are to work with the school only as a means to the end of building up that body of Christ on the face of the earth which is known by the name of his church. I do not see how the separation to any extent of school and church work can fail to break the unity of administration and hinder the progress of this gloriously on-going work.
I have just one word to add in regard to the reflex influence of this church work upon the home churches. My brethren, there has been a great dearth in candidates for the ministry until very recently. It strikes me that there is no such object-lesson in all our land, inviting men to consecrate themselves to the noblest of purposes, as the heroic ministry of this Association. It needs the heroic element to attract young men. It needs something which is very plainly worth their while to live for and to work for and to consecrate their energies toward, in order to attract them from the allurements of business and material progress to-day. The Indian service of the British Government, and even the service of the great commercial companies, have that element of heroism in it them which has attracted the very best brain and brawn of the English race to India. So it seems to me we will have to hold up these great organizations, which reach down to the hard places of the land, which occupy places that require men to man them, in order to recruit the ranks of our ministers. A man needs to know that he will have to be all the more a man to be anything of a minister now-a-days, to attract him into this great work. And this heroic type of Christian ministry and of Christian manhood and womanhood, shown in the half century of this society's work and existence, is to my mind one of the great attractions upon the best, the strongest, and the most consecrated of those men and women who devote their lives to the service of the church.
Its reflex influence upon every other branch of missionary activity in the church is very plain. It is to-day—I do not hesitate to say it—the hero of our organizations. It takes far less stamina, far less consecration, I believe, to go to India, or China, or Japan than it does to come out at the call of God and of this agency of His divine Providence and enter many a field manned by this Association. In the personnel of our theological seminaries I have long noticed that the choicest spirits, the men with the stamp of courage upon them, those who are not working for place, but for Christ, and him alone, are the men who take up this work. They are the men who, when they come back to the schools of the prophets, thrill our hearts as no other men do with the story of the conquests of Christ in their own hearts as well as out in the hard fields which they cultivate for his sake; and there will be no more glowing missionary meeting of the seminary with which I have the honor to be connected than when the reports of this meeting shall be carried back to the brethren. The prayers of the class-rooms, the prayers of the missionary meetings, the yearnings of the hearts of the men who are preparing to follow in the footsteps of those who have heroically led the way, are the wires for these unseen and yet never unused electric currents which unite the North with the South, the frontier with the citadels of our common Christianity.
We know very well the danger of a false education, of a school without A church, education without evangelization, a university without the heart of Christ beating in it. Great are the joy and confidence felt in the hearts of the constituency of this body that school and church are so inextricably interwoven with each other that if you plant a school it will develop into a church, and if the church comes it will eventually and inevitably re-act, and in a most blessed way in spiritual and often in material resources upon the school. We give largely to the school because there is a home beneath it and a church around it.
I regard these churches of the American Missionary Association with their evangelistic and nurturing agencies, prime sociological factors for bringing in Christ's dear kingdom in this land of ours. It is their mission not only to remedy evils, not only to restore rights, but to be great constructive agencies of a new Christian civilization. For when Christ came, he came preaching, not the gospel of the individual, not a gospel simply to save that man, that woman, that child, but the gospel of the Kingdom, the gospel which this great Association so effectually preaches and not only preaches but applies and administers as well. And the time will not be far hence when this whole subject of the environment of the spiritual life will force itself so imperatively upon the study of the churches at home that they will take the type of their work and the inspiration for their new developments from the leadership of this and kindred missionary organizations which have set them these most brilliant examples of being ahead of the thought and the feeling of their day.
ADDRESS OF REV. C.W. HIATT.
More than fifty years ago De Tocqueville gave utterance to these prophetic words: "The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future existence of the United States arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory." I think that that prophecy has been iterated and reiterated before this convention until we ought finally to let it rest as an established fact. I believe we are menaced by these eight millions of people, who are twice as great in number as were the people of the United Colonies when they broke from the mightiest naval and military power in history; but I believe that the peril that we are menaced by in the presence of this black man arises from his perils. There is a peril from the black man, but it is a peril secondary to the peril of the black man upon this soil. I do not apprehend any uprising by Uncle Tom; but Uncle Tom is dead, and his son is here and his friends of a younger generation. These men are being gnarled and corrupted and imbruted, and are massing themselves, touching elbows one with another; and under the influences of the age in which we live are becoming a factor in our civilization which, unless we modify and change it under our Christian teaching, will render our Southland like that island on the north of the Caribbean Sea where to-day it is said that the name of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the original defender and liberator, is a hissing and a reproach.
It was a fine augury of the future when the work for the ex-slave began at Fortress Monroe in the atmosphere of religion. Mary Peake, meeting the advancing multitudes of refugees, gospel in heart and primer in hand, as by divine suggestion, laid the pattern of all our succeeding toil. Side by side of mutual helpfulness God has placed the alphabet and decalogue, the teacher and the preacher, the school-house and the church. "What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder."