That lady may be a Florence Nightingale,
but if I whisper, and whisper truly, that she came from the slums, that
her sisters are in the penitentiary, and her brothers are thieves,
society will never forgive her for not being in the penitentiary
herself. Society will pity her in ostentatious magniloquence, which is
far worse than contempt or neglect; perhaps it will clothe her with silk
and diamonds; but it will never treat her as it would not dare not to
treat any lady whom it felt its equal. As has been well said, what is
needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact--the recognition of fact.
When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it
belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still
showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by
chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as
full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears,
"Negro" will be as honorable as "Caucasian." And for this, through its
churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the
American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid
success.

I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by
the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with
his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the
American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities. Africa is the
only continent on the planet that has never had a history. For
millenniums it has been a locked closet. But in the providence of God
the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it. All the passions,
good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and
energetic of our race to look or to go thither. Love of money, love of
adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men
to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has
at last been thrown back. Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose
Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe
and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that
which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me
to educate. Do you believe these facts are accidents? Do you believe
that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the
remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of
his own will? There never can be a C