It is the dictate of economy that we push the Southern work of this Association. It is cheaper to fight ignorance and crime with Christian education, than to fight their certain outcome with military and police force. It is vastly cheaper to settle the bills for the services of the Christian teacher now, than to meet the settlement of accumulated wrongs in the outbreak of a war or rebellion by and by. And this is a kind of settlement that must be met. There is in the universe a law of recompense; God in the government of the world is always working out equations. He may require centuries to bring about the result; if so, he takes them. Men are not far-sighted enough to see the outcome. The wicked grow bold and defiant and boastful because of punishment delayed, while the righteous for the same reason are led to cry out, “How long, oh Lord! how long shall wickedness be allowed to go unrebuked?” but all the while the law of recompense is filling out the equation. The eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth principle is rolling up the answer. Only give it time, and right shall have triumphant, though it may be terrible, vindication. In the case of individuals, the working of this law is not so evident, because retribution follows them beyond the grave, but in the case of nations, since they have no other life than in this world, settlement must take place here; and it never fails. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generations, and there is no escaping the visitations. I might appeal to the history of nations, the record of whose career has been completed, in illustration of this, but a pertinent illustration can be found nearer home, even in our own country. This nation cherished and protected by law the institution of slavery. With an open Bible in the land, with Protestant Christianity in the ascendancy, with the light of a free Gospel shining upon all questions of morals, with the sentiment of enlightened Christendom smiting heavily the iniquity of the sin; nay, with a constitution for its government, a preamble which declared that all men were created free and equal; right in the face of all this, and despite all this, the giant iniquity and monstrous contradiction was fostered and protected by the law of the land. But the equation was working out. The day of reckoning at length came, and, in the settlement, justice exacted full payment.