It certainly is not a misfortune that this Association is forced to measure itself with other benevolent enterprises in making its appeal for sympathy and support. It can afford to do so, for it risks nothing by the contrast. Without disparagement to any other form of Christian endeavor, it is not exaggeration to say that considering the work accomplished, or the largeness and importance of the work remaining to be done, and which it proposes to do, this organization is easily peer of the foremost. It is a Zion that will bear and courts inspection, not only such as may be made by a leisurely "walk round about it," but exact and minute scrutiny in which "judgment is laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet." In some near future, when the history of the continent for the last half of this century comes to be written, it will be seen that the American Missionary Association was one of the most influential factors in the solution of great national problems, in removing sectional differences, in obliterating race distinctions, in harmonizing conflicting policies, and, better and more marvelous than all else, in building up out of African and Indian, and Mongolian and Caucasian a kingdom of God in whose unity all diversities blend and all separating lines are effaced, and righteousness is the sole and sufficient foundation, and sanctified manhood and womanhood the walls of strength and splendor.
Do you realize, good friends, the contrast between America at the date of the founding of this society and the America of this year of grace? The interval of time is short, but we have been making history at a prodigious rate, a rate so rapid that in the rush of it the advance of to-day dims the recollection of the position of yesterday. Forty years ago this nominally free government was a tyranny. It posed before the world in the white fleece of liberty, but the covering was too scant to hide the ravening wolf underneath. The world held no such infernal riot of iniquity as American slavery. High treason against God and man, it bred unnumbered crimes. Generations were born in the darkness of captivity, moaned and struggled awhile for light, and died. In its greed for gain the nation coined the bodies and souls of men into money. Many a millionaire built his mansion on outrage and wrong. The timbers of his house were the bones of innocent victims. For every adorning some brother man had groaned and smarted under the lash. And yet how few dared or cared to protest against this hell upon earth. The Government said, "Hands off!" The churches were afraid to meddle with the matter or talked piously about "the patriarchal institution." Great publishing societies emasculated the tracts which they issued for the purpose of saving the souls of men, and tore out of them all reference to the iniquity which was destroying both soul and body. Foremost organizations that clamored for laborers and money to preach the glad tidings of deliverance to the swarthy dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, could not see as far as the banks of the Mississippi. Only one Christian organization in the broad land--this Association, dared to say, Slavery is an accursed thing. Riddance from it was only a dim hope, the remotest of possibilities. And all that less than forty years ago. To-day no foot of a slave presses the soil of the continent; to-day ancient irresponsible ownership of the souls and bodies of men is a nightmare of the past, and the haughtiness of unquestioned authority is changing to conciliation and growing respect for human rights; to-day an emancipated race has not only cast off the fetters from its limbs but is seeking and finding the larger liberty of completed manhood and womanhood. Wonderful and blessed change; you search history in vain to find its parallel.