“Freely ye have received,” Christ says, “freely give.” We cannot wash away our national injustice; God does not expect that. We can show penitence by our helpfulness toward those who have been its victims. So much God will expect, and it is likely to be sad for us if we fail to meet the expectation. * * * * * GEORGIA. A Beginner’s Reflections--The Gospel--Congregationalism--The Negro. REV. S. E. LATHROP, MACON. I have been at this post for about three months, and as it is my first experience with the colored people, I may be pardoned for offering some impressions that have come to me since entering on the work. Having preached eight years to white people in the North, I was somewhat curious to compare the results of the same Gospel as applied to different races. The comparison thus far is entirely satisfactory. I am more than ever convinced of the priceless value of the Gospel as an elevating, purifying power in human hearts, no matter what is the color of the skin. Judging medicines by their results, we say that this or that is a specific for certain diseases; so judging Christianity by its results, as applied not only to different individuals but to different races, it is a specific for the deep-seated disease of sin everywhere. As different doctors have formulæ of their own, differing more or less each from the other, so are the different sects or schools of religious thought. I, as a Congregationalist born and bred, the son of a Western Home Missionary, with Puritan ancestry running back to the days of John Robinson, am, as a student of human nature and of theological therapeutics, convinced more than ever of the value of our Puritan ideas, modified, mellowed and improved as they are by the additional light which has broken forth out of God’s word. I think Congregationalism is adapted to African as well as Caucasian Christians; both from its lack of iron-bound traditions and mannerisms, and “theological slang,” and also from its flexibility, its adaptedness, its “sanctified common sense,” which does not make a Procrustean bed of inflexible length for tall and short alike, nor like that which the prophet mentions, “shorter than that a man can stretch himself upon it, and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.” Its covering is, like Christ’s seamless robe, broad enough to envelop in its generous fold every forlorn heart.