THE

AFRICAN REPOSITORY.

Vol. xxxix.]

WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER, 1862

[No. 12.

THE HAND OF GOD WITH THE BLACK RACE,

BY REV. ALEXANDER J. MCGILL, DD.

SIXTH ARTICLE IN THE OCTOBER NUMBER OF 1862,

From the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review on African Colonization.

This Discourse of Dr. McGill, Professor in the Theological Seminary, Princeton, delivered before the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, and published by their request, contains many valuable thoughts touching the Providence of God towards the African race and his Divine purpose in disposing of all races so as to bring them at last to a knowledge of Himself. As the foundation of his Discourse Dr. McGill has chosen the memorable words of Paul to the Athenians: "And hath made of our blood all nations of men for to dwell ou all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation"-Acts xxii, 26-considering it as declaring, 1st. The unity of the human race. 2d. The special Providence which governs the times and events of any people. 3d. The special Providence which fixes their place in the world. And 4th. The manifest aim alike of creation and providence in dealing with all races of men, to bring them to the knowledge of himself.

It is remarkable that the same year which saw the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, witnessed the introduction of a few slaves in Virginia. They came, as Dr. McGill insists, to be schooled in our civilization, our language and our Religion, and their subsequent return with treasures of knowledge and piety to find the bounds of their habitation in their ancient Land of Promise.

"No one, it seems to me, who watches the negro, anywhere upon our temperate zone, in the dead of winter, can help a surmise, that the God of nature

has another destination in store for the development of his constitutional energies.

"But Africa needs him, still more than he needs Africa. She stretches forth her hands, not for the races that can but touch her shore, and could but subjugate her people; but for the return of her own children, to the latest generations. She says in her own peculiar sense, to the North give up, to the South keep not back, bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth. That poor mother of slaves came out of the original chaos, a solitary continent; which of all other divisions of the globe, is the least susceptible of benefit from strangers. If you look at her shape on the map of the world, you see it rounded and concentrated upon itself without peninsulas and inland seas, entering from the ocean, with the reach of commerce and its civilizing influence to her inmost recesses, showing that nothing can redeem and exalt her, but forces from within, the attainment of art and science, and religion, by her own returned and indigenous populations. She has but one mile of coast for every six hundred and twenty-three miles of surface; while Europe has one mile of coast for every hundred and fifty-six miles of surface-evincing that the advantage of Europe, in emerging from barbarism to the glory of Christian civilization, is four times as great, by the very lines of the earth, which become 'the bounds of her habitation.' "And it is not, surely, because the vast interior of Africa is a sterile waste, that her mighty contour fences off, in this way, the keels and canvas of the nations. Discoveries every year, by Livingston, Barth, Burton, Anderson, and other truthful adventurers, prove that her soil is rich beyond comparison, that her rivers are deep enough and long enouhg to bear the freight of empires on their bosom; and in short, that she needs only the elevation of man by the interaction of men, who can stand her suns and breath her vapors, to become the garden of this globe, and bless all the ends of the earth with her inexhaustible abundance.

"It is the land of promise at this moment of sublunary time. Discoveries have exhausted the new world. This hemisphere is booked within and without by an indefatigable topography, which henceforth may rest, till the planet itself is changed. But Africa now fixes on herself that curious and restless and excited gaze, which America has held, for three centuries and a half, and which has never failed in history to draw after it the tides of immigration, and the utmost energies of human enterprise. Shall the instincts of humanity be powerless, because it is an old world that is now thrown open to enlightened men? Shall the migratory impulse of manly souls be repressed, because a mother, instead of a daughter, pleads, and the plea reaches from ten thousand cemeteries of ancestral pride, for one race alone to return, and take the last El Dorado, which the measuring line of man's adventure can reach upon the face of the earth?

"Let it not be said that he returns to a land of reprobation. There is no curse on Africa to preclude the utmost grandeur and felicity, in the future of her races. Egypt may have a doom still resting upon her, and Lybia, Numi

dia, and Mauritania, all the northern shore, from the Nile to the Straits of Hercules; wherever the Gospel was spread, and then extinguished by man. But no curse ever yet resulted on that glowing tropical belt where we urge the black man to go with the light of Christian civilization. No history is there, to bode some vial of unexpiated wrath, which buried empires had been too frail to suffer and exhaust. All is fresh in the hope, which returns with these captives. The race now lifts up its head, for the time appointed when its turn shall come to wield the rod of empire.

"Muse! take the harp of prophecy: Behold!

The glories of a brighter age unfold:

Friends of the outcast! view the accomplished plan,

The Negro towering to the height of man."

"Who knows, but that a mighty tropical Republic is just what this reeling planet needs to make it steady and peaceful; to fix the balance of power at the centre of the earth, and thence govern to the poles with a reign of order and righteousness.

"The experiment is made. Finley, Caldwell, and Key were true prophets. And so was their first agent, the sainted and heroic Mills, who just fortyfour years ago this month, said, as he was embarking in this city on the ship Electra, 'we go to lay the foundation of a free and independent empire on the coast of poor degraded Africa.' The Republic of Liberia is at this moment the most promising and prosperous Government in the world. It has copied all that is wise and good in our institutions and history.

"Never did any colony make a beginning so hopeful and auspicious. It has had better health than either Plymouth or Jamestown had at the beginning; better agriculture than either Carolina or Louisiana had upon their virgin soils in the bush; better trade and commerce than either New York or Philadelphia had in the first forty years of mercantile adventure; better education than Massachusetts or Connecticut had in the first half century of their institutions; better Christianity in its freedom, simplicity, and power combined, than any people ever had in the cradle since the days of the Apostles; these are but some of the first things in the destiny of this young black Republic.

"Such are some of the attractions with which Colonization would persuade the free colored people to turn to the land of their fathers; and of their own choice, concur with the manifest determination of Heaven to fix there the bounds of their habitation."

On the missionary aspects of African Colonization, Dr. McGill says eloquently:

"JV. And who that loves the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ will notl acquiesce in all necessities, which go to spread the glorious Gospel of the blessed God?' This is the aim, this the consummation of all that specia Providence, which brings good out of evil, in working for every afflicted and poor people' If in the times of ignorance, at which God winked, the

constant indication of unity in creating and a special Providence in ordering the destiny of every people, was enough to excite the benighted heathen to seek after God, when there was but a chance, 'if happily,' they might find him, how much more should such a demonstration now, of a common blood, and a special care of the Most High for such a trodden race as this, awake the world to seek after him, when there is a perfect certainty of finding him? Along with the Gospel, as it goes with redeeming light to Africa, will be the story of another exodus, a New Testament exodus, for the world to hear, and for the ransomed of that continent to teach their children and children's children, to all generations. How vast a theme of adoring gratitude, and love, and obligation, and instruction, too, did the deliverance of Israel from bondage in Egypt add to the precious light of revealed religion which they carried back to Palestine! The preface to the ten commandments, God's eternal law, was itself couched, at Horeb, in the fact of this their special deliverance. Migrations are the best of missions.

"Its missionary aspects alone are enough to enlist the ardor and liberality of every Christian man for this cause of Colonization in Africa. Its patriotism, its philanthropy, its worldly wisdom, its whole assemblage of merits and values, the rarest and best that ever combined in any society of man's organization, have been so palpable and imposing upon the minds of its friends, and the passions of its enemies, that its grandest claim of all, for which alone it should be cherished and promoted, if everything besides in its history had been foolishness, to this hour, has been strangely unappreciated. In its day of small things for the spread of his kingdom and the knowledge of himself, behold' what God hath wrought!' Devil worship and brutal violence have already fled from six hundred miles of the benighted coast; and churches and schools, and a college now dot the whole conquest; and invite, with wonderful success, two hundred and fifty thousand heathen, under its jurisdiction, to accept the light and liberty of the Gospel. And far beyond the selvage of that evangelized and evangelizing shore, the preachers of Jesus Christ have penetrated the interior, and have already been hailed with welcome by the barbarous idolaters, who swarm upon its fertile hills and valleys.

"Let it be remembered that the majority of American Africans in Liberia are emancipated slaves from the Southern States,"

IN THE BIBLICAL REPERTORY OF PRINCETON, For October is an article on African Colonization.

The writer of this Review quotes from a letter of the Rev. John Newton, January 20, 1775, to a nobleman, some expressions indicating his belief that "the present unhappy disputes between Great Britain and America, with their consequences, whatever they may be, are a part of a series of events of which the extension and interests of the church of Christ were the principal final cause." The multiplication of Colonies and States on these shores, consequent

upon our independence, the unparalleled prosperity of our country, the growth of a missionary spirit and of means for the diffusion of Christian knowledge, the relations of the United States to Mexico, Central and South America, as also from our western shores to Asia, inspires the Reviewer with hope not only for the extension of the Protestant Faith in South America, but also for the great increase and diffusion of Christian light among those nations who may come in contact with one another on the Pacific coast.

"Who can tell how great will be the commerce of Oregon and California with China, Japan, and Siam fifty or a hundred years hence? That commerce will be a highway for the Christian religion. A great house may rise in San Francisco for publishing the Bible in Chinese, Japanese, and other languages of Asia; and near it may stand a mission-house, occupied by such men as the Lowries.

"But there is no part of the heathen world which has as strong claims upon America as Africa. There is none to which the providence of God points more distinctly, none in which the churches can be more easily brought to take an interest, or which promises more abundant or more speedy success. 'In no other part of the heathen world is there evinced so much willingness to hear the Gospel as in Africa. Ethiopia is now stretching forth her hands unto God, whom, through the mists of superstition, she sees, as yet, afar off."-Mrs. Scott.

Afer al'uding to some of the striking prophecies of the coming Divine favor toward Africa, the waiter considers Liberia as the most remarkable feature in the re'ations of Africa to America, and, though dissenting from the idea urged by some of the friends of this Society, that the cause of African missions depends absolutely on the cause of colonization, maintains that the "colony of L beria is the most important means of extending the blessings of science and religion into the adjacent dark places of the earth that are full of the habitations of cruelty;" while the reviewer holds "that there are other methods of carrying the Gospel to Africa as well as to other benighted lands besides the planting colonies, and cites the report of the Wesleyan Missionary for 1858; their mission schools in Semigambia containing 377 scholars, and their churches 399 communicants, he insists that "colouies of people of the same degree of intelligence, and to the same degree imbued with Christian principles, in any part of the heathen world must be no small advantage to the spread of the Gospel, and would be seized upon by missionary societies, as doors of God's providence into which they were called to enter." The writer adds:

"We may form a more correct idea of the importance of these colonies in