as they would be glad to publish. It has seemed expedient till business revives to content ourselves with issuing fewer books, and press on vigorously with the periodicals and the Sundayschool publications; these, we will add, have the most gratifying and a constantly increasing circulation. If Congregationalists would have such a Publishing Society as they need to enter and occupy the large field which legitimately belongs and opens to them, they have only to furnish the needful capital, and not confine their patronage wholly to outside organizations.

It is not now a propitious time to solicit money. While the Methodist book concerns report capital amounting to nearly $1,700,000, and the Presbyterian Board of Publication reports a capital of more than half a million dollars, and the American Baptist Publication Society has in its building alone, which is fuily paid for, more than a quarter of a million of dollars, it is mortifying that the Congregational Publishing Society can report only property enough to keep on in the very humble and moderate, though honest and prudent course it has thus far pursued. We need, and as soon as the business of the country will justify it an effort should be made to raise, $100,000 to put into this most important undertaking. We ask those also who are making legacies to keep in view what a mighty work a good book will do for them and for their Lord after they are gone, and to make sure of leaving to this society enough to perpetuate at least one such volume. We ask all to give generously while they are living, and take the satisfaction and exercise the wisdom of supervising and looking after their benefactions, by bestowing them through this society, and so making sure that the best work is accomplished by their gifts. Cripple our publishing societies, withhold from them facilities for covering the breadth of fields which lie open to the earliest seedsower, and the fairest hopes of grand spiritual achievements will be disappointed. "It is of the greatest concernment in the church and in the commonwealth," says John Milton, "to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men." We need and must have societies to keep an eye upon the literature of the day, "to confine," as Milton adds, "imprison, and do sharpest justice on the books which are malefactors," and no less to equip and send forth the books which are not "dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are, and to preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." Many a

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man," this old Puritan adds, "lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life. Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse."

These books in which are embalmed truths on purpose to a life beyond life, how shall they preach except they be sent? No good book goeth a warfare at its own charges The cost of disseminating Christian literature is one of the wisest expenditures for which money can be used. For good books "multiply themselves; they are as lively and vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth, and being sown up and down may chance to spring up armed men." That sort of armed men is what our country needs. Let there be no stint in sowing the seed.

THE RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION.

BY REV. M. E. STRIEBY, D. D.

THE most peaceable man that treads the American continent is the negro, and yet around him have gathered our fiercest and bloodiest wars, our bitterest political strifes, and our most notable religious conflicts.

Why is this? We only inadequately explain when we say that the negro has not quarrelled with us; nor have we quarrelled with him. We have quarrelled among ourselves over him, and we did this because we had first quarrelled with conscience and God about him. We explain a little further when we say that we have grievously oppressed him. True, we at length emancipated him, but this only as a war necessity; we enfranchised him, but this only as a party necessity; and since then we have been inclined to cast him off, to leave him, in his poverty, ignorance, and danger, to help himself, preferring ourselves to help the far less needy white man.

But we reach the true explanation, the bottom fact in the case, when we confess that we have a prejudice against him on account of his color and past condition. That caste-pride which is the direst curse of half the globe is found with us; and God seems

to have thrown upon our hands these three races, the Indian, Negro, and Chinaman, to test our Christianity and to call us to the high duty of setting the example to the world of the conquest of caste. We must do this by conquering the caste-spirit in ourselves in giving these races the gospel; by rendering them harmonious and helpful in sustaining free institutions, and preparing them to carry the gospel to other lands. Those obligations involve the great duties of home evangelization, Christian patriotism, and foreignmissions. I hesitate not to say that here is not only the hardest, but, if attained, the greatest achievement for American Christians and patriots, an achievement which the power of Christ only can enable us to accomplish, and in which mere political sagacity, patriotism, or a sense of justice will utterly fail.

Let us look at these several duties.

I. The evangelization of these masses.

There is no people in the land more eager for the gospel than these races, especially the negro. We only need to conquer ourselves to save him, and make him worthy of our respect; and to attain all this we need but one simple rule, and that is to regard and treat him as Christ himself would if he were here. When he was on earth, he did not neglect the rich or the learned. He ate with them, he tried to instruct them; but the people that were drawn most to him were the outcasts, the man possessed with devils that dwelt among the tombs, the lepers that were ostracized from society, the woman that was a sinner, who washed his feet with her tears, wiped them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet. If he were here, he would seek the same outcasts, and where are they to be found if not among these despised races? They would hear him gladly, because they would feel the magnetism of his divine pity. He is not here, but he sends us. If we go not in that same spirit, we go in vain. Nay, if we bestow all our goods to feed these poor, and give our bodies to be burned, and have not the charity which Christ feels towards them, it will profit us or them nothing. But if we go in that spirit, we reach them and lift them up, and in lifting them up we exalt them from objects of mere pity to the plane of intelligent and Christian manhood. II. The duty of Christian patriotism.

America owes to herself and to the world the great duty of maintaining her free institutions. They were bought at a great price, and are a priceless boon to mankind. As we have seen, they have been jeopardized more by these three races than by all others com

bined. If the same causes continue to operate in these people and in us, the same dire calamities must again return. The first sweep of the great storm has passed, and there is a calm. We may, if we will, avert the return of the tempest. Never was there a more propitious time. When the terrible war-cloud had only begun to pass away, the rainbow of liberty to the slave spanned the whole horizon, and the Proclamation of the immortal Lincoln was God's sign and seal that the curse of slavery should no more deluge the land. The war closed, but the sky was not all clear; Ku Klux outrages darkened the South, the angry discussion of the measures of reconstruction raged in Congress and over the land; then came the rivalry of races in the political contests in the Southern States, followed by the military occupation of South Carolina and Louisiana. The South was irritated, and the North became weary of the whole subject. But now President Hayes has brought peace. I am not here as a partisan, but from my standpoint, and with my knowledge of the South, I am prepared to indorse the statement he made to the colored people at Atlanta. "For no six months since the war have there been so few outrages or invasions of your rights, nor you so secure in your rights, persons, and homes, as in the last six months."

And now, in this favored hour, shall we address ourselves to the great work before us? We must not fall back on past achievements. The Proclamation of Emancipation and the reconstruction measures have done their work. Nor can we gain anything by repeating the political or party measures of the past. These last were powder spent in vain, and the best of powder cannot be burned twice. We must turn from the past, whether effectual or ineffectual, for the greater, the profounder work yet remains, that of elevating these races into intellectual Christian manhood. This is now all that is needed, and aught else is useless. Let me specify in several particulars.

(1.) The present lull will give a new impulse to the industry of the South, and both blacks and whites will spring forward to the opportunity. But if the white man still retains a monopoly of the land, the capital, and the intelligence, the blacks must sink into a species of serfdom wellnigh as incompatible with our free institutions as slavery itself, and as certain to perpetuate the rivalry of races and to renew our national dissensions. We can only avert these sad results by the new manhood we give the black man; and that manhood can come only from the power of a real and practical

Christian character Nowhere in all the land is there an equal number of the working masses so accessible to gospel influences.

(2.) Again, the South is quiet politically; but this is only because the white man has it all his own way, and the ballot is useless in the hands of the blacks. But that ballot, representing a million of voters and forty-one members in Congress, will not always remain dormant. It is too vast a power. The ignorance

behind it may make it as terrible as it is vast. But for weal or woe it will come to the surface again. If it rises turbulently it will be put down by violence; if it rises under the shrewd manipulations of party leaders, it will only renew the political troubles of the past; it can only appear again in one way, with safety to the blacks themselves or to the nation, and that is that the voters arise as intelligent and virtuous men. Mere intelligence will not suffice; they must have character, a right moral purpose, and this can be given to them only by Christianity. They can now be reached, and here is the paramount duty of the church of Christ towards them.

(3.) Once more. This is a golden moment for an advance in the educational work in the South. The dense illiteracy of that vast section, which contains more than one third of the entire population of the nation, an illiteracy without parallel in any other portion of the land, amounting to 3,550,425 persons who cannot read and write in the South against 409,175 in the West, must awaken deep anxiety in the mind of every thoughtful man.

But now, with the return of peace and the advent of more prosperous times, the South will do more for her common schools. Her great want, especially for the colored people, is a supply of competent teachers. They ought to be largely raised up from among the colored people themselves, and the duty and opportunity of preparing them for this important work are largely devolved on institutions planted there by Northern Christians. But mere secular education is not adequate; that education must be imbued with the spirit of Christ, and will be all the more welcomed by the people, both black and white. Here, then, is the lever for the real elevation of this people put into our hands.

A tremendous emphasis is added to this opportunity by the fact that, if we fail to seize it, it will soon be snatched from our hands by the emissaries of Rome. Their plans are well laid, and stead

ily and successfully followed.

Have we shed the blood of a million

of men to free the bodies of the slave, and shall we now leave him to a deeper thraldom?