is followed out in detail. The work which this Association has in hand
will {158} bear the test of analysis. It is not only a Christian work,
it is a work which, from the beginning, has called into exercise the
fundamental principles of Christianity. It exemplifies Christianity in
its most original and essential features.

I.--A RADICAL FAITH.

As I look into this work, the first thing that impresses me is the
faith that inspired it. It was a most sublime undertaking. It began,
so far as relates to its present fields of labor, with the millions of
freedmen just emancipated from two and a half centuries of bondage.
What this bondage signified, this present generation will find it
difficult to realize. For years it had been a crime to teach them the
alphabet. They had been bought and sold like cattle. Their lives were
a daily school in sensual immorality, deceit and dishonesty. Every
manly aspiration, and womanly feeling, was smothered at its birth.
They had come from savagery to slavery, and in a day, without training
or preparation, they were set free. It is no wonder that they were
ignorant, indolent, degraded and despised. As one of their own number
says, "We came into bondage naked and destitute of worldly goods, we
went out of it penniless, homeless and almost characterless." Now it
was this mass of degraded humanity that this Association set itself to
elevate and Christianize, and it did it with a calm assurance and
serene hope which no obstacle has as yet been able to disturb. The
road has been a long and hard one, but it did not anticipate an easy
time or miraculous success. It has met with new and perhaps unexpected
difficulties. It may be that all the workers would say what the
President of Talladega writes in a recent letter, "The magnitude of
the obstacles are more and more real to me as I live and work." But