is said by a competent witness--and our own personal acquaintance with
him confirms the testimony, so far as we are competent to judge--that he
is a great traveler and an accomplished linguist, equally familiar with
Hebrew and Arabic, with Greek and Latin, with five European and with
several African languages, and, had he been born a European, might fill
and adorn almost any public post. Dr. Blyden was born a full-blooded
Negro in the Danish Island of St. Thomas, emigrated in his seventeenth
year to Liberia, entered an American missionary school and rose to the
head of it, became in 1862 Professor in the College of Liberia, and, two
years later, Secretary of State in the African Republic. In 1877, he
represented Liberia at the Court of St. James, as Minister
Plenipotentiary, and has been abundantly decorated with honorary
degrees.

Dr. Blyden's opportunities for knowing the facts are unquestioned, and
his book presents in very striking array the advantages which in some
respects Islam enjoys over Christianity in the propagation of its faith
in Africa. The discussion has been continued by Canon Taylor of York,
England, and, more recently, in a very clear article in the _Nineteenth
Century_, by Dean R. Bosworth Smith. Our space does not permit us either
to summarize the facts as to this progress, nor can we present all the
reasons for it. But one of these reasons touches so nearly a point that
is of such vital interest to American Christians, that we feel called
upon to state it and emphasize it. We abridge the full statement thus:
Christianity has labored under the great disadvantage of coming to the
Negro in "a foreign garb." Its teachers came from a land that first
reached the Negro by capturing him as a slave; they came to him with the
conscious or unconscious air of superiority born of race-prejudice.
Christianity came to him as the creed, not of his friends, his
well-wishers, his kindred, but of his masters and oppressors. They