said, what is needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact—­the recognition of fact.  When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears, “Negro” will be as honorable as “Caucasian.”  And for this, through its churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid success.

I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities.  Africa is the only continent on the planet that has never had a history.  For millenniums it has been a locked closet.  But in the providence of God the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it.  All the passions, good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and energetic of our race to look or to go thither.  Love of money, love of adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has at last been thrown back.  Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me to educate.  Do you believe these facts are accidents?  Do you believe that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of his own will?  There never can be a Christian education which does not plant and foster the missionary spirit.  Is it a dream?  If so, let me die before I wake.  Is it a dream that among 8,000,000 of our fellow citizens each of whom, as Dr. Strieby told us at New York, is qualified to live, perhaps to thrive, in the climate which has proved a grave to Anglo-Saxons, each of whom is qualified to visit Africa with a fair hope of making himself received as a child returning unto his own household?  Is it too much to hope that, under the Christian education we may give them if we will, enough will desire to preach Christ to the dark continent to gem it with life and light as the sky is gemmed with stars?

I am too old to do it, but so complete is my conviction that the future of the race in the coming century shall move toward Africa as in the ages following Paul it moved toward the North and West of Europe, that were I a young man, loyal and devoted to my Master, and trying as he told his followers by Gennesaret to read in the morning and evening red the signs of the times, I should not go to Africa, perhaps; I would go to Tougaloo University, I think, and there devote all my energies and powers to instructing black men in the meaning and scope and inspiration and promise of the Master’s words, “Go ye.”