he had fulfilled his vow, and the ends of the earth had felt his influence for the advancement of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. The enterprise of African colonization, already dear to Christian hearts for the hopes that it involved of the redemption of a lost continent, of the elevation of an oppressed race in America, of the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery, received a new consecration as the object of the dying labors and prayers of Mills. It was associated, in the minds of good men, not only with plans for the conversion of the heathen, and with the tide of antislavery sentiment now spreading and deepening both at the South and at the North, but also with "Clarkson societies" and other local organizations, in many different places, for the moral and physical elevation of the free colored people from the pitiable degradation in which they were commonly living in the larger towns. Altogether the watchmen on the walls of Zion saw no fairer sign of dawn, in that second decade of the nineteenth century, than the hopeful lifting of the cloud from Africa, the brightening prospects of the free negroes of the United States, and the growing hope of the abolition of American slavery.[258:1] Other societies, national in their scope and constituency, the origin of which belongs in this organizing period, are the American Education Society (1815), the American Sunday-school Union (1824), the American Tract Society (1825), the Seamen's Friend Society (1826), and the American Home Missionary Society (1826), in which last the Congregationalists of New England cooeperated with the Presbyterians on the basis of a Plan of Union entered into between the General Assembly and the General Association of Connecticut, the tendency of which was to reinforce the Presbyterian Church with the numbers and the vigor of the New England westward migration. Of course the establishment of these and other societies for beneficent work outside of sectarian lines did not hinder, but rather stimulated, sectarian organizations for the like objects. The whole American church, in all its orders, was girding itself for a work, at home and abroad, the immense grandeur of which no man of that generation could possibly have foreseen. The grandeur of this work was to consist not only in the results of it, but in the resources of it. As never before, the sympathies, prayers, and personal cooeperation of all Christians, even the feeblest, were to be combined and utilized for enterprises coextensive with the continent and the world and taking hold on eternity. The possibilities of the new era were dazzling to the prophetic imagination. A young minister then standing on the threshold of a long career exulted in the peculiar and excelling glory of the dawning day: