It will see in all history the developing thought of God, and in its own history a particular increment of that thought. These eighteen centuries, and those that are to follow, are the development of Christianity, and that development covers three zones, which circle and complete the globe—God’s relation to man, man’s relation to God, and man’s relation to man. During the five centuries nearest Christ, about the centres of Alexandria and Constantinople, influences rose and were moulded whose resultant was that view of God in his relation to man which is the common property of Christendom. For eleven centuries following, Divine Providence was shaping especially under the impulse of the Reformation, the confession of the scriptural relation of man to God. Then, with the seventeenth century, history passed into the third zone, in which is to be illustrated the Divine idea of man’s relation to man, which is, that the race is an organic brotherhood, because having one father, God, and one elder brother, Jesus Christ. From the first planting at Plymouth, God has been shaping our national experiences to draw the confession from us. Little by little the problem has grown upon us, as we were able to meet it. Two centuries and more were required to illustrate, through us, how the sublime socialism of the New Testament, could blend together in one brotherhood, representatives of all the white and dominant races of the world. And it is done, though not perfectly, indeed. English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dane, German and Russ—all over our land—are companies of them cemented into the equal brotherhood of a Christian Church and a Christian State. And now the deeper conditions of the problem are upon us. Within our borders are three races, neither white nor dominant. They are men; the Saviour died for them; the Holy Spirit calls them, one by one, into membership in the kingdom of God; they are our brothers by New Testament law. We are to make them organically one with us in a Christian state. Here, in the despised races, is the _test of our national life_. The American Missionary Association appeals to you, not only as Christian men in the name of the Christianity that is on trial as to its social power, but as American men in the name of God’s thought for the land, which it is working out as to the Negro, the Chinaman and the Indian. It says, “One is our Master, even Christ, and all we are brethren.”