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Paul, when standing on Mars-Hill, and speaking to the proud and philosophic Athenians, who themselves superior to all other races of men, informed them,-first, that God had "made the world and all things therein,"-secondly, that this same God" hath made of oue blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." This phrase, one blood," evidently means one nature with one common parentage. The apostle had in view the Mosaic record of man's creation and early settlement of the earth. His eye was fixed upon Adam, who in the Scriptures is called "the first man," because he is the common ancestor of all men. Paul's statement to those who admit his inspired authority, is then decisive as to the homogeneous nature and origin of human beings. Adam is the common father of us all.

The account of the creation as given by Moses, is equally conclusive. According to this account, Adam and Eve are the primitive sources of the human family. Noah, who transmitted the life of the race across the flood, was one of the patriarchs, decended from, and born in the line of Adam. Noah was a man, bearing the distinctive lineaments of the first father. His three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, were men. From them, according to the Scriptures, have sprung all the nations of the carth, the Negro races of Africa, whose humanity has sometimes been questioned, being the natural progeny of Ham. Ham, I suppose, was a man; and hence I infer that his children are men and will be to the last generation. They are black men; yet color is no criterion of humanity.

The apostacy of Adam involved the race in sin and death, because he is our common father; and so too, the redemption by Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and man, is provided for all without any reference to the distinction of color or country. In the language of Dr. Smyth, of South Carolina, our common humanity and common parentage are "made the basis on which all the doctrines of Scripture relating to the fall and recovery, the guilt and redemption of man, founded." They also "form the foundation on which are erected the claims of charity, love, and all the offices of Christian philanthropy." The command to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, refers to all the varieties of men found on the habitable globe. The essential unity of the human race is as certain as the truth of the Bible.

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The same conclusion equally follows when we bring this question to the bar of science. Dr. Breckinridge has well said, -"Every department of knowledge has been searched for evidence, and all respond with a uniform testimony. The physical structure, constitution, and habits of the race,-the

in which it is produced, in which it exists, in which it perishes, -everything that touches its mere animal existence, demonstrates the absolute certainty of its unity; so that no other generalization of physiology is more clear or more sure. Rising one step, to the highest manifestation of man's physicial organization, his use of language and the power of connected speech, the most profound survey of this most tedious and complex part of knowledge, conducts the inquirer to no conclusion more indubitable than that there is a common origin, a common organization, a common nature, underlying and running through this endless variety of a common power, peculiar to the race, and to it alone. Thus a second science--philology-has borne its marvelious testimony. Rising one more step, and passing more completely into a higher region, we find the rational and moral nature of men of every age and kindred absolutely the same;-those great faculties by which man alone, and yet by which every man perceives that there is in things that distinction which we call true or false, and that other distinction which we call good and evil, upon which distinction and which faculties rests at last the moral and intellectual destiny of the entire race, belonging to us as men, without which we are not men, and with which we are at the head of the visible creation of God. So a third science-the science which treats of the whole moral constitution of man, embracing in its wide scope many subordinate sciences has delivered its testimony. If we rise another step, and survey man as he is gathered into families and tribes and nations, with an endless variety of development, we still behold the broad foundations of a common nature reposing under all,-the living proofs of a common origin struggling through all,-the grand principles of a common being ruling in the midst of all. So a fourth, and the youngest of the sciences-ethnology-brings her tribute. And now from this lofty summit survey the whole track of ages. In their length and in their breadth, scrutinize the recorded annals of mankind. There is not one page on which one fact is written, which favors the historical idea of a diversity of nature of origin; while the whole scope of human history involes assumes, and proclaims, as the first and grandest historic truth, the absolute unity of the race."

As to the Ethiopian race, or Cushites the descendants of Ham through Cush, resident in Central, Western and Southern Africa, Dr. Smyth, in his admirable treatise on the "Unity of the Human Races," has clearly shown that comparatively a high degree of civilization was the former condition of the Negro, amply evincing his claim to a place in the great calendar of humanity. The effort to displace him from this position. is a failure The Negro, notwithstanding his present degradation, is a man, historically and philosophically a man. He be

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longs to a race that was once powerful. Heeren observes in his" Historical Researches," that, except the Egyptians, there is no aboriginal people of Africa, with so many claims upon our attention as the Ethiopians" He speaks of them as " from the remotest times to the present, one of the most celebrated and yet most mysterious of nations," It is the opinion of Niebuhr the great historian, that hieroglyphic writing, and all that we afterwards find as Egyptian civilization, originated with the Ethiopians. In the seventh century before Christ, Ethiopian kings conquered Egypt and reigned over it for fifty years. Long before this, the Ethiopians were a famous and powerful people, often disputing the supremacy of Egypt in arts as well as in arms, Cambyses, the Persian invader, having conquered Egypt, sent ambassadors as spies to Ethiopia. The reply to the monarch was in these words,--" Go, tell your king he is not a just man,―else he had not coveted a land not his own, nor brought slavery on a people who never did him any wrong. Bear him this bow, and say,-The King of the Ethiops thus advises the King of the Persians,-When the Persians can pull a bow of this strength thus easily, then let them come with an army of superior strength against the long-lived Ethiopians. Till then, let them thank the gods that they have not put it into the heart of the sons of the Ethiops to covet countries which do not belong to them." This language has the clear ring of a powerful and energetic humanity. Herodotus speaks of the ancient Ethiopians as a tall and powerful race of men. The eunuch to whom Philip preached, and who seems to have been a Jewish proselyte, belonged to this race He was a man of great authority under Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians; and surely no one will doubt the humanity of this eunuch, or his high development as a man, who has read the history of his conversion.

I am quite aware that the Ethiopian race has for a long period been the subject of a sad decline, and that its present condition is one of extreme depression; yet this phenomenon is not peculiar to the Ethiopian. The Egypt of to-day is not the Egypt that once took the lead in the civilization of the world. Greece and Rome, where are they? Certainly not where or what they were two thousand years ago. In the seventh century the Arab race was exceedingly powerful; and yet it has now lost its military prestige and political empire. That which has befallen the tropical man of Africa, has happened in the history of other people. It is well for us to remember that when the Ethiopian was in his glory, our British ancestors were savages, feeding on acorns, eating the raw flesh of animals, and clad in the skins of wild beasts. Though barbarians, they were men; and so the descendants of Ha

Cushites, are still men, though greatly fallen from the position of their ancestors, inhabiting a very productive country, and wanting nothing but Christianity and good government to make them again a power in the world. The time will come when Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God; and then the triumphs of the gospel in the elevation of her long degraded sons, will leave no doubts as to the question of their essential humanity. We pay a poor compliment to science, and a much poorer one to religion, when we seek to justify our oppression of this race by denying its participation in all those attributes physical and mental, by which man is distinguished from a brute. The Negro is no more a brute than I am, no less a man than I am. His humanity makes him my brother, the descendant of my father, related to me by the bonds of a common origin and a common nature. His rights to him are as sacred and valuable as mine are to me. The noblest elements of any man are common to all. Man is a much larger word than King. This, I take it, is the doctrine of a true Christian Democracy.

I am now prepared to say in the third place, that besides being the creatures of God, and possessing a common nature, all men are made in His mental image.-God is a Spirit, having no form or bodily parts. Man is a spirit, as such allied to that vast empire of beings of whom God is the Head, all of whom are fashioned after the image of their Maker, in this sense being partakers of the divine nature.

This image of God as set forth in the structure of man, embraces the following particulars: first, REASON, to think, to investigate God and things, to conceive of ends and means, to judge of the true and the false: secondly, CONSCIENCE, to see the good and the evil, enforcing the former and condemning the latter, making man a moral being subject to the guidance of law, and justly responsible for his conduct; thirdly, FREE WILL, lifting him above the region of mere mechanical forces, and thus fitting him to be the voluntary and uncoerced source of his own spiritual deeds: fourthly, AFFECTIONS, that like his God he may love, and possess a moral character: finally, IMMORTALITY, rendering his mental life once begun, coeval with his Author. These characteristics of man as a spirit give him his rank, and assimilate him to his Maker, being the working clements of his career and destiny in both worlds. Whether civilized or savage, black or white, bond or free, saintly or sinful, living or dying, in heaven or in hell, these principles make him a MANthat sacred, moral, and immortal personality, upon whose nature is installed the image of God, whose native glories no event can change, and no hand expunge. Degrade this gifted creature as much as you please, and still he lives, and moves, and acts and thinks, and wills, and feels, with the unmistakable marks

and expressions of his essential manhood. Place the heel of oppression upon his neck, and crush him to the very earth, and yet by an instinct as irrepressible as it is powerful, he will lift the banner of his outraged nature, assert his sense of the wrong, pour the agonizing dirge of despair upon the pitiless breeze. You cannot sink man below the consciousness that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are his inalienable rights. You cannot beat these ideas out of his soul. God has placed them there. They are the fixed convictions, and permanent aspirations of human nature. No education can change them, or make them false to themselves. What they say in one age, that they say in every age.

Such is the man of moral philosophy-the man of the Christian Scriptures-the man whom we are bound to see whenever and wherever we look upon any human form-the man whom God has made in his own image, and on whom no earthly power may innocently write the epitaph of buried and ignored humanity. This is the man you observe in prattling infancy, in verdant and joyous youth, in ripened age, in trembling years, in the dying hour-as really man in the dungeon as in the palace-whose essential nature no crime can forfeit, whose elementary constitution no earthly cause can improve, and whose distinction from a thing is traced in letters of eternal light.

He who has not reached this view of man, has scarcely begun to see the object. It is the great view where monarchs and subjects, philosophers and Christians meet to chant the imperial glories of a common origin. We must not reason about human nature with rice swamps, cotton fields, commercial advantage, and family affinity, for our premises, if we would reason correctly. We must see man as he is, as God has made him in his own image. This view clearly gained, and thoroughly penetrating the empire of thought, is the grand mount of vision on which to stand, and from which to look.

I remark fourthly, that God has invested man with a regal prerogative, somewhat analagous to his own. Let me quote the Scriptures on this point. "And God said Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have DOMINION Over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Thus by a divine charter, men are made the lords of earth, receiving it as a patrimony from God, related to all inferior beings and things somewhat as God is to the total kingdom of existence, and hence in this sense bearing the image of his dominion. This passage contains the primitive deed of trust from the Divine Granter to man the created and rational grantee, written in the chancery of ven and substantially saying to man,-"This is your earn