ions of the General Assembly on this subject, to license them. Further than this your committee is convinced that it is not wise for this Assembly and the church to go in the matter of licensing those who shall preach the gospel and exercise the functions of the ministry.

And in general the committee recommends

1. That while maintaining the high standard of ministerial qualification which has characterized our church throughout its history, presbyteries are reminded of their duty to promote the spiritual welfare of the unevangelized masses within their bounds, and are recommended in extraordinary cases to avail themselves of whatever flexibility in the licensing of candidates the rules prescribed by our Form of Government will permit.

2. That the faculties of our theological seminaries are recommended to bring frequently before their students the duty of the ministry to the unevangelized masses, and to emphasize those phases of theological instruction which will especially qualify them to instruct and Christianize these masses.

Accordingly it will be seen that all applications for aid in behalf of those who expect to take a partial course of preparation for the ministry must be sustained by clear evidence of their importance, in order to their acceptance by the Board.

CORRESPONDENCE.

The following letter is interesting, and speaks for itself:

June 6, 1887.

DEAR SIR:-Enclosed find one dollar for the Board of Education from E- Church, NPresbytery. It is not much, but it will help some poor victim of the vile habit to buy his

tobacco. We would not give anything to the Board while it permits its beneficiaries to squander the benefactions of the church in this way. But we want to give to all the boards, and therefore send you just $1.

Respectfully,

How far the Board "permits its beneficiaries to squander the benefactions of the church on tobacco" may be seen from the following extract of a letter regularly sent to all the candidates under care of the Board on their reception:

Another topic is the use of tobacco. We earnestly dissuade from it for the following

reasons:

1. The known use of tobacco by any candidate under our care serves to diminish, our resources, compels a reduction in our scholarships, and thus does injury to the larger number of those who do not use it.

2. The habit is protested against by the great majority of our contributors. Not infrequently is a contribution sent in accompanied with the restriction, "Not a cent of this for tobacco.” One writes: “ Buy tobacco with the Lord's money! No, never!" To indulge in it, therefore, is dishonest.

3. It puts the Board on the defensive before the churches, and abates the force of its appeal.

4. The habit is injurious to a minister's influence, and often hinders his acceptance with a people and prevents a call; and the Board wants its candidates clear from all obstacles to their usefulness in every field.

5. The use of tobacco is pronounced by the ablest scientists to be injurious to the body, and to unfit a student for the best study. Such a disqualification for the very objects for which the Board was established the Board emphatically protests against.

A lady in San José, California, wrote to the editor of THE CHURCH AT HOME AND ABROAD, making an inquiry which she desired him to answer in the magazine. He

perceives that his esteemed colleague who furnishes the material for this department has answered her question upon this page, while he had no knowledge of it.

THE NEGRO RACE AN ENIGMA.

There is no thoughtful person who has had much to do with the moral and religious improvement of the Freedmen who has not been perplexed with perpetually-recurring contradictions. In some regards they certainly are, as styled in the following selection from the report of the school superintendent of a southern state, an enigma. But as they are the subjects of the church's solicitude, calling forth her benevolence and prayer, it is desirable that those who are interested in their elevation should understand these peculiarities. Only in the light of statements like the following can we appreciate certain developments in Negro character:

It is just ten years since I entered upon my present work, and I have studied nothing so much as the Negro, because he is an enigma and yet a part of my work. I have seen him in all sections of my own state. I have read everything I could find in regard to him everywhere. I have listened to everything, pro and con, that anybody had to say about him, and my impression in regard to his spirit and capacity is just this:

1. He wants to do right, and he is the most amiable and the most religious of human beings, and the character of his religion is improving. It controls his daily life more than formerly. Among these people there are many centres of great moral power.

2. The Negro craves education, and I believe that this desire has increased. It certainly has not diminished. He makes fully as great sacrifices to send his children to school as the laboring classes of the whites.

3. The civilization of the race is progressing, and even faster than his thoughtful friends anticipated.

4. The Negro is fond of politics, and he has just one principle of political action, and this is to go with those who will do most, or lead him to think they will do most, to advance his interest. He has an eye to the past, but a much sharper eye to the future. He has no strong faith in men or parties, and he will go hither and thither according as his confidence

He is most sus

is gained at the moment. picious of those who have hitherto formed the controlling element in southern society and politics. There are occasional divisions of sentiment among the Negroes; but the great body of them move in mass, thus giving an illustration of the "unanimity of ignorance."

5. But finally, as a class, they are in character weak and ignorant, and hence to that extent a dangerous element in society. We cannot expect that the mass of them-any more than the mass of ignorant white people-will be controlled by high and broad views while in their present condition; and there is no way of making them safe members of society but by educating them. The Negroes are a highly. improvable race. A surprising proportion of enlightened, right-thinking men have already

risen from their ranks-men who have taken a respectable position, some in the learned professions, some in editing and printing newspapers and some in the management of business; and what is not less commendable, great numbers are living worthy lives in the humble occupations. The colored children learn well at school and show good effects promptly; but the kind and amount of education they are receiving or can receive with our present means is wholly inadequate to the great work of fitting them as a race for duties laid upon them by the federal government. And the race generally is far below the demands made upon it. No stronger claim to education ever existed than the claim of the Negro race in these southern states upon the government which set them free and made them citizens, and this claim will be rung in the ear of Congress until it is responded to. It is a great plea, of so much force in itself and supported by collateral reasons of such tremendous weight that it must prevail.

Can there be a nobler work for a country than to help the struggling efforts of a newborn race of freedmen to become free men, and to aid in building up a new civilization out of the ruins of slavery?

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-Thomas Jefferson.

AN APPEAL TO THE WOMEN OF THE CHURCH BY ONE OF THEIR NUMBER.

We have in our midst a population of more than 7,000,000 belonging to a race distinct from ours, brought here against their wills and kept in bondage for our profit. Of family relations they knew. nothing. Neither the law nor the church recognized the marriage relation among them. They were married at the will of the master, and the same will could separate them and sell husband or wife. Children could be taken from the mother's arms and sold. For two hundred years the race was thus enslaved. It was a crime punishable by law to teach them to read, and for many years the same law would punish them for coming together for religious services without the presence of a white person. Is it wonderful that the Negro to-day is almost destitute of morality, and that his ignorance and superstition are appalling? Without any agency of their own these people were set free. Freedom to them was abject poverty, for they did not own one foot of ground or one implement of labor. These adult children, without previous training and with the wildest ideas of liberty, were thrown upon their own resources. No wonder many mistakes have been made; but amid all the corruption there is a germ of good, which, if properly cared for, will do much to purify and elevate the masses. They all want to be educated, and to-day there is not a people upon the earth so eager to improve. From no part of our country come such urgent appeals as from these black people, who are hungering for knowledge. Christian women, is there not something here for us to do? These colored sisters, before whose wrongs even those of the Indian pale, need our help. "Their condition is what we have made it, and remains what we will it." Shall we not show them that the best way, the only way, to elevate their race is to give them intelligent homes? We must reach the women before we can have such homes. We need earnest, patient, educated Christian white women to show them, both by precept and

pure,

example, the beauty of purity, and give them a true idea of womanhood. We have a few such teachers, and their influence is seen in the higher morality and improved homes of those around them. Will you not help us to send now at least twelve more such women to different parts of the South? Will you not talk about, pray for and give to this work? Appeal to the patriotism, as well as the Christianity, of your fathers, brothers, husbands and acquaintances. What we do we must do quickly. They are now adjusting themselves to their new circumstances. With God's blessing upon our efforts, they can be made intelligent, useful citizens, with Christian homes. Neglect this golden opportunity, and they will become our scourge.

A distinguished officer in the late southern army recently said:

Practically, through the great majority of our higher educational officers, we are fairly converted to the imperative necessity of elevating the colored man intellectually, and are beginning to see very plainly that the whole community is sinned against in every act or attitude of oppression, however gross or however refined.

We seldom hear the freedmen prayed for in our concerts of prayer for home or foreign missions. Why this neglect?

We have 15,689 scholars in our colored Sabbath-schools. Will not our white Sabbath-schools help us to gather in as many more? Their missionary contributions of only one month during the year would enable us to do this. Five cents only from each Sunday-school scholar would give us $37,175.90.

Before the conclusion of this century we shall have a chain of states extending from the Potomac to the Mississippi in every one of which the colored race will have a clear and indisputable majority; in several of which their preponderance will be as two to one.Judge Tourgée.

FREEDMEN FOR AFRICA. However villainous the African slave trade was, and whatever sin there may have been in the enslavement of Africans in this land, there was clearly a providential design in their being brought to this country, and that design was to Christianize them. The slave-trader meant to make money, and so did the slave-buyer, but God meant to "save much people alive." He made the wrath of man to praise him. With all the evils of slavery there are some wonderful facts which stand connected with the strange history of the children of Africa in America. Among them are these: Long before the war which ended slavery, there were nearly half a million of these slaves brought, hopefully converted, into the communion of the various Protestant churches then at work in the southern states. Now there are nearly one million of them in the different Protestant churches in the United States, and the

remaining six millions have been largely brought, directly or indirectly, under the influence of the gospel of Christ. In these facts is there not a further providential design looking toward the ultimate evangelization of Africa? The elevation and Christianizing of the Negroes in America is a grand and noble work; but is that to be all the outcome of two hundred and fifty years of slavery? The people of God, in their Egyptian bondage and their trials in a wilderness march, were trained for a grander work than their own salvation and that of their children. Surely the Christianizing of these multitudes of Africans in our own land looks and must look toward the salvation of the vaster multitudes of the "Dark Continent."

In the work we are doing to-day among the freedmen we see the morning star of hope for the millions of Continental Africa as it shines over the humble chapels and school-houses of Christianized and educated Negroes in the South. We know there are those who put little faith in sending colored missionaries to Africa; but how strangely they must read providence, and how entirely have they lost sight of the ultimate outcome of the vast movement of free

ing and Christianizing millions of African slaves in America! Says Dr. Haygood, in that admirable work, "Our Brother in Black":

It is, by the way, a significant fact that the wild Africans appeared on these shores long before there was a thought of a foreign missionary society in the American churches. Who knows but that the heathen who were brought to us largely moved the churches to send the gospel to the heathen in their own land? He who cannot, through the mists and clouds of this strange and troubled history, see the hand of God in their coming to this country, can hardly understand the "going down" of Israel into Egypt.

Rev. Louis Grout, who has carefully studied the African on his native soil and in America, says:

The freedmen, properly educated, will make capital missionaries for Africa. After a careful study of the race for thirty years-fifteen on their own ancestral shores, and now fifteen concerning them. They have, naturally, some in this land of ours-such is my conclusion

of the best traits to fit them for mission work. They are hopeful, for one thing, as every missionary should be. During all the long years of their bondage, and then during all the war, how did they hope on and hope ever that deliverance would come, till come it did! They are naturally a social people. Getting a new idea, a new truth, they talk it over, pass it on, keep it going. The missionary must be social if he will do the most good. They are a sharpminded, quick-witted people. For ability to read character, make a quick turn, a good use of passing events, or take a good illustration from nature, the Africans have no superior. They are of a tropical constitution, most happy, healthy and most at home in just such a climate as that of Africa. It is their native climate a fact whose value can neither be denied nor overestimated.

Now, keeping all these natural qualifications in mind, let us briefly note some pertinent points in that most unique, varied experience and divinely-appointed discipline through which God, in his providence, has been causing the freedmen to pass for all these years, as giving them a yet more special preparation for

the great mission work he has in store for them.

First, experience in suffering. I know not how it may be with others, but for myself I have come, long since, to think that there is no discipline in this world like that of suffering,

rightly used, to fashion us after the image of the Divine. In this way the Saviour himself is said to have been made perfect and fitted for his great redemptive work (Heb. 5:8, 9). And when, in olden time, God would make choice of a people to be conservators and propagators of his truth in the world for ages, how did he prepare them for their mission? Not by sending them to college, but by sending them down into Egypt; and there, for long generations, did he keep them in bondage, and then for other long years in wanderings in the wilderness, till he had fitted them for his work, and ground into them a character which all the friction of ages has not yet ground out of them. So with the people of whom we speak: what an experience have they had in suffering! Surely, God must have in store for them some great and wondrous mission, for which he has intended this experience to be both presage and preparation. Then notice the discipline they have had as soldiers in the camp, on the march, on guard, in the battle, shoulder to shoulder with our men, sons, brothers, fathers, bravely fighting for the Union, that they might know what war is, and what it sometimes costs to secure liberty and save a nation from anarchy and ruin. See, too, what experience and discipline they are getting in civil and political life, in the use of the ballot, in the forming and reconstructing of states, in the framing of constitutions, in making and executing laws, in all the varied and complicated duties of citi

zens, magistrates, judges and rulers, that they

may know how laws, states and nations are made and sustained, and so be prepared to go and plant these institutions and principles in the land of their fathers. And then, last and best of all, what an experience are they getting in the work of organizing and running Christian schools and pure churches among their own people, under the lead of our teachers and preachers in the South, that they may be prepared to do this same blessed work in that dark land which is so imploringly calling to them, as her own sons and daughters, to come with the school and the church to her help.

What is needed is that the church of God come with a full heart and hand to the help of the work among the freedmen. Give them the gospel, give them Christian education and training, and we shall soon see the unfolding of God's providence in regard to the part that Christianized Africans in America are to have in Christianizing Africa and redeeming Ethiopia unto the Lord.

CASTE PREJUDICE.

In looking over the American Missionary not long since, we came across this paragraph:

Christian intelligence is the most potent agency for obliterating the barbarism of caste prejudice; and the endowment of schools for those who suffer from it, the most safe and certain means for its overthrow.

The truth of this none will question; we only fall short when called upon to apply the remedy. We have a people among us numbering more than seven millions against whom exists as strong a caste prejudice as can be found in any land. What is the duty of the Presbyterian Church toward this people? Our General Assembly, by establishing the Board of Missions for Freedmen, and by recommending it year by year to the churches, acknowledges its obligation to them. How are we meeting this obligation? Looking over the field we find churches and schools planted here and there in the southern states. We find faithful pastors and teachers. Ignorance and superstition are slowly disappearing. This all

seems favorable, and we thank God for what he has enabled us to do. Let us look closer and inquire why more has not been accomplished, why the light has not spread, and we find almost without exception our churches and schools suffering for want of

means.

We hear of congregations and no houses of worship; of schools among the poor that were doing a good work closed because of want of teachers; and of noble men and women offering themselves for the work, but the treasury is empty. Even Biddle University, the only institution under the care of the Board for training ministers, is crippled for want of funds and proper accommodations. The patient, persevering, self-denying labors of our brethren there have yielded a rich harvest; but who can estimate how much greater it might have been had the means been placed in their hands of carrying on the work in accordance with their desires? Let the great Presbyterian Church cease "to play" with its missions for freedmen, and, recognizing its peculiar obligations to this people, take