unto thee; because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the Lord.”  Here we have a kindness done by a colored man to Jeremiah, and a message sent from God to the colored man acknowledging and rewarding that kindness; but O! how many debts of that sort owed by men among ourselves to the colored people have been forgotten or repudiated!  In the agony of the war, colored people fought in the ranks of the Northern armies; and I have heard those who have belonged to the Confederate side declare with tears in their eyes that the faithful watch kept by their colored servants over their wives and families while they were absent with the troops was beyond all praise.  And yet in these days we read every now and then of colored people shot down like dogs on the slightest provocation, and prevented on the merest pretext from exercising the rights of citizens of this free Republic, and men look on and do nothing.  But God may say something by and by, and when he speaks men’s ears shall tingle!  We have another illustration of God’s treatment of a colored man in the case of the Ethiopian treasurer.  He was returning from Jerusalem, where he had been at one of the great annual Jewish feasts, and as he was riding in his chariot he was reading aloud to himself the book of the prophet Isaiah, when the evangelist Philip, specially sent thither for the purpose by God’s Spirit, addressed him, and on being asked to come into the carriage with him expounded to him the meaning of the passage which he was reading, and preached the gospel from it unto him with such good effect that he was forthwith baptized on the confession of his faith, and afterward went on his way rejoicing to found that Ethiopian church which claims to this day to be one of the most ancient Christian churches in the world.  He was a man, for he was moved by the truth as you and I have been, and he became a Christian—­“the highest style of man”—­to show us that, as Peter said, “In every nation they that fear God and work righteousness are accepted of him.”  That which is highest in any man is his appreciation and acceptance of the gospel! of Christ, and wherever we see that appreciation we have not only a fellow man but a brother Christian, to be treated by us as Paul requested Philemon to treat Onesimus—­as “a brother beloved.”  Nor let any one suppose that there is a single race upon the earth that can not be so transformed and gladdened as this Ethiopian was.  Even Charles Darwin declared that after the Patagonians it could not be said that any race is too degraded for the gospel to elevate, and so he gave new emphasis, unwittingly, perhaps, but, if so, all the more strongly, to the words addressed to Peter on the housetop:  “What God hath cleansed that call not thou common;” or those of Paul in one of his epistles:  “For there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”