nd better nature.

Has the Negro a higher and better nature? We shall see.

To separate him from the rest of the human family would be to dispute
the great truth, that has been so long accepted, by all thoroughly
Christianized nations--the Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of
man. "Of one blood God formed all nations, for to dwell upon the face
of the earth." Man, in his first estate, was supremely moral, being
created in the righteous image of his Maker; had man continued in
this condition, he would have been perfectly innocent and happy,
favored with the exalted privilege of direct communion with God,
inspired only by Him who is the Great Source, all light and
perfection, from whom emanates nothing dark, unholy or unclean.

But man fell, and was driven from Eden. Hence, he began to wander away
from God, in spirit and purpose; the tempter had been admitted and
man's heart grew very deceitful and desperately wicked. The command of
God, however, as written in Genesis, 1st chap., 28th verse, was
inviolable. The earth _must_ be peopled; thus man continued to wander,
and his heart became proud and defiant, even to the resistance of the
will and purpose or God. So far did the distance become between man
and his Maker and so greatly abounded his wickedness, that at last God
gave him over to his own evil imaginations.

The inhabitants of the antediluvian world, as a consequence of man's
first transgression, fell lower and lower in the scale of good morals.
They became so confirmed in wickedness, so totally depraved, that God
destroyed them all, save one man and his family, whom He accounted as
righteous, for the sake of his faithful obedience, and whose seed He
preserved for the repeopling of the earth. The races, whether Semitic,
Hamitic or Japhetic, as springing from the three sons of Noah, all
partook of some of the natural proclivities of their revered and
ancient grand-sire. What Canaan lacked in the line of perfection in
the moral ethics of his day, may be directly attributed to heredity.
The lineage of the Negro has been directly traced through Cush to Ham;
hence, to argue the total moral depravity of the sons of Ham is but to
concede the total moral depravity of the entire human race, as
emanated from Noah in the postdiluvian age.

To assert that the Negro has no defects, and is morally good, would be
to deny him as one of the legitimate heirs of the family of Noah, and
deprive him of his natural inheritance.