The Christianity of the nineteenth century is on trial as to whether it can do this. Its power to redeem the individual has been grandly illustrated before our eyes, and now the other question comes forward. Its answer will have many forms indeed. One of them is the attitude that Christian capital and Christian labor take to each other. But its marked test, the most illustrious triumph or conspicuous failure, is to be here among the despised races, whose representatives are before us. God has reserved for American Christianity this grand opportunity to show the world, that after eighteen centuries the gospel is shorn of none of its honor—that under its inspirations we are able to bind these despised races, regenerated and lifted up, into a true fellowship with ourselves. The American Missionary Association is your representative and servant to this end, and worthy such support as the gospel itself should receive.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, in a recent essay, uses these words: “When we talk of man’s advance towards his full humanity, we think of an advance not along one line only, but several. The Hebrew race was pre-eminent on one great line. The Hellenic race was pre-eminent on another line.”
Taking for truth the conception involved in these words, but with a Christian interpretation, it follows that a true Christian patriotism will not have respect to the permanence of party or the development of resources; these are means to its nobler ends.
It will see in all history the developing thought of God, and in its own history a particular increment of that thought.
These eighteen centuries, and those that are to follow, are the development of Christianity, and that development covers three zones, which circle and complete the globe—God’s relation to man, man’s relation to God, and man’s relation to man. During the five centuries nearest Christ, about the centres of Alexandria and Constantinople, influences rose and were moulded whose resultant was that view of God in his relation to man which is the common property of Christendom. For eleven centuries following, Divine Providence was shaping especially under the impulse of the Reformation, the confession of the scriptural relation of man to God. Then, with the seventeenth century, history passed into the third zone, in which is to be illustrated the Divine idea of man’s relation to man, which is, that the race is an organic brotherhood, because having one father, God, and one elder brother, Jesus Christ.