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318 which God's providence has already wrought, in a partial degree, for Africa, through your West Indian islands. The ways of God are most mysterious— past finding out! lie sees what man's short sight cannot perceive; and takes the direst human workings into his own hands, for enlarged and most beneficent ends. And herein we may see the plastic power and the transforming energy of that perfect wisdom and that omnipotent hand, which knoweth all things, and which worketh as it wills, His own great ends. It seems now quite clear that the children of that very people, who for nearly three centuries have been passing through the dread ordeal of slavery in your West Indian colonies, are yet to be the special messengers of glad tidings to their father-land. Already several missionary companies of black men from your islands have gone to the land of their fathers. One case I may mention: some African converts from Jamaica, feeling that they ought to do something for their father-land, went, four years ago, as teachers, to the Calabar, at the mouth of the Niger; and already as the first fruits of their labors, the king of one of the small tribes has been converted, and is attempting to introduce civilized habits, and has already established the observance of the Sabbath. Indeed, so important has this movement become, that a Society has been formed, as I have before remarked, to give it form, order, system, and distinctness; and there is every probability that soon it will become one of the great colonizing movements of this colonizing age, with this difference, that is, that it will be conducted on a ,