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._
* * * * *
THE REWARD OF WORK FOR THE LOWLY.—I remember to have read of a
traveler who was shipwrecked. He seemed to have been a dissolute,
young Englishman, though of culture enough to read and write. He
was held captive on one of the South Sea islands for several years,
the natives keeping him out of sight whenever a vessel was near-by.
They saw that he was of a superior culture to themselves, and they
had built him a hut and given him everything to make him happy.
They waited on his instructions and he taught them many things,
and for years he had blessed them as much as a dissolute, immoral
man could. Finally, however, he managed to escape. One day he saw
a ship approaching the island, and he got behind some rocks and
put off in a canoe. The natives saw him and made after him. It
was a race for life. He finally succeeded in getting so near the
vessel that they threw him a rope and pulled him on board—a strange
looking creature, all his clothes in tatters and his hair unshorn.
He was in great agitation, but as soon as he could speak he told
them his story, and there was this fleet of canoes crowding around
the vessel to corroborate his account. And the natives took up a
wail, that he was going away from them, he, their only link to the
civilized world, was going to leave them, and their hearts were
full of sorrow. They wanted him to come back and give them one
farewell embrace; but he would not trust himself in their midst.
But they did this: the sailors tied a rope around him and lowered
him over the side of the ship, and then the natives rowed by in
their canoes and kissed the poor scoundrel’s feet in token of
gratitude.
Oh, what a blessing it is to be permitted to lift others! How
thankful those colored people at the South are for their teachers
and helpers! It is a success, thank God! See the gratitude that
swells up in their hearts; see their eagerness to follow their
instructions; see the endeavors they make to copy the examples that
are set before them.
* * * We are enabled to be personal sharers in this work; and we
can, by prayer and alms, thus express to Him who is over all, God,
blessed forever, our thanksgiving.—_Rev. A. H. Plumb._
* * * * *
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.—[This veteran friend of the Freedman, after
enlarging upon the evils to which the country is exposed by
prevailing ignorance and vice, continued as follows:]
Is there any light? When Judge Tourgee wrote his first book, “The
Fool’s Errand,” there appeared to be a sort of hopelessness in all
the air; but the next book, “Bricks without Straw,” let the light
through the crevices. He discovered and unfolded the remedy. It is
educate! Educate the masses by educating the children! It is the
fear of God and the love of man in active operation which make the
individual his brother’s keeper, his brother’s helper. It is by
expanding the individual conscience to take in fully and largely
his individual responsibility, and re-awakening it among those who
are more or less enlightened already.
The American Missionary Association is the mother of a big
household. She is pure, sweet-tempered, patient and persevering.
She entered the field of contest early and is proud of her scars.
She has stood at the doors of church pews which would not open,
and endured the contempt and derision of the unthinking in her
school-house receptions; her sons have lost arms and legs and lives
in her service; but she looks ever forward for her final reward,
when vast multitudes shall rise up to call her blessed. My friends,
give help to this Association, and you help in the most direct way
the cause of Universal Education.
But let me say a word for Howard University. It has received
pronounced commendation from both the friends and the enemies of
colored men. A representative friend says of it: “It recognizes the
complete manhood of a man and the complete womanhood of a woman.”
An enemy says: “It makes gentlemen and ladies of niggers!”
It duly claims for itself equality of rights for all men, and
limits knowledge not to color but to capacity. May the Lord bless
and prosper it till its students and graduates shall be honored in
all the world!
The Fisk University will ever be memorable for the wonderful
struggle, perseverance and final success of the Jubilee Singers.
Theirs is the history, in a brief compass, of their race. It is
a prophecy to which we of this generation should take heed. Here
were slavery, emancipation, want; then journeyings almost without
hope—none except in God; then the dawn, broadening and widening
till the full day came! Turned out of hotels in hate; pushed from
railways in disgust and blasphemy; then received with delight and
honor by kings and princes, queens and princesses everywhere; men,
women and children crying with joy at the plaint of their song, and
clapping their hands by the thousands in their praise!
May we not take this bright history as a harbinger of good—as a
spur to more and more activity to the pupils’ foster-mother, the
American Missionary Association—as a call to individual duty on
the part of us who make up its membership—yea, as in some degree
an offset to the grievous evils that afflict our land? Ah, may we
not, resolving to be better and do better ourselves, look steadily
forward, and, like your own poet, say:
“I have not seen, and may not see,
My hopes for man take form in fact;
But God will give the victory
In due time; in that faith I act”?
—_Gen. O. O. Howard._
* * * * *
ELEVATION OF THE DEGRADED.—When I received an invitation to speak
at this meeting, I had arranged my business engagements for the
week, and I sent word back that I could not come; but I was asked
to reconsider it, and so I have canceled two of my engagements for
the purpose of being here, not that I am to interest you with a
speech, but to show my earnest love for the great movement carried
on by this society.
When a man steps out from his own specialty, he generally makes
a failure of it; and I don’t know but I shall make a failure in
attempting to speak to you on this theme to-night.
But this meeting and all these meetings are a grand contradiction
to the infidel utterance, that those who love God the best love
their fellow-men the least. We give such a sentence as that the
flat contradiction as an abominable and outrageous falsehood. What
is it that prompts men to endeavor to ameliorate the condition of
their fellow-men? There is no benevolence worth anything that does
not come from the New Testament Christianity. Love for Christ, it
is that which induces us to bring those who are straying away into
the fold. And this is the idea of this society, if I understand it.
Now you know as well as I do that a reformed drunkard can operate
upon a drunkard better than a man who never was an intemperate man;
and a converted thief will do more good among thieves than a man
who has always been honest; and one who has been converted from the
lowest grade of sin can go down into the very depths to lift up
those who are as debased as he or she was.
With regard to educating the colored people, I have heard people
say: “O, there is no use trying to educate them.” I have heard the
remark that they are “a stupid lot.” No, they are not! If you know
anything about them, you know they are not stupid. They will say
wonderful things. I grant you a good many of them are ignorant;
but I tell you, although they may be ignorant, utterly ignorant,
yet you will hear brighter, smarter things from them than you will
hear from the ignorant in the North, as a general thing. Why, what
do you think of the negro who, when asked why he didn’t fight in
the time of the war, said, “Because I don’t want to fight.” “Well,
but they are fighting for the negro.” “I know they are; but did you
ever see two dogs fighting for a bone?” “Yes.” “Well, did you ever
see the bone fight?”
There is something, I say, in the education of the colored
man—though why they call him “colored,” I don’t know. A man
was once asked if he was colored; he said no, he was “born
so”—something to build on in themselves. And then there is their
desire for education. We here in the North can hardly conceive the
earnest desire of those people to learn. When Straight University
was burned, I received a letter asking me for some books; and I had
the privilege of sending some two or three hundred volumes to them.
I was told in the letter that on the very morning after the fire
the scholars assembled, and, standing among the ruins, they sang,
“Hold the Fort,” and then formed themselves into classes all around
about the ruins that they might not lose their lessons.
I have an idea—I shall get bewildered here a little, because I
am talking about education, and I never was educated myself—that
education may not make a man a better Christian, but it will make
him a more useful Christian. One poor woman, living in a smoky
cabin, when asked how she could endure to live in such a smoke,
said: “Why, honey, I’se thankful to de good Lord to get anything to
make a smoke of.” There was a good deal of ignorance, but there was
true thanksgiving. Another one said: “God whips you and leaves you
alone sometimes, to see if you won’t work; but la, it’s just like
a baby—as soon as you cry He hears ye!” Some of the most beautiful
sentiments have been uttered by those who are the most ignorant;
but when we are appointing men to preach the Gospel, my opinion is
that education is needed, and we must so arrange the machinery of
the American Missionary Association that hundreds of thousands of
men who are now waiting the opportunity to preach the everlasting
Gospel intelligently shall be brought into the field of labor.
O, it is a glorious work, this lifting, lifting up of the low, this
ministering to those who are poor, this helping those who have no
helper! It is a grand work, and I thank God that there is such an
Association as this, stretching out its hands and its arms in every
direction to lay hold on those for whom the world has cared so
little.—_John B. Gough, Esq._
* * * * *
THE NEGRO WORTH SAVING.—It may be put down as a sure thing that our
estimate of men, in the long run, determines what we do for them.
Our theories of human nature are the measure of our philanthropies.
I am not going to sacrifice much for any man whom I reckon as
utterly and hopelessly insignificant. Christian philanthropy is
not a sentiment, nor an emotion, but a practical principle; and
principles are ideas vitalized and set in movement by convictions.
Suppose, for instance, that you assume that men are incapable and
cannot be made capable of self-government. I think your political
philanthropy will not take a very democratic type. If a colored
man—black, red, or whatever—is not fit, and cannot be made fit, for
the political suffrage, then we shall have white men’s suffrage,
and the question of fitness will inevitably determine the whole
matter. If negro suffrage had any rational ground, and was not a
wild and desperate venture, it was grounded in the theory that
the negro could be made capable for the exercise of the political
suffrage, and the men who had faith enough in him to give him the
suffrage, assumed that there would be found men who would have
faith enough in him to fit him for the exercise thereof.
Again, suppose you assume that the Christian churches are
incompetent to manage their own ecclesiastical affairs within the
limits of a true Christian and ecclesiastical fellowship. I think
your ecclesiastical fellowship will not take a very Congregational
type. Of course, we must have a strong central government that
will manage the affairs of such incompetence. It has been assumed
that the colored people of the South are unfit for the superior
intelligence of our Congregationalism, or that Congregationalism is
not sufficiently spectacular and sensational to fit the primitive
wants of the colored people. I will not characterize such heresy as
that as it seems to me it ought to be characterized. At any rate, I
think it a most beggarly begging of the whole question; and if it
be true, then the occupation, ecclesiastically at least, of this
society is gone.
The truth is, friends, our ecclesiastical, like our political
philanthropy, is grounded on faith in men—intelligent, Christian
faith in the manhood, capacities and possibilities of men; and
when that faith is gone, the bottom is out and we must have new
foundations.
Or suppose we assume that the children in our homes are only
animals, or are fit only for the mechanical drudgery of life. I
think our domestic and educational philanthropy will not take, to
say the least of it, a very civilized type. Yung Pow says that it
is of far more importance whether an angel or a devil educate the
child than whether a learned doctor or a simpleton teach him; that
is, the virtue that educates is of far more importance than the
intelligence that instructs—which, in a certain way, of course, is
true. But what is the use of debating the relative importance of
virtue and intelligence where they are co-ordinate? The highest
virtue demands intelligence, and the highest intelligence demands
virtue. But suppose it to be true that the child is very likely to
find the doctor or the simpleton, as well as the angel or the evil
demon, what then? Of course, we want the angel in our homes and
in our schools; but I submit that we want the doctor, too, or his
equivalent. We have got to look out for the devil in our homes and
in our schools; but I submit that we have got to look out for the
simpleton, too. It is not virtue, it is not goodness alone that
educates; it is intelligence as well; and what we want is a broad,
noble, manly and Christian intelligence that estimates aright the
manhood possibilities of every man—that will assume the Christian
standard of estimate, which is not, I submit, the materialist’s
estimate, nor the secularist’s estimate, nor the politician’s
estimate, nor the Pharisee’s estimate. We want a faith in men
that will not prejudge either case against them, and undertake
to determine on _à priori_ grounds just the precise measure of
men’s capacity, and just what they are able to accomplish. We want
a faith that understands that we are not dealing with material
substances nor merely mechanical aptitudes, but with a higher range
of powers that are to fit the coming man or woman for a worthy
service in the social and political world, and in the kingdom of
our God.—_Rev. L. O. Brastow, D.D._
* * * * *
A GLANCE AT THE SOUTH.—There is something interesting, as you go
through the South at the present time, in watching the progress of
events. It is a region, speaking of it as a whole, that strikes
the Northern man with many peculiarities. One is, where is the
population that made that stern resistance to the Northern arms?
The cities are all small; there are no villages; whence came that
force that withstood us so many years, and withstood us with such
might? And then again, you are struck with many things so different
from what we find at the North. You may ride whole days and find
very few Southern people with whom you can have any opportunity of
conversing. There is usually a car on the train which the colored
people devote to themselves, but they only ride from station to
station. You find but few of the white people traveling, and yet
since the close of the war there has been a visible growth; and I
am a firm believer in a new South that is dawning. There is coming
to be a gradually renewed intercourse between the people of the
North and the people of the South, and step by step we shall find
new interests awakening and a closer linking than there has been
for many a year.
But one of the most interesting phases of the South, from whatever
stand-point, is the colored population. They are a remarkable
people. They number six and a half millions by the last census.
You know that it used to be said that when slavery should take
away its fostering care, we should find large inroads made upon
their numbers, and like the Indians, they would gradually waste
and disappear. But what is the story of the two censuses of 1870
and 1880? The increase of the whole population of this country for
the past ten years has been a little over 30 per cent. Of this,
the white population has increased 28 per cent. and a fraction
over, and the colored population 34 per cent. and a fraction over.
So that, although the white population has been benefited by the
enormous immigration, of which we so often speak and boast, yet by
almost six per cent. the colored population has won in the race.
I met the president of a railroad within a month, who has recently
constructed a long road in the South against time. I asked him,
“With what help did you construct this road?” He said, “With
colored men entirely.” “Were they satisfactory?” “Entirely so.”
“Would they do as much work per man as the railroad laborers of the
North?” “Not quite as much per man, but there was no danger of a
strike. They were cheerful, hearty and willing, and I was entirely
satisfied with them. I completed my road many days before the time
given me, with every man in the South prophesying it was impossible
to accomplish that result.”
I said to a policeman not long since in the city of Savannah, “Have
you any colored men on your force?” “Not one; and if a colored man
were placed here, every one of us would resign.” I then asked him
about the colored people in the South and in that city. He said,
“They are orderly and well-behaved; we have no fault to find with
them.” “How are they getting on in the schools?” “They are beating
our white children in the public schools.” “How is that?” “Well,
our people do not altogether patronize the public schools, and the
colored mothers take much more pains to have their children prompt
and constant in attendance than the white mothers; and when the
children of this generation come to stand up face to face ten years
hence, we are going to be put to shame by the intelligence of many
a black boy that to-day walks our streets barefooted and ragged.”
That is the statement of a man who said he would resign if a
colored man was put upon the police force of which he was a member.
There are many things about the colored people we must be patient
with. They are ignorant, and ignorant beyond what we realize. It is
an ignorance which we must not be surprised at; it is an ignorance
which we must be patient with. It is our duty to give them
education—and not merely the duty of us who are here to-night, not
merely of this generation, but of generations to come. It is a duty
that is patriotic beyond what we are apt to consider. At the close
of the war we gave to the colored population the ballot; but it has
been the proud claim of New England always that back of the ballot
must be intelligence, and that it is not safe in a republic that
he who casts the vote that decides the fate of the nation shall
cast a vote that he cannot read. Yet to-day there is that enormous
vote of the South, a vote which the man casting it cannot read. We
sometimes wonder that, in a state like South Carolina, where the
colored population is almost double the white, it is possible that
they should be deprived of the franchise; but you can judge how
timid a man is as to his rights when he cannot read his ballot nor
count it after it is cast. Therefore, as I say, that question must
be a slow one as it works itself out; but it is as citizens of this
nation, as patriots, that we must see to it that intelligence is
furnished to that people at the earliest possible day, to enable
them to both read and count the ballots which they cast.
_—Henry D. Hyde, Esq._
[THE COLORED MAN.—Fifteen years ago Gen. O. O. Howard asked
a colored school, “What message will you send to the friends
North?” Richard Wright, at that time a lad of thirteen,
responded, “_Tell ’em we’s risin’ sir_.” Mr. Wright has since
graduated from Atlanta University, and for several years has
been engaged in teaching and editing a local paper in Georgia.
Those who heard his admirable address had abundant evidence
that his statement has been verified in his own case, at least.
We regret that we can give our readers so small a part of it.]
You cannot imagine how much it rejoices me to stand before those
who helped to shape the events whose tremendous logic forced the
great patriot and philanthropist, Abraham Lincoln, to sign that
necessary war measure which resulted in striking the shackles from
the four million unfortunate human beings whom I have the honor to
represent at this meeting.
I come to tell you that your labors have not been in vain. The
colored man, whose cause you have espoused, is worthy of your
efforts. Numerically, the colored people form about one-seventh of
this great nation. Their natural increase is greater, probably,
than that of any other branch of the American family. In the
South they constitute nearly one-half of the population, and in
the cotton states even more. Nine-tenths of the manual or menial
labor of the South is done by colored men. Freedom has not made
them lazy, as has been stated by their enemies. Besides making
ten million more bales of cotton than during any fifteen years
of slavery, they have, during the last fifteen years of freedom,
acquired in the South over one hundred million dollars worth of
property. That eagerness for an education which characterized them
when your first missionaries were put in the field has not left
them. In 1878, Gen. Eaton reported as being in the public schools
of the South 675,150 colored children, and about 100 schools
devoted to secondary, normal, collegiate and professional training
among the six and a-half million colored citizens. Such, in brief,
is the strength of a people who are to help shape the destiny of
this republic.
Ignorance, intellectual and moral, is our main weakness, a curse
for which our forefathers were not responsible, but for which we,
of the rising generation, are compelled to atone under the manacles
of political proscription and religious and social ostracism.
It could hardly be expected that the slaveholders of the South
would in their straitened circumstances undertake the education of
those whom they had looked upon as their property taken violently
from them. So the North, as it has abolished slavery, must also
abolish ignorance.
The first need of the colored man is Christian training. The old
preachers, fettered by slave habits and filled with superstition
and sectarianism, will hardly be able to make their flocks much
better than themselves. The colored people need spiritual advisers
whose lips and lives express the holy gospel they profess. There
are in the South thousands of colored preachers, controlling large
congregations, too, who are unable to read correctly a single text
from the book which they undertake to expound to their followers.
The colored people are naturally religious and nominally Christian.
They are ready to be led by the Christian teacher or the scheming
Romanist, by the true patriot or the plotting demagogue. As clay
in the hand of the potter, they can be made vessels fit for the
Master’s kingdom, or they can be left to grow more vicious and more
corrupt, and thus be lost to Christianity.
The colored man needs the facilities for becoming educated. He
has the inclination, but not the means, to make a good and useful
citizen. The A. M. A. has done much, and will, I hope, do more to
arouse this whole nation to see the threatening danger that lurks
in the ignorant masses of the South, and to feel the necessity
of removing the danger by educating this element. The black man
is not to blame for his hard lot, nor is he of his own accord an
American; but 250 years of toil and hardship have wedded him to
this soil, and here he means to stay. Docile and tractable, his
industry has made the Southern wilderness productive and beautiful.
He has produced the cotton, tobacco and cane of this country. Any
attempt to supply his place as a laborer in the South will prove
utterly futile. He is there a laborer, citizen and voter, part and
parcel of the American nation, and I trust the American nation
will recognize him as such. The full, complete recognition of
the right and privilege of the colored man to be and do whatever
any other citizen is and does, is what the republic must settle
down to. The question whether the colored man shall live in this
republic, on terms of perfect equality, protected in the enjoyment
of every privilege and immunity accorded to any other American,
is a question which has postponed the progress of the South, and
will continue to until the nation shall have solved this problem.
Sooner or later the republic must see its solution. Like Banquo’s
ghost, down at your beck or wane it will not. It will present
itself at your churches, your theatres, your legislative councils
and your court rooms. It is the one question that will not and
cannot be settled until it is settled rightly. It is a question
embracing the development of an irrepressible race, one that cannot
be starved out, driven out or killed out. When the people of the
South, together with the people of the North, shall approach
this subject, under the guidance of intelligent reason and an
enlightened conscience, they will see that the true way to solve
this vexing question is to educate the colored man and treat him
as a citizen. But, aided or unaided, helped or hindered, the negro
will have an influence in the government of this country, and there
is now no power in the arm of the American people to keep him down.
He will rise to help make this republic the grandest and noblest
that has ever dotted the face of this globe, or he will sleep on
a common burying-ground with his white oppressors, amid the ruins
and ashes of this republic. Inseparably united with the fate and
fortune of America, the words of the Hebrew maiden to Naomi express
his adhesion to the white man. “Whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people,
and thy God my God; where thou diest I will die, and there will I
be buried.”—_Richard Wright, Esq._
* * * * *
AFRICA AND THE AFRICANS.—Mr. President: Africa and the Africans is
the subject assigned me. But before entering upon it directly, it
is fitting, perhaps, that I should say that for the last six and
a half years I have been in Great Britain as the Secretary of the
Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society, of which the Earl of Shaftesbury
is President and Lord Kinnaird is Treasurer. The British people
have been largely interested in aiding the American Missionary
Association in preparing and sending out to Africa colored
teachers, missionaries and general helpers for that great work
so wonderfully opened up in that dark land. And it is well known
that the Jubilee Singers, who went through Great Britain under
the patronage of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, or we may say its
President, the noble Earl of Shaftesbury, received very generous
aid for Fisk University from our British friends. They have also
aided liberally in the support of colored missionaries at the Mendi
Mission on the West Coast of Africa. But latterly they have become
greatly interested in the Arthington Mission, projected for the
Upper Nile valley, toward which field two white missionaries have
gone forth, Rev. H. M. Ladd, and Dr. Snow, of Western New York. For
this mission, Robert Arthington, Esq., of Leeds, England, has given
$15,000; others in Great Britain have given $15,000 more; so we
have $30,000 of the $50,000 needed for the mission from our British
friends. One London gentleman, after hearing a statement of the
case in Scotland, sent for the speaker and gave him $5,000, as he
said, instead of a legacy. Note that. A young man, who is a butler
in a gentleman’s family, sent at another time $50. When asked if
that was not too much for him he said, “I gave £10 a little ago,
to help a friend out of a difficulty, and I can give £10 for the
good of a vast continent.” A good woman, who had been a governess
for some years, also handed to the Secretary £10 for herself, and
her sister gave £10 more; and they agreed to give together £15
($75) a year right on for colored missionaries for Africa. These
were deeds of self-sacrifice. Are there not generous young men,
and older men, and noble women in America, who will do as well for
that dark continent, which our ancestors so cruelly plundered? We
need, _we must have_ $20,000 more, very soon, for that Arthington
Mission. We want a steamer on the Upper Nile waters also. We must
besides have a steamer, the John Brown memorial steamer, for the
Mendi Mission on the West Coast at once. In that country there are
no roads, there are no beasts of burden. Human beings have to be
the carriers of all burdens for hundreds of miles. And our dear
missionaries have fallen, many of them, in early death, in those
perilous journeys through swamp and jungle, on their errands of
love to the poor suffering millions of Africa. We cannot believe
that their friends and our friends will hesitate and delay their
giving for this steamer for the increase of good and the saving of
precious lives.
If we recall the abuse and the needs of Africa, we can but see and
feel our duty and privilege in this connection. Africa has been
for five hundred years the hunting-ground for the bondmen of the
whole world, and to this day the slave trade covers an area nearly
equal to all Europe, in Northern, Central and Southern Africa.
This accursed trade is to the East, and mainly to the Mohammedan
countries; and it is said that from some of the Eastern ports a
traveler may wend his way, without a guide, into the very heart of
Africa, by following the line of human bones and the skin-covered
skeletons of the poor slave victims who have fallen in that
terrible march to the sea. And that this crime should have been
permitted by the Christian nations down to the closing part of this
19th century is an astounding fact! And it ought not to need an
argument to show any man that a people who still demand slaves, and
buy human beings therefor, ought to be hounded out of the very pale
of the civilized nations; for it is generally known that for every
slave delivered in any country, four and often six human beings
have fallen in death in the attempts to capture them, or in the
cruel journey to their doom. And this trade will never be stopped
till the better nations learn to treat the demand for slaves as a
huge crime, as well as the act of supply. To meet and combat this
crime boldly and persistently in both demand and supply is the call
of God to the Christian nations out on the morning and the midnight
air.
Now we may do both. Africa is open to us, and travelers are
penetrating her vast territories; the steamer’s screw and
paddle-wheels of reform are stirring her waters and also the
thought of her people; commerce is tapping her mines of wealth;
geographers are correcting her maps; scientists are studying her
various climates and testing her remedial agents. Christianity,
of which it was said in a meeting of the International Society
for Africa, made up of distinguished travelers, learned and
scientific men, “History shows that Christianity has special
virtue for rescuing savage races from barbarism, causing
them rapidly to over-step the first barriers in the way of
civilization”—Christianity, we say, is now challenging Paganism,
the Moslem curse, and the accursed slave trade, on that long
plundered continent of Africa. And now we have a potent factor
for the work not available a little ago. We have more than six
millions of Africa’s sable children, from which people we may
select educated Christian young men and women for the great work
given us to do. And these are the people for Africa. They can live
in hot climates; they are by blood relations and common sufferings
in sympathy with the people to be reached and saved; they can touch
the heart, stir the thought and lift up their own race as no other
people can ever do it.
For this they are developing a peculiar type of piety on a grander
scale than we have yet seen among the Anglo-Saxon race. The Pauline
we have had—the intellect and conscience carried by an intense
conviction of duty, so that the man would go to the stake for
his principles. But the loving, trustful type of piety belongs
to these sable children of the sunnier and more genial climes.
Shall we, then, know our day and dare to take our opportunity
with these ex-slaves for the redemption of Africa from ignorance,
superstition, slavery, war and woe? We want the John Brown mission
steamer. We want, we must have, in addition to all the generous
and noble gifts for our Southern work, the sum of $20,000, already
pledged by the committee of the A. M. A., for the Arthington
Mission in the Upper Nile valley, frightfully ravaged by the
villainous slave trade to this very day!
Who, then, of all God’s dear people, _will rally to this standard,
and come at the call of the Divine King to this momentous work,
with hand and heart and money, to take possession of that vast
continent of Africa, with its 200,000,000 of people, for Christ,
and for the good of all nations_?—_Rev. O. H. White, D.D., Sec. F.
M. A. Soc., London, Eng._
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