It is quite true, sir, that the Head of the Church, as has been proclaimed from this platform, and from that at Lowell, again and again, is imposing on you the discipleship of the world, the duty of carrying the Gospel to all the nations of the earth. It thus lies upon the Christian nations so honored to stretch out their hands to lift the other nations up to the plane on which they are themselves living. But there has been brought to America, it seems to me, a specially difficult task. She has had thrust within her national boundary at least three separate races, that are on a different stage of intellectual development and civilization from that which she has reached; or if it be too much to say that these races have been thrust within her boundaries, then that the high and laudable ambition, which has moved you as a people to keep this great continent to yourselves, and to take as much more as you can get, has brought upon you this obligation in connection with the great races which are to be found on your soil. We are aware that the spirit and the policy of the world is hounded on, perhaps now more than ever, by that proud and insolent dictum of science, falsely so called, ready to be applied to the affairs of races as to other things—“the survival of the fittest.” No doubt there are men among you who are ready to take up the spirit of this maxim and to apply it all around, and to feel, as has been said here about the dead Indian, that it is the province of the stronger people simply to overrun, and press out, and hustle over the frontiers, or over the shores of your continent, the weaker races. Now, sir, as I understand it, you have been called to this vocation of bringing up these weaker races, of incorporating them into your own national life, of clothing them with all the honors and responsibilities of citizenship, of giving them a full status in the Church and in the township, of making them what you are yourselves, gradually scattering their darkness by the light of your intelligence, and vitalizing their enfeebled and degraded manhood by the overflow of the surplus energy of your own manhood. There has been given to you this great task to perform, to show the nations a better way of dealing with the weaker races than any nation has yet reached; and if the spirit of the American Missionary Association can but be breathed into the American people as a whole; if you can control your political action, if you can determine the issues in your Congress by that spirit, and control all your dealings with those peoples by it, one of the very brightest of the many crowns which will sit on the brow of the American nation will be the crown which you will win in that service. This is the work to which you are called.