The Freedmen, properly educated, will make capital missionaries for Africa. After a careful study of the race for thirty years—fifteen on their own ancestral shores, and now fifteen in this land of ours—such is my conclusion concerning them. They have, naturally, some of the best traits to fit them for mission work. They are hopeful, for one thing, as every missionary should be. During all the long years of their bondage, and then during all the war, how did they hope on and hope ever that deliverance would come, till come it did! They are naturally a social people. Getting a new idea, a new truth, they talk it over, pass it on, keep it going. The missionary must be social, if he will do the most good. They are a sharp-minded, quick-witted people. For ability to read character, make a quick turn, a good use of passing events, or take a good illustration from nature, the Africans have no superiors. They are of a tropical constitution, most happy, healthy, and most at home in just such a climate as that of Africa. It is their native clime—a fact whose value can neither be denied nor over-estimated. Now keeping all these natural qualifications in mind, let us briefly notice some pertinent points in that most unique, varied experience and divinely appointed discipline through which God, in His providence, has been causing the Freedmen to pass for all these years, as giving them a yet more special preparation for the great mission work He has in store for them. First, experience in suffering. I know not how it may be with others, but for myself I have come, long since, to think that there is no discipline in this world like that of suffering, rightly used, to fashion us after the image of the Divine. In this way the Saviour himself is said to have been made perfect and fitted for His great redemptive work, (Heb. v., 8, 9). And when, in olden time, God would make choice of a people to be conservators and propagators of His truth in the world for ages, how did He prepare them for their mission? Not by sending them to college, but by sending them down into Egypt; and there, for long generations, did He keep them in bondage, and then for other long years in wanderings in the wilderness, till He had fitted them for His work, and ground into them a character which all the fiction of the ages has not yet ground out of them. So with the people of whom we speak—what an experience have they had in suffering! Surely, God must have in store for them some great and wondrous mission, for which He has intended this experience to be both presage and preparation. Then notice the discipline they have had as soldiers in the camp, on the march, on guard, in the battle, shoulder to shoulder with our men, sons, brothers, fathers, bravely fighting for the Union, that they might know what war is, and what it sometimes costs to secure liberty and save a nation from anarchy and ruin. See, too, what experience and discipline they