rnest philanthropist, Dr. Robert Finley, of New Jersey, he aided in
the instituting of the American Colonization Society. In 1817 he sailed,
in company with a colleague, the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, to explore the
coast of Africa in search of the best site for a colony. On the return
voyage he died, and his body was committed to the sea: a "little man,"
to whom were granted only five years of what men call "active life"; but
he had fulfilled his vow, and the ends of the earth had felt his
influence for the advancement of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The enterprise of African colonization, already dear to Christian hearts
for the hopes that it involved of the redemption of a lost continent,
of the elevation of an oppressed race in America, of the emancipation of
slaves and the abolition of slavery, received a new consecration as the
object of the dying labors and prayers of Mills. It was associated, in
the minds of good men, not only with plans for the conversion of the
heathen, and with the tide of antislavery sentiment now spreading and
deepening both at the South and at the North, but also with "Clarkson
societies" and other local organizations, in many different places, for
the moral and physical elevation of the free colored people from the
pitiable degradation in which they were commonly living in the larger
towns. Altogether the watchmen on the walls of Zion saw no fairer sign
of dawn, in that second decade of the nineteenth century, than the
hopeful lifting of the cloud from Africa, the brightening prospects of
the free negroes of the United States, and the growing hope of the
abolition of American slavery.[258:1]

Other societies, national in their scope and constituency, the origin of
which belongs in this organizing period, are the American Education
Society (1815), the American Sunday-school Union (1824), the American
Tract Society (1825), the Seamen's Friend Society (1826), and the
American Home Missionary Society (1826), in which last the
Congregationalists of New England cooeperated with the Presbyterians on
the basis of a Plan of Union entered into between the General Assembly
and the General Association of Connecticut, the tendency of which was to
reinforce the Presbyterian Church with the numbers and the vigor of the
New England westward migration. Of course the establishment of these and
other societies for beneficent work outside of sectarian lines did not
hinder, but rather stimulated, sectaria