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 they still live and they still work, never doubting the final result.  If you want to find men who have undying faith in the future of the black race, go to those who, in the spirit of their Master, are toiling night and day, under the commission of this Society, for its elevation.

In the same spirit, also, this Association has welcomed new labors and entered into new fields.  When Chinamen were to be Christianized, immediately it had great faith for the Chinese.  When the Indian missions were laid upon it, then it saw wonderful possibilities in the red man.  And now, last of all, when some million or two of long-forgotten and neglected “Mountain Whites” are brought to its attention, it sees in these abjectly poor, dispirited and superstitious people, only another opportunity for elevating humanity, and proving the power of Christianity to restore the lost manhood of every race.

These servants of God are not engaged in a forlorn hope.  They have faith.  Wherever they work there they expect results, not only in the saving of individual souls, but in regenerating whole races of men.  A Christian woman, missionary to the poor whites among the mountains of East {159} Tennessee, under the inspiration of her great faith, writes home to her friends, “We can almost hear the bells ring in unreared steeples, and hear the songs from choirs that are as yet totally oblivious to the spirit of melody, and enter into the heart-worship of the prayer meetings that are to be when shall have been fulfilled the prophecy, that ’to the people which sat in darkness and the shadow of death, light is sprung up’.”  Such buoyant, hopeful faith as this, so clear and beautiful in its confidence in the promises of God, is one of the “radical forces” which command, while they inspire, this holy work.

 II.—­A RADICAL LOVE.

But what may be called the special characteristic of this Society among missionary organizations doing work in our own land, that which establishes its special claim upon hearts of Christian people, is the radical spirit of love there is in it.  It exemplifies in a most practical way, the brotherhood of man.  It repudiates caste.  It is absolutely color-blind.  It works for the despised.  It helps those who are themselves the most helpless.  This is no newly-discovered fact.  I remember the first sermon I ever heard in behalf of this work, more than twenty years ago;