stian power has
become the property of the Negro. Does God despise the weak? No, the
Providence of God intervenes for the training and preservation of such
people.

But has the Negro race any of those qualities which emanate from
Christianity? Let us see. The flexibility of the Negro character is
universally admitted. The race is possessed of a nature more easily
moulded than that of any other class of men. Unlike the Indian, the
Negro yields to circumstances and flows with the current of events,
hence afflictions, however terrible, have failed to crush him; his
facile nature wards them off, or else through the inspiration of hope
their influence is neutralized. These peculiarities of the Negro
character render him susceptible to imitation. Burke tells us that
"imitation is the second passion belonging to society, and this
passion arises from much the same cause as sympathy." This is one of
the strongest links of society. It forms our manners, our opinions,
our lives. Indeed, civilization is carried down from generation to
generation, or handed over from a superior to an inferior, by means of
imitation. A people devoid of imitation is incapable of progress or
advancement, and must retrograde. If it remains stagnant, it must of
necessity bring its own decay. The quality of imitation has been the
grand preservative of the Negro in all lands. Indeed, the Negro is a
superior man to-day to what he was three centuries ago.

I feel fortified in the principles I have advanced by the opinions of
great, scrutinizing thinkers. In his treatise on Emancipation, written
in 1880, Dr. Channing says: "The Negro is one of the best races of the
human family; he is among the mildest and gentlest of men; he is
singularly susceptible to improvement." Kinmont declares in his
"Lecture on Man" that "The sweet graces of the Christian religion
appears almost too tropical and tender plants to grow in the soil of
the Caucasian mind; they require a character of the human nature of
which you can see the rude lineaments in the Ethiopian, to be
implanted in and grow naturally and beautifully withal." Adamson, the
traveler who visited Senegal in 1754, said: "The Negroes are sociable,
humane, obliging and hospitable, and they have generally preserved an
estimable simplicity of domestic manners. They are distinguished by
their tenderness for their parents, and great respect for the aged--a
patriarchal virtue which, in our day, is too little known." Dr.