American Scenes, and Christian Slavery: A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United StatesDavies, Ebenezer
History
American Scenes, and Christian Slavery: A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States
Davies, Ebenezer
Slavery -- United States; United States -- Description and travel
I had been invited in the evening to speak at the public meeting of the
Foreign Evangelical Society, and to take tea at Dr. Baird's house.
While I was there, Dr. Anderson, one of the Secretaries of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and Mr. Merwin, called to
invite me to address the public meeting of that society on the Friday.
I promised to do so, if I should not previously have left for the West
Indies. The public meeting of Dr. Baird's society was held in the Dutch
Reformed Church, Dr. Hutton's, a magnificent Gothic building. Dr. De
Witt took the chair. The attendance was large and respectable. Dr.
Baird, as Secretary, having recently returned from Europe, where he had
conversed on the subject of his mission with fourteen crowned heads,
read a most interesting report. The writer had then to address the
meeting. After him three other gentlemen spoke. There was no
collection! Strange to say, that, with all their revivals, our friends
in America seem to be morbidly afraid of doing anything under the
influence of excitement. Hence the addresses on occasions like this are
generally stiff and studied, half-an-hour orations. This feeling
prevents their turning the voluntary principle, in the support of their
religious societies, to so good an account as they otherwise might. At
the close of this meeting, there seemed to be a fine state of feeling
for making a collection; and yet no collection was made. This society
is one of great value and importance. It is designed to tell in the
promotion of evangelical truth on the Catholic countries of Europe and
South America. In those countries, it employs a hundred colporteurs in
the sale and distribution of religious publications.
The next morning I addressed a breakfast meeting of about 400 people,
in a room connected with the Tabernacle. This was a new thing in the
New World. It was, moreover, an anti-slavery breakfast, under the
presidency of Lewis Tappan. It was charming to see the whites and the
coloured so intermingled at this social repast, and that in the very
heart of the great metropolis of America.
At 10 the same morning a meeting of the American Tract Society was held
at the Tabernacle. I had been engaged to speak on that occasion, but
was obliged to go and see about the vessel that was to take us away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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