ant benefactor
to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are
they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and
perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy?

Christian men and women of the North! still further,--you have another
power; you can _pray!_ Do you believe in prayer? or has it become an
indistinct apostolic tradition? You pray for the heathen abroad; pray
also for the heathen at home. And pray for those distressed Christians
whose whole chance of religious improvement is an accident of trade and
sale; from whom any adherence to the morals of Christianity is, in many
cases, an impossibility, unless they have given them, from above, the
courage and grace of martyrdom.

But, still more. On the shores of our free states are emerging the poor,
shattered, broken remnants of families,--men and women, escaped, by
miraculous providences from the surges of slavery,--feeble in knowledge,
and, in many cases, infirm in moral constitution, from a system which
confounds and confuses every principle of Christianity and morality.
They come to seek a refuge among you; they come to seek education,
knowledge, Christianity.

What do you owe to these poor unfortunates, oh Christians? Does
not every American Christian owe to the African race some effort at
reparation for the wrongs that the American nation has brought upon
them? Shall the doors of churches and school-houses be shut upon them?
Shall states arise and shake them out? Shall the church of Christ hear
in silence the taunt that is thrown at them, and shrink away from the
helpless hand that they stretch out; and, by her silence, encourage the
cruelty that would chase them from our borders? If it must be so, it
will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have
reason to tremble, when it remembers that the fate of nations is in the
hands of One who is very pitiful, and of tender compassion.

Do you say, "We don't want them here; let them go to Africa"?

That the providence of God has provided a refuge in Africa, is, indeed,
a great and noticeable fact; but that is no reason why the church of
Christ should throw off that responsibility to this outcast race which
her profession demands of her.

To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized
race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to
prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the
inception o