n no way different from any
other people in respect to Christianity. Many of the differences of
races are accidental and oftentimes become obliterated by
circumstances, position and religion.

Go back to a period in the history of England, when its rude
inhabitants lived in caves and huts, when they fed on bark and roots,
when their dress was the skins of animals. Then look at the eminent
Englishman of the present day--cultivated, graceful, refined,
Christianized. When we remember that his distant ancestors were wild
and bloody savages, and that it took centuries to change his
forefathers from rudeness and brutality into enlightened, civilized
Christians, there is no room to doubt the susceptibility of the Negro
to Christianity.

The same great general laws of growth continue unchangeable. The
Almighty neither alters nor diminishes these laws for the convenience
of a people, of whatever race they may be. The Negro race is equally
susceptible of growth in Christianity as in civilization.

At once the question arises--Is the Negro race doomed to destruction?
Or, does it possess those qualities which will enable it to reach a
high degree of moral and Christian civilization? To the first of these
questions I reply that the Negro race is by no means doomed to
destruction. It is now over five hundred years since the breath of the
civilized world touched powerfully, for the first time, the mighty
masses of the pagan world in America, in Africa and the isles of the
sea, and we see everywhere that the weak heathen tribes of the earth
have gone down before the civilized world; tribe and nation have
dispersed before its presence. The Iroquois, the Pequods, the brave
Mohawks, the once refined Aztecs and others have gone, nevermore to be
ranked among the tribes of men. In the scattered islands of the
Pacific seas, like the stars of the heavens, the sad fact remains that
from many of them their populations have departed like the morning
cloud. They did not retain God in their knowledge. Just the reverse
with the Negro. Destructive elements, wave after wave, have swept over
his head, yet he has stood unimpaired.

Even this falls short of the full reality of the Negro as a Christian,
for civilization at numerous places has displaced ancestral
heathenism, and the standard of the cross, uplifted on the banks of
its great river, showing that the heralds of the cross have begun the
glorious conquests of their glorious King. Vital Chri