Page:The religious instruction of the colored population.djvu/14

 will all the more enrich and adorn. Inertness, incapacity, untraciableness, untrusiiness, wastefulness, supineness,—these are very great evils, affecting not only the particular individuals who exhibit these moral incrustations, but ourselves, with whom these individuals are so closely connected. Now, it is the gospel, and the gospel only, which will entirely remove from this people all these remains of their former barbarous and uncivilized condition, advancing to the very highest perfection ihose to whom, as operatives, we must necessarily look, in all our domestic and civil economy. Great advantages will follow, also, to the community at large. Dr. Chalmers says, of the system of schooling and preaching in Scotland, that it has "conferred the highest benefits on the one or two uppermost strata of society, but, overlooking and neglecting the lower, has left a smouldering fire among the very foundations of the commonwealth." In this city, too, as in every other Christian country, there are masses of practical Heathenism. "In our large cities, (says a Scotch periodical,) there is a dreadful collection of ignorance, of ungodliness, of aross sin, and, as a consequence, of heart-rending misery. The State has enacted laws, and appointed judges, and organized its police force, and built jails, and erected gibbets, and rid society of many a ship-load of convicted felons, and still the masses of godlessness, and crime, and wretchedness, have remained undiminished; nay, have gone on fearfully accumulating." Now, so far as this description applies to our community, it may he safely said that the gospel is our remedy for all these evils. Moral restraints are a mightier means of governing mankind than mere force. Bring the influence of religion to bear upon the masses, and you relieve the body politic of a dead weight and disembarrass the government of that which clogs and oppresses its whole machinery. Great advantages to the church will also accrue from the diligent preaching of the gospel to our poor. "The assiduities of Christian principle," in this work, will bring their own blessing with them. Here is a wide field for church extension in the South. Here is a missionary field which is competent, to rouse the enthusiasm of many a pious youth, who does not feel pressed into the ordinary service of the ministry, because the call to that work is not loud enough. Here is, my brethren, which will raise up a. This business of preaching the gospel to our poor is what will fill your recently endowed seminary with