The demand for missionaries of the negro race who can realize that “Christianity is a missionary religion,” will be greater, also.  We can scarcely expect that those who came out of Egypt will become missionaries to Egypt.  The apprehension of missionary responsibility comes with a developed Christianity.  The missionary sense came to the Apostles themselves very slowly.  It came to the Christian Church slowly.  The African people in America, I trust, will seize upon it more rapidly, for they have a large emotional nature and great faith.  What they now need is education and intellectual character, and those qualities which give shape, and tone, and persistence, to the forces which direct and control events.

Men who have been slaves may not take on this, and their children may not in great numbers.  But their children’s children are coming on multitudinously, and from them must go those who shall preach the Gospel to their own race in Africa.  For psychological as well as physiological reasons this must be.  Not only because they can live, and whites cannot, in Africa, but because, other things being equal, they can do this work better with their own race.  Said Christ, “Go home to thy friends, and tell what great things the Lord hath done for thee.”

All of which says that the Fisk must now add to its great work a thorough theological school, and must urge its students to listen to the voice of God and to answer when God calls, “Speak, Lord, thy servant heareth.”  More and better ministers are needed both for Africa in the United States and Africa across the sea.  He will give wisely who will give quickly for this.

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ILLUMINATED SPOTS.

A Northern visitor in the South, writing in a recent number of The Advance speaks of the rapid improvement of the Negroes in that locality.  He says that the Negro is prosperous; that commercially he is honest; that one house has had no less than thirteen hundred names of colored people on its books, each having a credit from a few dollars to forty or more; that the Negro respects education—­even if he is unable to read himself, he wants, with all the determination of his soul, that his children shall be educated; that the merchants say that they are buying better and better goods, are learning the value of money, are exercising wiser judgment, are becoming farmers and mechanics, are becoming better men.

These items, taken from a long article, show the bright light glowing in that locality.  Of course the writer gives some dark touches to the picture, and thus modified, it may be repeated of thousands of places throughout the South.  Some of our friends, we fear, look too much upon the dark side.  There is a dark side, and it is dense.  But if we can only continue and enlarge the sphere of these bright spots, and kindle others in new localities, the time will come when the light will displace the darkness and the dawn of a new era will come.  Friends of the Negro race, patriots and Christians! furnish the oil for these bright spots and help to multiply them.