must have all needful preparation, and we must see that they have it. These picked men and women must go forth. It is the demand of nature and of grace.

The warm feeling of the African race and their zeal in religious work, enforced by the claims of patriotism and humanity and religion, point to them as the appointed ministers of mercy to their own people. We must send them-they must go.

There is something even in the songs of their days of slavery in our house which may prove of service in their work. We can judge something of a people by their songs. The weird melodies of these singers, springing from their life of sorrow and hope, always touch our hearts. They may do more. They may be the evangel of promise and courage to those who do not know their Father and their Saviour, while they strengthen the hearts from which they spring. To themselves and to others they sing their prayer when disheartened and overburdened, they cry with St. Paul, “Who is sufficient for these things?" and voice their supplication in their plaintive song, O my good Lord! Keep me from sinking down."

66

When they stand sometimes with the prophet and his servant, and the servant's heart sinks within him until his courage revives as he beholds the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire on the heights of Africa, in their desolation and peril, they may catch the gleam of the golden wheels of the triumphant chariot of the King, and sing, out of their faith and their experience, the song of the prophet over again,

"Swing low, sweet chariot."

The experience of these men, thus embodied in simple melodies, full of passion, possibly, but of passion touched by the spirit of longing and hope, and the spirit of truth, will work mightily when it is turned into the current of patriotism and philanthropy, and be strong for the enlightening and saving of the race. Who shall read with more ardor than they the words of our Lord at Nazareth, when the promise of deliverance falls from the lips of men born poor and broken-hearted into the ears of the captives, and the blind and bruised? Where better than in Africa can the divine preacher find another Nazareth? Rare men, rarely endowed and trained; men ready for the work and called to it by all which moves others, and by the personal appeals of their own and their father's land:-they wait till we bid them go. Let it not be long.

There are many interesting scenes in African history; there are heroic events whose story thrills us as we read it. But there is nothing which touches my heart in all that travelers have found,

nothing in all their experiences or their discoveries which moves me so much as that I see when I enter the rude hut which his faithful servants have built for him, and find Livingstone dead upon his knees. He had made the weary march to Ilala; he was worn out with pain; his heart would have sunk had it not been more intrepid than other men's; he had lived upon mercury until even calomel had ceased to be nutritious; he lived upon God day after day, night after night. He kept himself within the humble door of his hovel. No one but his two servants could come near him, save that every man was desired to come to the door each morning and say "Good morning, sir." In the early dawn Majwara saw him and dared not speak to him. He called Susi, his companion. They feared to disturb their master. A half-burned candle was on a box by his side. There knelt the great traveler, with his shattered frame thrown forward, his arms outstretched, his head buried in his hands upon his pillow, and his soul with God. "As he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered." That worn body rests with the kings and the mighty men in the solemn renown of Westminster Abbey. That hut at Ilala is a truer and a prouder place. It meant all things that he was there; it sealed all things, that, from the ground he had hallowed by his life, he should be translated to the skies.

If it were given to me to devise a seal for this Missionary Association which carries that land in its hand and upon its heart, it should bear but one figure: David Livingstone in Africa upon his knees, dead. The legend should be, "Faithful unto death." His works do follow him, whither he has followed his ascended Lord. He will rejoice when Africa comes up to God; when the suppliant hands of Ethiopia are raised only in thanksgiving. The day of the Lord is coming. The light is on the hills and along the coast of all the lands. The nations are coming to the king. The continents and the islands begin to hear his voice. The tongues of men shall be filled with praise. It is not long; a few more days of work and prayer; a few more deeds of sacrifice and love; a few more lives given; a few more men girded with the towel and with the basin in their hands; a few more repetitions of that strange and sacred deed, Jesus washing the feet of Judas. Then the glory and the rejoicing. A little while and the day shall dawn. We may see the hastening light as we face the East,

Where, faint and far.

Along the tingling desert of the sky,
Beyond the circle of the conscious hills,
Were laid in jaspar-stone as clear as glass
The first foundations of that new, near Day

Which should be builded out of heaven to God.

ADDRESS.

REV. W. M. TAYLOR. D.D.

SELFISHNESS AND SELF-SACRIFICE.

As the starting-point of my address to-night let me bring before you from the Gospel history a scene with which you are all familiar. It is the latter portion of an Oriental afternoon, and the slopes of the mountain on the eastern side of the Lake of Tiberias are covered with thousands of people who have come from the towns and villages round about to listen to the words of Him who spake as never man spake. All day they have been hanging on His lips with such absorbing interest that every meaner thing has been forgotten by them, and no care has been taken by them to provide themselves with necessary food. Nor even as the sun is rapidly westering has any thought of what they should do for bodily sustenance disturbed their minds. The engrossment of the moment was too complete for that. But the disciples, anticipating trouble when the inevitable claims of hunger should assert themselves, and not seeing what they should do to still the clamor which should then arise, came to their Master and said, "Send the multitudes away." Therein, however, they only showed that they had not yet themselves fully comprehended the spirit of their Lord, for He immediately replied, "They need not depart, give ye them to eat;" and when, even by their own greatest efforts, they could raise only five loaves and two fishes, He took them and multiplied them to the feeding of the fasting crowd. Now many purely spiritual lessons of a valuable sort might be learned by us from this interesting episode in the life of our Lord. In particular we might give emphasis to the truth that it is never necessary to send men away from Christ; and that, aye, until upon the throne of judgment He shall Himself say to those upon His left hand, "Depart from me;" no one, be he apostle or bishop or presbyter, has any right or warrant to turn a single sinner away from Him.

But it is not for the enforcement of that truth, glorious as it is, that I have brought this scene before you now. My design is to set in clear and striking contrast on the one hand the policy of selfish non-exertion for the needy, as that comes out in the request of the disciples, "Send them away;" and, on the other, that of self-sacrificing love, as that is enforced by the reply of Christ, "They need not depart; give ye them to eat," and to apply the principles that underlie the Master's words to the work which the American Missionary Association has specially undertaken to perform in our land. Indeed, it would seem to me that in few departments has the cold indifference of selfishness been more manifested by men in modern times than in the treatment that has been given by the community generally to those suffering races whose interests are so tenderly watched over by this Society; while, on the other hand, the spirit of Christian love has been rarely more conspicuously displayed than it has been in the plans which have been formed and the efforts which have been made under the auspices of this institution for those peoples, who, in a manner so marvelous, have been brought by Providence into juxtaposition with the American nation; and I do not think that I can render a better service, not to this Association merely, but to the nation, than by making the truth of this assertion thoroughly apparent.

Here, then, let us take first the case of the North American Indians, and we shall find that the spirit of the greater part of our national dealings with them may be condensed into the words, "Send them away." Every kind of expedient has been resorted to for shutting them up in isolation and preventing them from coming into wholesome contact with our civilization and Christianity. They have been imprisoned within reservations beyond which they are not permitted to move. They have been forbidden to trade directly with those who might wish to purchase anything which they may raise, or manufacture. In the words of General Leake, in his able and exhaustive paper on this subject read at the last annual meeting of this Association: "We have placed over each tribe whom we can confine an agent of strange race to them, ignorant of their customs and language, with power to suspend their own chiefs, to suspend all trade, to warn off all visitors of whom he may disapprove. We have prescribed who should sell them anything, the place where the sale should take place, what the article sold should be, and how much they should pay for it." All this is bad enough, and yet they have no security that the reservation assigned to them will be in any proper sense of the term reserved to them, after all. If for any purposes of

་

gain white men desire the lands which have been allotted to them, they must arise and go elsewhere. "There is," to them, as it has been strongly but sadly said, "no element of certainty in their title to their lands, but that they will lose them." And when they gird themselves to defend their rights they are denounced as savages! To what an advanced degree of civilization, I pray you, must we attain before we should tamely submit to such indignities? And what savages our forefathers must have been when they emptied the teachests into Boston harbor, and resisted unto blood, striving against injustice! Almost every treaty made with the Indians has been violated, not by the Indians, but by the white man; nearly every promise that has been made to them has been broken; and the principle on which the nation has proceeded toward them has been almost always that of the most selfish dishonesty, to wit:

"That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.

Even a joint committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives has reported that "in a large majority of cases" (of Indian wars) "they are to be traced to the aggressions of lawless white men, always to be found upon the frontier or boundary line between savage and civilized life." And a commission appointed by the President on the same subject reported: "If the Indian is cruel and revengeful it is because he is outlawed, and his companion is the wild beast; " while the common saying in the mouths of heartless men to the effect that "the best Indian is a dead Indian," may fitly represent the spirit which has presided over the dealings of the nation with his race, and which is solely and absolutely responsible for all the troubles which have arisen between him and the white man. Now, whatever may be the right way of dealing with these aboriginal tribes, this is very evidently the wrong one. For one thing, it will only make them worse. Kindness may elevate them; but cruelty and injustice can only degrade them. "The villainy we teach them they will execute, and it will go hard but they will better the instruction." How can we teach them honesty, when we are continually defrauding them? How can we produce in them a regard for justice, when we are constantly trampling upon their rights? How can we hope to give them reverence for truth, when our own most solemnly asseverated promises to them are systematically broken ? That which we are to them, they will become, in an intensified form, to us, and we need not marvel at the poor success of our Christian missionaries among them, when we think of the treatment they have received at the hands of a nation calling itself Christian. Nor must