The hour and the call have come. The nation is re-awakened to its great duty to the late slaves; they are themselves awaking to the glorious opening for them as citizens and Christians in America, and they are enthusiastic to aid in redeeming the land of their fathers. The possibilities of African regeneration are enkindling the hearts of Christians in Germany, in Great Britain and in America. God’s providence is opening the way and sending His commands along the lines. Well may it be said to the Church of Christ in America as Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
THE PROVIDENTIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA.
REV. E. H. MERRELL, PRESIDENT OF RIPON COLLEGE.
The significance of the negro in America cannot be understood without study in the light of the providence of God. It is not presumption to seek in the course of events the divine thought; it is rather presumption to assume that events occur without a divine purpose. “They that love to trace a divine hand will always have a divine hand to trace.” It is true that men have committed unspeakable folly in attempting to force the thoughts of the great God into the channels of their intellectual pettiness. Philosophies of history written with a provincial scholarship, under the eye of an unsound philosophy or the extravagancies of religious enthusiasm, must from the nature of the case be unsound; so a too particular and minute description of the ways of Providence in the interest of a preconceived theory of life, or of some specific reform or “cause,” leads to fanaticism and exposure to contempt. There are sins committed only by the good, if the solecism may be tolerated, and among them is a profane assumption of knowledge in regard to the purposes of God. But, on the other hand, it is greater folly to assume that God has left the world out of His thought and providential care, and that the course of the world is not made by the efficiency of His word. It is absurd, also, to assume that great providential courses are undiscoverable by the intelligence of man. “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for the sky is red and lowering. O, ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but ye cannot discern the signs of the times.” We may make ourselves quite ridiculous in attempting to literalize the tails, wings, breastplates, teeth, hair, faces, crowns, shapes of the horse-like locusts of John’s apocalypse; but it is quite within the reach of our faculties to find the key to his book and to unfold its prophetic instructions and consolations. The use of the tabernacle as the dwelling-place of Jehovah’s glory it is possible to find by a simple exercise of the ken of philosophic interpretation; but the symbolic import of the coverings of fine twined linen and woven goats’ hair and rams’ skins dyed red, we must leave to the dogmatism of unlettered exegesis. It is not our fault, then, that we are looking too intently for the ways of God through the history of the world, but rather that we do not look aright. * * * * If it be true that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will;” that “He changeth the times and the seasons; He removeth kings and setteth up kings;” that “promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south; but God is the Judge; He putteth down one and setteth up another;”—if it be true that the Lord “that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth” by Himself also, “frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad;” that He “sayeth of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure,” surnaming him, and girding him, though he knew him not;—if, in short, the Lord is God, and His providence extends over nature, over nations, over individuals, over free acts, and over sinful acts,—surely we shall not gather the significance of any great matter in the world’s progress without such a study of the facts, and such an interpretation of them as shall disclose the main trend of the divine purposes.