To Africa this country owes a debt larger than she is able to liquidate. Most intensely do I desire to see that ill-fated continent transformed into the abode of civilization, of the arts and sciences, of evangelical piety, of liberty, and of all that adds to the dignity, the renown, and the temporal and eternal happiness of man. Shame and confusion of face belong to the Church, that she has so long disregarded the claims of Africa upon her sympathies, and prayers, and liberality--claims as much superior as its wrongs to those of any other portion of the globe. It is indeed most strange that, like the Priest and the Levite, she should have 'passed by on the other side,' and left the victim of thieves to bleed and sicken and die. As the Africans were the only people doomed to perpetual servitude, and to be the prey of kidnappers, she should have long since directed almost her undivided efforts to civilize and convert them,--not by establishing colonies of ignorant and selfish foreigners among them, who will seize every opportunity to overreach or oppress, as interest or ambition shall instigate,--but by sending intelligent, pious missionaries; men fearing God and eschewing evil--living evidences of the excellence of christianity--having but one object, not the possession of wealth or the obtainment of power or the gratification of selfishness, but _the salvation of the soul_. Had she made this attempt, as she was bound to have made it by every principle of justice and every feeling of humanity, a century ago, Africa would have been, at the present day, 'redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled,' and the slavery of her children brought to an end. No pirates would now haunt her coast to desolate her villages with fire and sword, in order to supply a christian people with hewers of wood and drawers of water. How much has been needlessly lost to the world by this criminal neglect! The conception of evangelizing a heathenish country by sending to it an illiterate, degraded and irreligious population, belongs exclusively to the advocates of African colonization. For absurdity and inaptitude, it stands, and must forever stand, without a parallel. Of all the offspring of prejudice and oppression, it is the most shapeless and unnatural. But more of this hereafter. History is full of instruction on the subject of colonization. The establishment of colonies, in all ages, with scarcely an exception, has resulted either in their subversion by the vices or physical strength of the natives, or by a fatal amalgamation with them; or else in the rapid destruction of the natives by the superior knowledge and greedy avarice of the new settlers. It is presumption to suppose that the colony at Liberia, composed of the worst materials imaginable, will present an example of forbearance, stability and good faith, hitherto unwitnessed in the world.