Various

“ With sublime faith that God intended all men to be free and equal, all men without restriction, without qualification, without limit, let us listen to their appeal, and respond with the best help in our power to contribute.
Never before in the history of this country has there been such an awakening in behalf of the Indian. Never before such healthy sentiment for justice and fair play for the original owners of the soil over which our fifty millions of prosperous people unfurl the flag of the free. The Indian question, like the Ghost of Banquo, is at every banquet. ”

“ Has any Christian a right to live for self, to cling to riches for self-aggrandizement, to consume riches upon his own lusts or set at naught the infinite urgency of the world’s wants? No, friends. There is a kind of justice in a certain thought of communism. God’s law of life is a law of service. No man has a right under Christ’s law of life to heap up riches in order to lord it over men, only to serve them. ”

“ It is the dictate of economy that we push the Southern work of this Association. It is cheaper to fight ignorance and crime with Christian education, than to fight their certain outcome with military and police force. It is vastly cheaper to settle the bills for the services of the Christian teacher now, than to meet the settlement of accumulated wrongs in the outbreak of a war or rebellion by and by. And this is a kind of settlement that must be met. There is in the universe a law of recompense; God in the government of the world is always working out equations. ”

“ If we simply give him education, even though it be so much of religious education as may be given in the schools, we are doing no more than sowing the seeds of scepticism—as when the Romanists of the old country lose their faith, it were better for them to stay in their faith with its tinge of superstition, than simply to be sceptics. We cannot afford to have this pure, tender, loving, spiritual life, developed during these last years, caught up by the scepticism of this century and hurried on into ruin. ”

“ What think you of the natural capacity of a soil that has produced such results, that has such staying power? It has lain long fallow, but let the process of breaking up their exclusiveness go forward; let the Gospel, not as a destructive force, illustrated by brick-bats and cannon-balls, but as a quickening power made beautiful to their eyes by the kindness and sympathy of those who profess its truths, be brought to bear upon them like the sun-light; and what harvests of righteousness shall not that great field bear for enriching the Redeemer’s kingdom! ”

“ I have said that his religion has been a religion of joy, fitting him to bear, fitting him to endure; but life has become something more serious than suffering—life has become to him a practical work. What De Tocqueville said to Charles Sumner in his youth, may be said to the young Freedman to-day: “Life is neither a pain nor a pleasure, but a most serious business, to be taken up with courage, to be laid down, if need be, in self-sacrifice.” The nation has made a change necessary in the type of his religion. ”

“ It was the climax of this law that found expression in the gift of Christ, and we but follow God’s law in Christ’s way, when we are ready to sacrifice lower good for higher good, to bring into contribution lesser things for greater things. And life rises to its highest when it is sacrificial in its self-abnegations; in its renunciations, when souls are uplifted into heroic sufferings and self denials. In wives for husbands, in husbands for wives, in parents for children, in patriotic soldiers, in Christian philanthropists. Men who incarnate their love in sacrifice rise by their giving. ”

“ The wise plans which this Association have devised give every assurance of success. Not at once, perhaps. We must not expect too much at once, but in the fullness of time. To say that there are not great obstacles in the way, would be to close our eyes to the truth. There are obstacles; but what are obstacles when God is with us? He has not forgotten Africa. That continent, which holds nearly one-sixth of the human race and is equal in area to all Europe and North America combined, was surely included in that great command, “Go ye into all the world and disciple all nations.” ”

“ This nation cherished and protected by law the institution of slavery. With an open Bible in the land, with Protestant Christianity in the ascendancy, with the light of a free Gospel shining upon all questions [343] of morals, with the sentiment of enlightened Christendom smiting heavily the iniquity of the sin; nay, with a constitution for its government, a preamble which declared that all men were created free and equal; right in the face of all this, and despite all this, the giant iniquity and monstrous contradiction was fostered and protected by the law of the land. ”

“ And we have not the power if we had the right. Congress does not make laws; Congress only declares and interprets them. There is but one law-giver—God Almighty; and all that judges and governors and law-makers and Congresses and Parliaments can do, is to ascertain what are God’s laws and interpret them. And God’s law is the law of liberty, and all His laws are to conserve liberty. Never in the history of the world has a nation succeeded in stopping one of these great migratory movements. ”

“ Now, sir, as I understand it, you have been called to this vocation of bringing up these weaker races, of incorporating them into your own national life, of clothing them with all the honors and responsibilities of citizenship, of giving them a full status in the Church and in the township, of making them what you are yourselves, gradually scattering their darkness by the light of your intelligence, and vitalizing their enfeebled and degraded manhood by the overflow of the surplus energy of your own manhood. ”

“ To sustain the rebellion it cost the South two billion seven hundred million dollars; add now to this the market value of the slaves emancipated, two billion two hundred and fifty million dollars, and we have, as the total, nine billion six hundred and fifty million dollars, which this nation spent in order to rid itself of the curse of slavery. That was the equation in dollars. As to the equation in blood, justice was even more severe in the exaction. Every drop of blood drawn by the lash, it is no exaggeration to say, exacted for its canceling, not a drop merely, but a stream. ”

“ Ah, my friends, the cry comes to us not merely from Africa! This call for enlargement is wider still; it is from the four quarters of the globe. For the work is all one; and you will find, if you think of it, that the solidarity of the race, the oneness of the kingdom of Christ, is in the appeal that is made through this Association. The considerations of an illimitable future join with those of the present. The new heavens and the new earth await our preparation for their advent. Christ, in His kingly glory, is summoning us to the conflict and the conquest. ”

“ THE CALL TO THE ASSOCIATION. REV. H. M. LADD, WALTON, N. Y.
One need not be a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, to be able to predict that the world’s great enterprises of the next century will take hold upon Africa. Already the earnest gaze of the civilized world is fixed upon that opening continent. The spirit of discovery and of commerce have pushed their way into the very heart of its mysterious jungles. Its borders are all alive with the enterprise of nations. Vast preparations are making to open up its wonderful resources, and to find a mart for the products of civilized industry. ”

“ We are all the weaker for any church that might be allowed to come in in that way. The greater approach—and that which I believe the Association, so soon as it has the means, will endeavor to carry out—is in the larger training of leaders, to meet what will be within ten or twenty years the enormous demand for Christian leadership through the South. In other words, give to the millions of the colored race at the South a sufficient number of trained, educated, common-sense ministers, and they will make that people in half a century the joy and the pride of our land. ”

“ We need to put education into the control of principle; otherwise our education may simply give us a certain evil power over other men, and eventually bring ruin upon us. We need to put principle in control in order that whatever we may know shall be turned in the direction of purity, of uprightness and of helpfulness to our fellow-men. And so here, if we are to have an education for the blacks, or an education for the land, we must not content ourselves with what has been called for by these public men. ”

“ The saddest part of it is the impropriety of the leaders, ministers, and official members. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch. Each, in self-protection, condones the other’s guilt. We know that the system of slaveholding is largely responsible for this divorce of religion from morality. But the fact, as we have to confront it, is all the same. If you propose to set up a church that shall be clean and be kept clean, in pulpit and pew, you have undertaken a difficult task. The gravity of depravity is against you. ”

“ If we preach about the giving of men, the church weeps and prays, and says “Amen.” But when we preach about the giving of money, how many meet this at least with a mental shrug, and do not love to have the Lord’s days made common and unclean with the money question? That which they have been seeking for all the week should not be dragged in too often on the day set apart for rest. But if we pause a moment, we shall remember how full the Bible is of directions about giving, and how much of the Lord’s teaching had reference to a right use of money. ”

“ Truly, as the great French poet has said, “In the nineteenth century the white has made a man out of the black. In the twentieth century Europe will make a world out of Africa.”
The great question is, Shall Christianity keep abreast of this advancing host? Shall the seeds of the Gospel of light be sown broadcast through this dark continent, before the tramping feet of commerce have trodden down its soil into the hardened footpaths of sin? The call of God is emphatic. He has opened a door which no man can shut. That call rests in a peculiar manner upon this Association. ”

“ Education, mere intellectual training, has done nothing for the morals of these people. There was a prisoner executed a few years since in the State of New York, whose great grief before his execution for the terrible crime of murder, was that he could not live long enough to complete a very learned work which he was preparing on some science. And even the honored State of Massachusetts has on its criminal record the name of a professor in one of its highest institutions of learning who committed murder in a moment of passion. ”

“ When God brings His people down to the sea, and all ways are shut up, and still His voice and command are to go forward, we know that the waters of the sea will be divided, and we shall go over dry-shod and singing songs of victory beyond. ”

“ Thus, if an Indian commits murder in his own tribe, he can be brought to justice only by his own tribe. “The non-treaty Indians can freely rob, murder, trade with each other, without incurring responsibility to United States authority.” ”

“ We cannot trust the State to educate our young religiously. I, for one, confess a profound distrust of all State universities. I too often have seen those universities, in their attempt to be non-sectarian, ministering to the interests of that intensest of sectaries—the infidel. I will go even further than this, although I may carry but few of you with me in this conviction. I fear the methods of higher education in our high schools are not always what they should be. ”

“ Now it is very evident, my friends, that the work of education, so imperative, must be carried forward by Northern consecration still.
Well, if you now turn from our intellectual need to our industrial wants, I can show you a State whose mines and hills are full of treasure, where forest trees grow in rank luxuriance, where our cotton fields are sufficient to wrap half America in their folds. And yet our homes are mean and miserable, and dark and dirty, and there is physical want and physical poverty and physical distress. You tell me the black man is indolent. ”

“ Men are not far-sighted enough to see the outcome. The wicked grow bold and defiant and boastful because of punishment delayed, while the righteous for the same reason are led to cry out, “How long, oh Lord! how long shall wickedness be allowed to go unrebuked?” but all the while the law of recompense is filling out the equation. The eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth principle is rolling up the answer. Only give it time, and right shall have triumphant, though it may be terrible, vindication. ”

“ To-day Ireland is wrestling with the labor problem, and England is wrestling with the labor problem, because there are vast tracts of unoccupied, untilled, uncultivated land from which the laborer is excluded. So long as our mines lie undug; so long as our prairies lie uncultivated; so long as our streams run their course and no music of the mills sings along their lines, so long industry has a right to its home under our flag and within our borders. ”

“ Education should be compulsory, and for a reasonable time, under patronage of the Government.
All the rights and penalties of citizenship should be accorded to the Indian, as to the Italian, Irishman, and Negro.
The Indian should understand that this is a final settlement of his case, and that now he must shift for himself as other citizens have to do. With justice, and the protection and penalties of law awarded to him, let the Indian take his chances in the struggle of life. The germ of civilization is obedience to law. ”

“ His religion, it seems to me, has been peculiarly, by God’s providence, the religion of the slave, and now the religion demanded is the religion of the man. The most beautiful illustration in all history has been given us by the negro, of the words of Scripture touching God’s gift to his people: “He giveth songs in the night.” The great, happy heart of that people has been singing through all these dark years, while the great heart of the North has been heavy in its shame. The negro of the South has been living for half the century in another world than this. ”