can discern the face of the sky; but ye cannot discern the signs of the times.” We may make ourselves quite ridiculous in attempting to literalize the tails, wings, breastplates, teeth, hair, faces, crowns, shapes of the horse-like locusts of John’s apocalypse; but it is quite within the reach of our faculties to find the key to his book and to unfold its prophetic instructions and consolations. The use of the tabernacle as the dwelling-place of Jehovah’s glory it is possible to find by a simple exercise of the ken of philosophic interpretation; but the symbolic import of the coverings of fine twined linen and woven goats’ hair and rams’ skins dyed red, we must leave to the dogmatism of unlettered exegesis. It is not our fault, then, that we are looking too intently for the ways of God through the history of the world, but rather that we do not look aright. * * * * If it be true that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will;” that “He changeth the times and the seasons; He removeth kings and setteth up kings;” that “promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south; but God is the Judge; He putteth down one and setteth up another;”—if it be true that the Lord “that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth” by Himself also, “frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad;” that He “sayeth of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure,” surnaming him, and girding him, though he knew him not;—if, in short, the Lord is God, and His providence extends over nature, over nations, over individuals, over free acts, and over sinful acts,—surely we shall not gather the significance of any great matter in the world’s progress without such a study of the facts, and such an interpretation of them as shall disclose the main trend of the divine purposes. I think I hazard little in saying that the foothold of the Negro in the United States is providentially significant in relation to a great onward movement for the evangelization of the world. And in this statement I have more in view than the Christianizing of the dark continent. In relation to this, it may signify much; but in relation to the whole kingdom of Christ, it signifies more.