y.

There is a beautiful story told in Greek mythology that when Ulysses was
passing in his ship by the Isle of the Sirens, the beautiful sirens
began to play their sweetest music to lure the sailors from their posts
of duty. Ulysses and his sailors stuffed wax in their ears, and lashed
themselves to the masts that they might not be lured away; but, when
Orpheus passed by in the search of the golden fleece and heard the same
sweet songs, he simply took out his harp and played sweeter music, and
not a sailor desired to leave the vessel. The sirens of sin and crime
are doing all in their power to lure us from the highest and best things
in life. Wealth, education, political power are, after all, but wax in
the ears, the ropes that may or may not hold us to the masts of safety;
but that sweeter music of the heart, played on the harp of love by the
fingers of faith will hold us stronger than "hoops of steel." Let the
great Sunday-school movement continue to play for us this sweeter music,
and no sirens can lure us away from truth and right and heaven. The
mission that will be of real help to us will be the mission dictated by
love, for no race is more susceptible to kindness than ours. It must be
undertaken in the spirit of the Master who said, "I call ye not
servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have
called you friends." The Negro loves his own and is satisfied to be with
them, and yet, the man who would really help him must be a man who has
seen the vision. Peter was unwilling to go to the Gentiles, being an
orthodox Jew, until God put him in a trance upon the house top, let down
the sheet from heaven with all manner of beasts, and bid him rise up,
slay, and eat. Peter strenuously objected, saying, "Lord, I have touched
nothing unclean." But God said, "What I have cleansed, call thou not
unclean." Then Peter said, "I see of a truth that God is no respector of
persons, but has made of one blood all men to dwell upon all the face of
the earth."

I pray, I believe, that you have seen this vision, and in this spirit
have come to help us. Sir Launfal, in searching for the Holy Grail,
found it in ministering to the suffering and diseased at his own door.
Ye who are in search of God's best gift can find it to-day in lifting up
these ten millions of people at your door, broken by slavery, bound by
ignorance, yet groping for the light. If we go down in sin and
ignorance, we can not go alone, but must co