ar thought" are so painfully in doubt, we protest
against your right, or that of any other created worm, to formulate for
the special behoof of Negroes any sort of artificial creed unbelieved
in by yourself, having the function and effect of detective
"shadowings" of their souls. Away with your criminal suggestion of
toleration of the hideous orgies of heathenism in Hayti for the benefit
of our future morals in the West Indies, when the political supremacy
which you predict and dread and deprecate shall have become an
accomplished fact. Were any special standard of spiritual excellence
required, our race has, in Josiah Henson and Sojourner Truth, sufficing
models for our men and our women respectively. Their ideal of
Christian life, which we take to be the true one, is not to be judged
of with direct reference to the Deity whom we cannot [221] see,
interrogate, or comprehend, but to its practical bearing in and on man,
whom we can see and have cognizance of, not only with our physical
senses, but by the intimations of the divinity which abides within us.*
We can see, feel, and appreciate the virtue of a fellow-mortal who
consecrates himself to the Divine idea through untiring exertion for
the bettering of the condition of the world around him, whose agony he
makes it his duty, only to satisfy his burning desire, to mitigate.
The fact in its ghastly reality lies before us that the majority of
mankind labour and are being crushed under the tremendous trinity of
Ignorance, Vice, and Poverty.

It is mainly in the succouring of those who thus suffer that the
vitality of the old creed is manifested in the person of its
professors. Under this aspect we behold it moulding men, of all
nations, countries, and tongues, whose virtues have challenged and
should command on its behalf the unquestioning faith and adhesion of
every rational observer. "Evidences of Christianity," "Controversies,"
"Exegetical Commentaries," have all proved [222] more or less
futile--as perhaps they ought--with the Science and Modern Criticism
which perverts religion into a matter of dialectics. But there is a
hope for mankind in the fact that Science itself shall have ultimately
to admit the limitations of human inquiry into the details of the
Infinite. Meanwhile it requires no technical proficiency to recognize
the criminality of those who waste their brief threescore and ten years
in abstract speculations, while the tangible, visible, and hideous