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 FOR THE COLORED PEOPLE; 
 
 A DISCOURSE 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE 
 
 Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
 
 IN BEHALF OF 
 
 The American Missionary Association, 
 
 BY 
 
 Rhv. r. s. storrs, d.d. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 HOI/r HROTHEKS. Printers, 17-27 Vandewater St, 
 1800. 
 
 
HIS Discourse was recently preached by Dr. Storrs in his own 
 
 pulpit, in presenting the claims of the American Missionary 
 Association for the annual collection in its behalf in the Church of 
 the Pilgrims. The Discourse was reported, and printed in one of the 
 daily papers of this city, and in this form it fell under the eye 
 of a benevolent gentleman in Connecticut, deeply interested in 
 the Christian education of the colored people, who was so im- 
 pressed with the great value of the address that he has furnished 
 the means to print a large edition for general circulation. The 
 Association publishes it most gladly, as an eminently wise and 
 timely utterance on one of America’s great problems. 
 
DISCOURSE. 
 
 Psalm xxii, ^7, 28. — All the ends of the world 
 shall renmnber, and tur7i unto the Lord ; and all the 
 kindreds of the natio7is shall worship before Thee. For 
 the ki7igdo77i is the Lord's ; a7id He is the Gove7'7ior a77iong 
 the 7 iatio 7 is." 
 
 I do not know that there is any word in the ancient 
 Scripture which, it seems tome, must have been more sur- 
 prising, almost bewildering, to the minds of those to 
 whom it was addressed, than this word must have been. 
 “The kingdom is the Lord’s, and He is the Governor 
 among the nations ; therefore, the ends of the earth shall 
 remember and turn unto Him.” The Israelite mio^ht 
 easily and properly feel that his own nation was sheltered 
 by the providence of God, as it had been built up by His 
 counsel and power ; and that He was the God of that 
 people, and the Governor in the midst of it. But how 
 with the Assyrian kingdom, not recognizing Jehovah at 
 all : with the helmeted figure on winged globe, and the 
 terrific winged human bull as the symbol of brutal 
 though intelligent swiftness, fierceness and power, giving 
 the clearest impressions of God ? How with the Egyptian 
 kingdom, a nation out of which Israel had been brought. 
 
4 
 
 and which reared its majestic and undecaying monoliths 
 as its supreme tribute to the gods, and graved its start- 
 ling hieroglyphics upon them ? How with the Macedon- 
 ian kingdom ? or with the Roman afterwards — the Roman, 
 which at last conquered the Jewish nation, which pos- 
 sessed its land, and which recognized no Jehovah but the 
 thundering Jove who had wrapped the city in whirlwinds, 
 and smitten with lightning the bronze wolf in the capitol? 
 How could it be said that God was the Governor among 
 these nations, and that by reason of that fact the whole 
 world at last should be brought to turn to Him? It 
 must have been an astonishing statement : not improb- 
 ably regarded, I think, by those who heard it as the sug- 
 gestion of poetic inspiration — an inspiration of holy and 
 devout fancy, but hardly, perhaps, the assertion of a su- 
 preme truth of reason and of history. 
 
 Yet there is no other affirmative word of the Scripture 
 which has been more emphatically illustrated in the prog- 
 ress of history from the time it was spoken until now. 
 That Roman Empire which had swept out across the 
 civilized world, and had finally embraced under its domi- 
 nation immense tracts of territory inhabited only by bar- 
 barous peoples, which had conquered Palestine and set 
 up its standards in the Castle of Antonia, was after all 
 sent, as we now see, in the providence of God, that an 
 open way might be offered to the messengers of the Gos- 
 pel ; that commerce might be expanded ; and that wher- 
 ever the Roman law extended, and wherever the Roman 
 officers were found, there the word and the messengers 
 
of the meek Master whom Pilate had crucified might 
 equally have place, and be equally at home. Then, when 
 the time came, that was broken up, to form the separate 
 nations which have since possessed, occupied, and in many 
 respects certainly glorified, the continent over which its 
 sway extended. It never was more clear than it is to- 
 day that every nation has been, and is, under the govern- 
 ment of God ; and that every nation has a work to do 
 for Him in carrying forward His plans on earth, and ex- 
 tending His kingdom of righteousness and peace. 
 
 This is all the more evident as nations become more 
 compactly organized, and show themselves more conspic- 
 uously the chief persons in modern history. In the 
 earlier time individuals had a vast, even sometimes a cos- 
 mical, range of influence. Now', they have not. Bernard, 
 in the twelfth century, spoke to all Western Christendom. 
 It made no difference w'hether he were of French or Ger- 
 man, it w’ould not if he had been of British, extraction. 
 His word was heard throughout Christendom. Luther 
 afterward spoke to the world, the monk of Wittemberg 
 shaking the continent, and sending the influence of his 
 truth further than he himself imagined, or ever knew wfliile 
 he lingered on earth. To a certain extent the same 
 thing was true of the Wesleys, even, in their later day ; 
 they affected not England only, but this continentas well, 
 and their influence was as wdde as the English language. 
 But now individuals are only important to the w^orld at 
 large as connected with nations. They do not speak di- 
 rectly to mankind, but to their ow'n peoples, and through 
 
6 
 
 those peoples exert their influence upon the world. This 
 is true of the foremost statesmen of our time. It was true 
 of Cavour, in Italy — a man of immense political sagacity 
 and foresight, of the rarest culture and tact in statesman- 
 ship, and of unsurpassed power both in the apprehension of 
 political truth and in the statement of it. It is true, as 
 well, of Castelar, in Spain, at this hour. We know little 
 of him, except as he is connected with the progress of 
 liberal ideas and administration in his own nation. The 
 same is true, even, of Bismarck : largely, through Ger- 
 many, but not directly, affecting us. And the same is true 
 as well of Gladstone, in England; whose words we read 
 always with interest and usually with admiration, but 
 whose influence is exerted upon history through the gov- 
 ernment of which he has been so long a distinguished and 
 a vastly useful member and minister. 
 
 And this is to be true in time to come : that individ- 
 uals will lose prominence, and lose in comparative range 
 of power, except as their influence is connected with the 
 development and education of the nations to which they 
 respectively belong. The nations themselves are more 
 and more, as I have said, coming to the front as the great 
 Persons, by whom the future is to be moulded, by whom 
 God is to be glorified in the final and universal establish- 
 ment of His kingdom on the earth. Every nation has its 
 work to do for this end; and every nation will be strong, 
 and widely influential, precisely in proportion as it does 
 this work with keener zeal and a higher consecration. 
 
 So our own nation has its work to do, within itself, 
 
and abroad, beyond itself, in testifying to the truth of 
 God, and manifesting His love and light to the peoples of 
 the world. But first, within itself ; and this work, an im- 
 mense work, has been in part accomplished, while in 
 large part it yet remains to be performed. 
 
 One element in it, and the first one which I would 
 now refer to, was the establishment of itself as a separate 
 nation on the earth ; and that was in some respects the 
 most difficult and perilous part of the entire work which 
 has been given to it to do. It seemed incredible at the 
 time — we do not realize the apparent impossibility of the 
 achievement — that a small people, numbering in all per- 
 haps three millions, scattered along the narrow strip bor- 
 dering upon the Atlantic coast, with every harbor acces- 
 sible to foreign ships, constantly liable to be overrun at 
 many points by foreign troops, should assert its inde- 
 pendence, and establish its independence, against the 
 mightiest naval power, and one of the mightiest military 
 powers, then on the face of the earth: — a power which 
 fought with relentless determination to conquer what had 
 seemed at first a mere local insurrection. It looked al- 
 most like a hen fighting a horse. It seemed like a boy 
 with a blow-gun, or a sling, meeting the front of arrayed 
 cannon, for this small people, scattered so remotely over 
 this scanty strip of territory, without intimate alliances 
 between the separated parts of it, to face, and finally 
 to conquer in effect, this mighty nation. Yet it was ac- 
 complished, as we know, largely through the wisdom, the 
 military sagacity, the undaunted fortitude and the abso- 
 
8 
 
 lute self-possession, of Washington, on whom the whole 
 nation rested at different critical and threatening times, 
 and without whom, apparently, that great struggle could 
 not have been successful. He seems as distinctly a provi- 
 dential man as St. Paul had been in his day, or Luther in 
 his day. 
 
 Then came the second work : that of providing a new 
 Government for the new people now struggling toward 
 nationhood — a Government from which all elements of 
 monarchical or aristocratical prerogative and power should 
 be excluded ; which should be absolutely popular, and yet 
 permanent ; which should be radically and essentially 
 democratic, while yet so conservative in the frame of its 
 constitution, in the organic law, that there should be the 
 assurance in the minds of those who founded the govern- 
 ment of its long continuance, of its practical perpetuity 
 on earth. And that work was accomplished, in connec- 
 tion with the wisdom, the foresight and the fidelity of 
 those who at that time were the leaders in our national 
 councils; a work, looking back to which, in the detail of 
 its history, we see that at different points it came near ab- 
 solute wreck, while yet it finally emerged, under the 
 kindly guidance and government of the providence of 
 God, into wonderful completeness — a completeness which 
 astonished even those who had wrought it, and which re- 
 mained after they had gone. 
 
 Then came the work of interpreting this organic law, 
 and framing a system of related though subordinate laws 
 in harmony with it : a work indispensable to the welfare 
 
9 
 
 of the nation. That was accomplished by the eminent 
 jurists, and the eminent legislators, who at that time were 
 principal in our public councils and on the Bench. 
 
 And then came the work of assimilating, as far as pos- 
 sible, the distributed peoples already extending over large 
 spaces of the continent, and bringing them into moral har- 
 mony and alliance with each other. That was the work, 
 largely, of the Home Missionary movement, in our own 
 communion and in other communions, and of the enter- 
 prise for establishing schools and colleges at the West, 
 and of distributing there and making familiar and at home 
 an enlightening Christian literature. That work was car- 
 ried on, primarily, with reference to the blessings to be 
 conferred upon individual souls, or upon families and 
 small communities ; but it was a work, as we now see in 
 looking back, which was essentially national in its aim, 
 national in its influence, and superbly national in its 
 results. 
 
 Then came the work of finally vindicating and estab- 
 lishing the organic political unity of the nation for all 
 time to come : a work which was accomplished amid the 
 turmoil and crash, amid the pain and the ravage, and by 
 the final magnificent success, of the immense civil war. 
 We felt at that time, vaguely perhaps, but I think often 
 very distinctly and very emphatically, that that was not 
 a war for the American people only; not a war for the 
 future of liberty in this country only ; —it was a war for 
 the World. The destinies of mankind were infolded in 
 the victorious prosecution of it to the ultimate triumphant 
 
lO 
 
 success, in which the nation should be new-born. So it 
 was carried on until that success was reached ; and the 
 nation, which had achieved its early independence, which 
 had furnished itself with its organic frame of government, 
 which had interpreted its constitution, and enacted laws 
 according *to it ; which had assimilated, as far as they 
 could be then reached, the scattered populations dis- 
 tributed over the northern parts of the continent, came 
 at last, bleeding but victorious, through the struggle ; 
 having shown its unity impregnable and infrangible, not 
 only as against any power without, but as against the 
 mightiest, the most defiant and energetic rebellion which 
 ever could have arisen within. Our work has so far, 
 in these elements, been accomplished. 
 
 Now, there remain two things to be done, in order 
 that .we, as one of the nations over whom God is Gover- 
 nor, may set forward His kingdom and glory in the earth. 
 One is the amalgamation with our own people, under 
 American training and in the experience of American lib- 
 erty and privilege, of those millions of immigrants from 
 foreign lands who are being incessantly poured upon our 
 shores ; representing forms of religion with which we are 
 unfamiliar ; representing forms of unbelief, fierce, reso- 
 lute, with which we have been unacquainted in our own 
 land ; representing the fiercest socialistic ambitions and 
 purposes, of which the American people, except as thus 
 flooded with them from abroad, would have known com- 
 paratively nothing ; representing anarchical tendencies, 
 and representing them with the fury of passion which has 
 
been wrought into these immigrants, and developed 
 among them, by the oppressions of foreign lands ; hating 
 the government because it is a government, as they have 
 been trained to hate governments abroad ; and apparently 
 insoluble, not so to be brought into moral flux as to 
 mingle intimately and inseparably with the American 
 people. 
 
 This is one work. It is a work to be done by Home 
 Missions, done by Sunday-schools, done by American 
 public schools ; done by Christian literature, and by per- 
 sonal Christian influence : to be done patiently and 
 
 widely, and, at last, we may be certain, effectively. But 
 it is to be a slow, gradual and difficult work, to take the 
 Bohemian, the Slav and the Hungarian, with the untaught 
 Finn or Norseman, and bring them into essential moral 
 and spiritual harmony with the American people. That 
 is a work, to which, in its time, our thought will be em- 
 phatically turned, and for which our gifts and labors will 
 be solicited. 
 
 But also there is another — it is the one which comes 
 before us this mornincj — and this is the work amongf what 
 are known as the poor whites and the colored population 
 at the South. The termination of the civil war left these 
 vast masses of people, whom Northern influence never 
 before had been able to reach, in the condition to which 
 they naturally had come in the absence of an enlightening 
 and a purifying moral power; in a condition in which they 
 became a threat to the whole American national life ; a 
 condition in which, however, they are now, and will be 
 
evermore henceforth, perfectly accessible to the influences 
 with which we are familiar among ourselves, and by 
 which the prosperity and power, the harmony and the 
 glory of the nation, have thus far been secured and ad- 
 vanced. 
 
 Let us leave sight, for the time, of the population com- 
 monly known as the “ poor white” population, remember- 
 ing only that they are in imminent, constant and infinite 
 need of precisely such instruction as has long been fami- 
 liar in New England and New York, in the Middle States 
 and at the West; remembering that they have been 
 trained into habits of servility of mind, looking upon the 
 stately mansion of the planter, out of their small and poor 
 cabins, very much as the hind in the British forest might 
 have looked upon the plumed and decorated knight in the 
 day of Ivanhoe. They are to be lifted into self-respect, 
 into the intelligent exercise of political power, and into 
 the expansion of mind as well as the enlargement of 
 knowledge and the uplift of spirit, which will come with 
 the illuminating and exalting truths of the Gospel. But 
 let us now think simply of the colored population collected 
 at the South — a population numbering probably eight 
 millions, with 1,600,000 children of the proper school-age ; 
 a population rapidly increasing — more numerous already 
 than the other, and extending its numbers, and widening 
 more or less in its distribution over the area of the con- 
 tinent, with every year ; a population which is thus be- 
 coming more and more a formidable, and which may be 
 a terrible, factor in the civilization of this country. 
 
What are their general characteristic tendencies and 
 traits? Taking them at large — remembering, of course, 
 that there are many signal exceptions, of those who have 
 been taught, and who are able to teach others ; of those 
 who have manliness and modesty, magnanimity and 
 heroism, who have noble power, and who use it nobly for 
 the welfare of their kin and kind, and for the promotion 
 of the public welfare — remembering this, but taking them 
 in the broadest view, without prejudice and without par- 
 tiality, what are the characteristics of the Southern colored 
 population ? A widespread ignorance must be conceded, 
 of what is familiarly known, believed and taught among 
 us as the Gospel of Christ; an unfamiliarity with the 
 written word ; an unfamiliarity with the great facts, and 
 with the rules and precepts of duty which are founded 
 upon those facts, and with the transcendent and illustrious 
 truths which are also based upon their solid and mighty 
 foundations ; a want of familiarity which is not their sin 
 at all, but their baneful misfortune. Books having been 
 formerly prohibited, reading forbidden, they have never 
 had the opportunity to learn, in the vast majority, what 
 the Gospel is from its own pages, or from the cultured 
 and enlightening instruction of others. So, not infrequent- 
 ly, appears among them an interpretation of the Gospel in 
 which the most fantastic fancies suddenly emerge — fancies 
 that seem not unfrequently to have been born of the 
 old heathenism still hereditary in the blood. I could 
 give examples of this, if the time and place permitted, 
 which have been given to me by those who have worked 
 
H 
 
 among these people at the South, which would be start- 
 ling ; the fantastic interpretations of the sacred truth, so far 
 as they have become partially acquainted with it, seeming 
 to show the shadow, at any rate, cast upon them still from 
 the ancient and gross paganism out of which they or 
 their immediate ancestors, comparatively lately, have 
 emerged. 
 
 Then, too, the various vices which are naturally engen- 
 dered in men by the endurance of oppression, under 
 slavery, appear in large classes of this population ; a ser- 
 vility of spirit, often reacting, perhaps, into insolent self- 
 assertion in their new conditions ; falsehood, more com- 
 mon than, perhaps, among any people not disciplined to 
 it in the like terrible manner; thievishness, to which they 
 were trained while receiving no reward of their labor, na 
 regular and remunerating wages for what they accom- 
 plished, when they were taught, therefore, by their own 
 instincts as they felt, and by the habit of those around 
 them, to steal whenever they had the opportunity. All 
 these present themselves, with the indulgence of the 
 animal passions to a degree quite unsurpassed, we may 
 say, at any rate among any of the modern peoples of the 
 world. And then an utter divorce not unfrequently ap- 
 pears, and this is the most fearful and almost fatal thing 
 of all, between religion and morality among them ; so that 
 the same man may be a fervent exhorter in the pulpit, 
 and an adulterer or even a murderer outside of it — an in- 
 stance of which was brought to my attention through a 
 friend at the South very lately, where a man had been a 
 
15 
 
 fervent preacher, admired for his eloquence, and had 
 turned out afterward to have been at the same time a 
 brutal murderer, and was ere long convicted of the hor- 
 rible crime. Nevertheless he had appeared to others, 
 perhaps to himself, to be sincere in his fervent exhorta- 
 tions. This whole strange conception of things was 
 summed up in the word of one man, preaching to a colored 
 congregation, himself a colored man ; “ I have to confess, 
 my dear Brethren, that I have broken every command- 
 ment of God, but I bless the Lord that I have never yet 
 lost my Religion !” There is an absolute contradiction, 
 an absolute antithesis in their mind between religion, 
 on the one hand, and morality on the other. Morality is 
 a matter of human law. Morality is a matter for the 
 judges to investigate, and according to artificial human 
 rules to blame for or to reward for. But religion is with 
 them a matter of excitement of the senses, of nervous rap- 
 tures, of fancied visions, of voices in the air, of convulsive 
 paroxysmal agitations of spirit. And so the religion 
 which is taught and sought might also be said to make 
 men worse, until they shall have been brought to feel and 
 to see that the whole moral life is to be illumined and 
 governed by the principles and the mandates of the Gos- 
 pel of Christ. 
 
 Then you are to observe in them, widely, a moral child- 
 ishness, perfectly natural. Under oppression so long as 
 they have been, accustomed to look up with reverence, 
 with fear, to the classes above them, they have come to 
 be largely in this condition of moral childishness ; with no 
 
ingrained, enduring and governing sense of the moral 
 dignity of manhood or of womanhood, as developed under 
 the government of God, and destined to immortal issues 
 after and out of this human life. 
 
 These are the characteristics, as I say, on the large 
 general scale, with many distinguished and noble individ- 
 ual exceptions, with even scattered communities to be ex- 
 cepted, where the power of the Gospel has now been seen 
 and felt for years, and is coming to its prophetic fruitage. 
 But take the distributed aggregate mass, which has not 
 yet been reached by the power of the Gospel as that lies 
 before us, as it makes its incessant Divine appeal to us, 
 and I have not at all overstated the facts. I have not 
 colored too deeply one line on the picture. It is as I have 
 said ; and those who return to us from the South bear 
 witness to it, all the time. 
 
 Now, here is already, and is to be, for our own safety, 
 an immense work to be done.- If this is not to be a great 
 black ulcer, eating into the vitals of the American life, we 
 have got to purify and remove it, not by excision of sur- 
 gery, but by sure if slow processes of healing. The weak 
 in the long run govern the strong. Permanent popular 
 liberties have their only sure foundation in sound moral 
 conditions practically universal. We must secure these 
 among those to whom we have given the ballot, and who 
 are to be henceforth citizens with ourselves. Otherwise, 
 we are building our splendid political house on the edges 
 of the pestilential swamp from which fatal miasmatic 
 odors are rising all the time. Yes, we are building our 
 
17 
 
 house on piles driven into the thick ooze and mud of the 
 pestilential swamp itself. We are building our cities, 
 which we think are so splendid, and which are so in fact, 
 as men built Herculaneum and Pompeii, on a shore which 
 ever and anon trembled with earthquake, over which was 
 flung the black flag of \’esuvius, and down upon which 
 rolled, in time, the lava floods that burned and buried 
 them. 
 
 We have got to face this duty, my Brethren. We have 
 got to meet this immense problem,, which is not far off, 
 but right at hand ; which is not a problem of theory, or 
 of distant history, but of practice and fact ; and which 
 concerns not the well-being alone, but the v^ery life of the 
 nation. Noble men and women at the South are engaged 
 in it already, with all their hearts ; and we must help, 
 mightily ! It would be the craziest folly of the age for us 
 to be indifferent to it. 
 
 Some men may say, perhaps, “ But this is a work that 
 cannot be done. It is too radical and vast to be hope- 
 fully attempted.” Nonsense ! There is no work for the 
 kingdom of God, and the glory of His name, which cannot 
 be done ! With the Gospel in our hand, we can do every- 
 thing. Paul said, centuries ago, that without God he 
 could do nothing, but “I can do all things through Christ 
 which strengtheneth me !” He was a modest man, and 
 would never have claimed that derived omnipotence unless 
 he had known that he possessed it. And the children of 
 God in the world can still do everything, which is neces- 
 sary for His kingdom and glory, with the power of the 
 
i8 
 
 Gospel held and wielded, patiently, persistently and he- 
 roically by them. This is necessary for our own security ; 
 and it is necessary for the work of God everywhere else 
 in the world that this work be done among ourselves. 
 We can have no power, comparatively, in India or Tur- 
 key, if the native converts there, coming to the knowledge 
 of the facts existing in this country, say to our mission- 
 aries, “Why don’t you evangelize the colored people at 
 home ? Why don’t you teach them to associate the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount with their daily life ? Why don’t you 
 bring the great white Throne of Judgment before their 
 minds, that they may live honestly and faithfully in the 
 world ?” We must do this for our own fame and moral 
 power in other lands, as well as for our safety at home. 
 
 And there is another most important relation of this 
 work which we do not always distinctly apprehend. 
 What is the meaning of the fact that since our civil war 
 Africa has been opened to the knowledge and commerce 
 of the world, suddenly, widely, as never before ? An un- 
 known continent for so many centuries of historic years, 
 a continent known only through the small settlements 
 along the north and south, and by the slave-trade along the 
 coasts on the east and west, has been now pierced at every 
 point, on every line, with its geography as familiar to us, 
 if we chose to have it so, certainly as the geography of 
 India ; far more so than the geography of Australia, which 
 has never yet been fully explored. Here is that enor- 
 mous continent, with its Free State of many millions al- 
 ready, with its advancing population at different points in 
 
19 
 
 the south and in the west, in the east, even, and also in 
 the north, now accessible to commerce, accessible to 
 Christianity, and with many of its Christian converts 
 showing an endurance and a heroism which put anything 
 in our experience to utter shame : men coming to confess 
 Christ in the face of the war club, in the face of the rifle 
 bullet, in the face of the flame ; men and women converted 
 to Christ in the midst of the most tremendous persecu- 
 tions ; in Madagascar, Christian congregations build- 
 ing memorial chapels on the very sites where forty years 
 ago men were flung over precipices, or were buried 
 alive, or in other ways had their life beaten out, because 
 of their fealty to the unseen God ! 
 
 Here is this great continent open before us, as I have 
 said, really already in every part, and explored largely by 
 American enterprise and American pluck. What is the 
 meaning of it, coming at this time? It meansthat if we 
 will Christianize the colored people on our own shores 
 we shall have thousands and tens of thousands of intel- 
 ligent missionaries to send soon to Africa ; where the 
 climate, injurious to the white man, is salubrious to the 
 black ; where the fertile soil, the vast run of the rivers, 
 and the vast snow-mountains, give to large spaces of the 
 continent all the natural advantages which either America 
 or Europe possesses. We may, if we will do our work at 
 home among the colored people here, send, not hundreds, 
 but thousands and tens of thousands of missionaries into 
 that great continent — the very men to work there, the 
 very men to reach most powerfully those kindred tribes 
 
20 
 
 who are still in a state of pagan barbarism. God has 
 fitted the two events together/as He sometimes has done 
 before in history — never more signally than in this case. 
 All the colored population released from bondage here ! 
 All Africa opened to them, on the other side of the sea 1 
 Here is the stamp, if we will have it, and there is the 
 yielding wax, that the seal of the Christ, with cross and 
 crown, may there be set ! 
 
 Now then, as I have said, there is no work too great, 
 if we will undertake' it in the love and faith and fear of 
 God, and with the instrument of His Gospel in our hands 
 wherewith to work. There has been a good beginning 
 made already. This society, to which we are to contrib- 
 ute to-day, the American Missionary Association, has 
 four established colleges, three of which are entirely sup- 
 ported by itself, have been founded by it and are carried 
 on by it; and the fourth very largely so. It has multi- 
 tudes of high schools, normal schools and primary schools. 
 One man in Connecticut, you remember, gave to it a 
 million of dollars a year or two ago, only the income of 
 which, however, can be used. This income is to be de- 
 voted to the education of such colored people as give 
 indications of efficiency and usefulness in after life. The 
 man who gave it saw the greatness of the work and of the 
 need, having himself lived long at the South and there 
 acquired his property. He has wisely designed his fund to 
 be used in the ways most effective for the advancement 
 of the colored population in industry, temperance, and 
 civilization, in the knowledge of the Bible, and in that 
 
love of God which he justly recognizes as the most vital 
 thing of all. He believes, as I believe, first of all, my dear 
 Friends, in the education of men in the Gospel of Christ, 
 and of women as well, who may become religious teachers 
 of the colored people ; who may bring the power and 
 light and glory of the Gospel into contact with those 
 uninstructed minds, receptive and sensitive but unin- 
 structed, in schools and colleges. First of all, we want 
 men trained, and women, too, in the knowledge of the 
 truth as it is in Christ, and then to have them teaching 
 others. And that is precisely the line along which the 
 society to which we are to contribute to-day, as we have 
 done gladly and largely heretofore, is carrying its in- 
 cessant operation. 
 
 Now I affirm absolutely that if there ever was a work 
 of God on earth, this is his work! If there was ever 
 anything to which the American Christian people were 
 called, they are called to this. If there was ever a great 
 opportunity before the Christian church, here it is; not 
 to reach those people merely for their own immediate 
 welfare ; not to save our own national life merely ; but to 
 Christianize that immense continent which lies opposite 
 to us on the map, which we have wronged so long with 
 the slave-trade and with rum, and to which now we can, 
 if we will, send multitudes of messengers to testify of the 
 glory of the grace of God. 
 
 Ah, my Friends, don’t say “It is too great a work.” 
 It is going to be done ! You and I may do or may not 
 do our part in it. It is going to be done! The North 
 
and the South, God hath created them; Tabor and Her- 
 mon shall rejoice in His name! God did not raise up 
 this nation for nothing. He did not plant the Holland- 
 ers here, and the Swedes in Jersey, and the Friends in 
 Pennsylvania, and the Pilgrims on the shores of New 
 England, for nothing. He had a plan about it from the 
 beginning. He did not inspire the Revolution for noth- 
 ing, or guide in the councils that framed the Constitution, 
 or stir the hearts of His children to send the Gospel 
 westward and westward, and still westward, with the ad- 
 vancing pioneer and the far mining-camp, till the minister 
 and the teacher looked out together on the waves of the 
 Pacific. It was not for nothing that He carried us through 
 the tremendous civil war, punishing North and punish- 
 ing South, but bringing, at last, the glorious victory to 
 the national cause. It is not for nothing that He has 
 given us this work to do. It is to be accomplished: to 
 the glory of His name, for the welfare of man, and for 
 the honor of our crucified, crowned and reigning King. 
 Let us do generously our part in it to-day!