In considering _the claims of the American Missionary Association_ to our prayerful interest and our liberal benefactions, these preliminary thoughts have practical force as applied to moral science; for it is distinctively the aim of this Association to lift society as a whole by lifting at the lower stratum. Its work is confessedly not with the most promising material, out of which the most may be made in the shortest time, but with the most degraded, unpromising and despised of the outcast races. _This is the great alchemist among our charities; seeking to transmute the baser metals into gold._ For the transmuting of character the mission of Christ was a witness to the universe that the last might be first, and that the lowest might be lifted to the highest position of honor and glory, as the result of the Divine condescension, the deep down-reaching love of the Son of God. He came not to honor the lordly, but to lift up the lowly. For gaining influence and establishing his kingdom he sought out not the ruling classes; but, himself despised and rejected of men, he knew how to condescend to men of low estate. He dispensed his largest blessings to the despised and the outcasts, who, conscious of their vileness, felt their need of salvation. Not unfaithful to the self-satisfied Scribes and Pharisees, he came especially to seek and to save those who felt themselves to be lost sheep of the house of Israel. Read the record anew, with this thought in mind, and see if his special aim was not to seek and save the lost, in the sense of the despised and abandoned, who were, perhaps, without hope for themselves, and whose case might have been regarded as desperate by others. We are not the true followers of Christ if we are wanting in the Christ-like spirit, and seek not to save the despised and outcast races who dwelt in the wilderness and in the south country. Do you tell me, _as an excuse for neglecting_ them, that the Indians, instead of being the noble red men, such as the sickly sentimental fancy of the poet and the moralist too often paint them, are, for the most part, ignorant and vile, dirty and degraded, lazy, mean, treacherous and revengeful? My familiarity with the better class of frontiersmen prepares me candidly to admit it all as a statement of fact. But I draw from those facts a very different conclusion than that they are not worth saving. All the more do they need to be saved. I might, without encroaching upon the regions of romance, tell, by the hour, tales of horror, as they have been related to me by reliable witnesses, that would make the blood fairly curdle in your veins. And if I had the gift of eloquence I might so vividly depict those horrors that you would find yourselves, right here in the house of God, clenching your fist and threatening vengeance upon wretches so base, upon savages so merciless, upon mockeries of manhood so gross and beastly.