and from these to specific laws, and from laws to the violation of them, and civil war. If a just God has been ruling among the affairs of the nation, it is infidelity to doubt that He has been guiding this vast and tumultuous slavery conflict to some great end for the enlargement of His kingdom in the earth. The moral and religious aspects of American political questions for the last three generations have a Divine significance unsuspected by the actors in our national drama. (3.) But of greater significance still is the fact that the coming of the Negro incorporates a missionary element in our national life. In the large advance movement now making for the evangelizing of the race, it is evident that the colored people are not to go out through a Red Sea into a wilderness, to become a peculiar people to whom shall be committed the oracles of God, and from whom shall arise one like the Messiah. No person is now so superficial as not to see that, whether we will or not, the Negro has come to stay. He is becoming even more and more an element in the sum of those experiences which we call our national life. He has not come to fit himself to become an uplifter; he is rather here to do that work which shall fit and cause this new and great nation to become in a peculiar way the uplifter of peoples. It is the resistance of this idea which has been the fundamental reason of all our national turbulence. Providence meant one thing; the selfishness of man another. God has given unmistakably the “sign of the prophet Jonas;” man sees nothing but the redness of a lowering sky. Can we fail to be impressed with the fact that a being whose not remote ancestors were, if not savage, at least barbarian, has now come into the possession of every element of American civilization? The negro has our language, dress, civil customs, religion, domestic and social life, and in the main, our vices. He is a voter, law-maker, executive, educator, freeholder, priest, and head of a Christian household. He has reached high proficiency in many branches of learning, and is skilled in all the arts with which we are acquainted. In a vast number of cases, through crime be it granted, he is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He is less a ward than citizen, and hardly more pupil than instructor. His absolute severance from fatherland,—his history, his tenacity of life and of race characteristics, yet, while retaining race characteristics, his greedy absorption of the best elements of civilization,—his poverty and his possibilities, awakening our sympathies and challenging our benevolent enterprise,—his tenacious hold upon our soil, our customs and our hearts,—these and many things beside indicate that he has come to stimulate, to lift us to a higher form of evangelical enterprise than that exhibited hitherto by any people. We are not merely to make missionaries of the black people; but we through them are to be ourselves made missionaries. It seems to be the