our ears have been greeted during the last few days by
those initial letters, "A. M. A.," and we have perhaps got a new
meaning which was hinted at yesterday morning, "A Master Artist,"
because the American Missionary Association takes the black clay and
transforms it into the immortal soul. But I like best of all the
meaning given to the letters by a little boy who had just begun to
study Latin. With that air of ownership which we are so apt to see in
the boys and girls who have just begun the study of a new language, he
came to his mother and said, "Here it is: A. M. A.--_AMA._, Love thou
them." I like better than all the meaning given inadvertently by that
little boy, because it seems to me that the American Missionary
Association, working as it does among the poor and oppressed classes,
striving to weld into one common brotherhood the black, the white, the
red and the yellow, is the best exponent we have here in our own
country of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and of
that self-sacrificing love which brought Christ into the world to die
for the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the black and the
white alike. So it is entitled to write on all its literature and
emblazon on its shield those cabalistic letters, "A M A"--"Love thou
them."

I will not try to add to facts or multiply incidents. Here we have
before us this great problem: ten millions of our people, one-sixth of
our whole body politic, sunk in the depths of superstition, ignorance
and sin. We may shut our eyes to this problem; we may ignore it; we
may say it has been exaggerated; we may even say it does not exist.
You and I in our quiet homes may not hear the mutterings or the
moanings of these ten million souls in bondage; but their cry goes up
to Him who in mankind's first morning uttered those two burning
questions which have ever since determined the standard of the Christ
spirit in humanity: "Where art thou?" "Where is thy brother?"

We are to make of these ten million people God-fearing, intelligent
citizens. We are to leaven this mass of humanity with the leaven of
the school and of the church, and, so doing, make of these two million
whites, these stanch, stalwart Anglo-Saxon men, and of these eight
million loyal, affectionate, docile negroes, all American-born
citizens--we are to make of them a bulwark which shall resist the
oncoming tide of socialism, anarchism and of atheism, which is trying
to overwhelm our American i