ble wars and devastations. In the midst of such a world as this, is an extraordinary display of omnipotent power in punishing the wicked and delivering the good-the manifestation of the divine power and Godhead, the revelation of Jehovah to man, a great light in the midst of moral darkness-is all this nothing but a jarring discord? In the midst of the wrongs and the darkness of the world, who has not felt, as did Isaiah, and prayed, "O that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down?"

The bed rock of the Bible has thus been reached; and, having found the Pentateuch to be the WORD of Gon, it is comparatively easy to determine, approximately, the age, genuineness and inspiration of the remaining books of the Old Testament.

To undertake to give an adequate idea of our author's treatment of these several books would be to transcribe a large part of his work. Suffice it to say, that the same thorough scholarship and careful research are brought to bear upon every portion of the Old Testament; and if in every case we do not agree with the conclusions of his logic, we cannot help being edified and profited by his learning.

His Introduction to the New Testament, which occupies the latter part of his work, does for the four Gospels what the course of investigation pursued in the case of the Pentateuch did for the Books of Moses. His examination of the authorities bearing upon the authenticity of the Gospels is thorough and exhaustive, and his accumulation of facts for the defense of the Gospels leaves nothing to be desired. But as the treatment of the New Testament is similar to the course pursued with the Old, it does not fall within the scope of this article to enter further into its discussion.

That the book is free from errors is not claimed, nor is it hoped that all the conclusions reached by the author will be accepted by orthodox Christians; but it contains so much that is rare and valuable that we can easily afford to overlook its defects. Dr. Harman is a scholar rather than a logician. The treasury of learning which he has given us in this volume is almost faultless. The mistakes are nearly all in the conclusions which he draws from indisputable premises. Without indorsing every thing contained in the book, we regard the volume, as a whole, as a grand contribution to sacred literature, and as an armory of truth from which the weapons of our warfare will be taken for a generation to come.

ART. V.-ECHOES FROM AFRICA.

The American Missionary. December, 1878; January and February, 1879. American Missionary Association. New York.

The Three Despised Races in the United States. An Address by JOSEPH COOK. American Missionary Association. New York. 1878.

"THE fate of the negro," it has been said, "is the romance of our age." The events which have transpired in his history since the great emancipation in the United States, and which are now transpiring, are in the highest degree romantic. There will always gather around the history of the race a pathetic interest, which must ever kindle the imagination, touch the heart, and awaken the sympathies of all in whom there is a spark of humanity.

The intelligence we have just received from America of large migrations of negroes from the Southern to the Western States is full of melancholy and suggestive interest. To reflecting minds acquainted with the history of Southern society during the last fifty years these events are not surprising. Retributive justice may linger, but it is sure. A prosperity built up on the wrongs of a race, by the unrequited labor of a whole people, ought not to have been expected to be permanent. In 1858 the chivalry of Louisiana passed a law forbidding free blacks to come in; now they would pass a law forbidding them to go out.

Many years ago," we are informed by a writer of Southern birth,

"an artist of Philadelphia was engaged by the State of South Carolina to paint some national emblematic picture for her Statehouse. Jefferson Davis was requested to act with the South Carolina Committee at Washington in criticising the studies for this work. The most creditable sketch presented was a design representing the North by various mechanical implements; the West by a prairie and plow; while the South was represented by various things, the center-piece, however, being a cotton-bale with a negro upon it fast asleep. When Mr. Davis saw it, he said, 'Gentlemen, this will never do; what will become of the South when the negro wakes up?'"

The discussions which the reconstruction laws have made possible in the South, the circulation of newspapers, the education of negro youth as preachers and teachers, have roused

the negro, and started him to his feet. The thunders of the civil war awoke him from his profound slumber; but he lay on the cotton-bale with his eyes open, uncertain where he was. The man who has been suddenly roused from a long sleep takes some time to recover himself. The negro is now up-stupid yet from a protracted and undisturbed slumber-but he is up, and wants to adjust his relations to the cotton-bale upon an equitable footing, or leave the bale and its owner to their fate. Hence the exodus and migration idea, which menaces the South in every department of its organic life. And this is a specially inopportune moment for the carrying out of such an idea on any thing like a large scale. The prosperity of the South has been rapidly returning under free labor, and was being placed on a satisfactory and enduring basis. Mr. Jefferson Davis lately declared that the ex-slave-holders were so far satisfied with the change that they would not, if they could, revert to the former system. And yet the owners of these reviving estates have been so unwise and reckless as to adopt such a system of treatment as has spread dissatisfaction among their hands. And, from all we can gather, this harsh and oppressive treatment has not been of a hap-hazard or isolated character, but the result of a deep-laid scheme. The plan seems to have been so to impoverish their laborers as to make them helplessly dependent, to check by a tyrannical repression the normal impulse of advance, to arrest the people through their elementary needs at a capriciously chosen point in their progress, and fix them in it, and thus bring about a species of serfdom very little better than the former bondage. Rev. Joseph Cook, the celebrated Boston lecturer, in an address before the American Association, furnishes the following information:

66

Last summer, on Lake Chautauqua, while I had a little leisure, I fell into conversation with one of the acutest members of Washington society-I dare not describe him more definitely-and he said to me: The negro is getting in debt. He is a peasant; he rents land; he has only very small wages; he buys his groceries at a store owned by his landlord, and runs up a bill there; and the silent scheme of the South is to get the negro in debt. Then he cannot very well leave town until his debts are paid. He becomes a fixture, in many cases, because of his indebtedness; and, to make the story short, sir," said my informant, "some of us fear that fifty years hence a considerable portion of the freed

men will be in a state of peonage. They will be bankrupt tenants under the power of landlords. And it is often whispered in the South that this will be the next best thing to the restoration of slavery."

No people having their eyes open and standing on their feet would long submit to such a state of things. But the intelligent among the negro population do not seem to consider that. any migration in the United States will materially affect for the better the social and political status of the colored people.

The "People's Advocate," (Feb. 1, 1879,) a colored paper published at Washington, in an able editorial on the subject, says:

There has been a very respectable partial migration, and no perceptible change has come over the South in its ideas of negro citizenship. In 1869-70, 60,000 left Virginia and North Carolina for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. They left Georgia by the thousands for Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and have gone from Eastern Virginia to New York and New England; but the feeling is nearly as bad to-day in Virginia and Georgia as it was years ago.

And they are now fleeing from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

""Tis but a poor relief they gain

Who change the place but keep the pain.'

And it strikes us, viewing matters from this distant standpoint, that the feeling toward the negro will continue to be "bad" in the United States, if being "bad" means the nonrecognition of his social and political equality with the white man. For the negro, pure and simple, there is no country but Africa, and in America his deeper instincts tell him so. He will never be understood, nor will he ever understand his European guide and teacher, as long as he remains in the countries of his exile. He is often misled by the overflowing and ceaseless generosity of white men into a belief that his benefactors are getting nearer to the idea of practical oneness and brotherhood with him. But among the phenomena in the relations of the white man to the negro in the house of bondage none has been more curious than this: that the white man, under a keen sense of the wrongs done to the negro, will work for him, will suffer for him, will fight for him, will even die for him, but he cannot get rid of a secret contempt for him.

"The Three Despised Races," etc., p. 25.

Mr. James Parton, in his article on "Antipathy to the Nogro,' says:

When Miss Kemble came first to Boston, in 1832, she sat next to the late John Quincy Adams at dinner one day, and the conversation turned upon the tragedy of "Othello." Miss Kemble has since reported one of Mr. Adams' remarks on this subject: "Talking to me about Desdemona, he assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a nigger." If this anecdote had not come to us on such respectable authority we could hardly believe it of a man who, during the last and best ten years of his life, was looked upon as the black man's champion:

Theodore Parker, who in pleading for the slave could "stir his hearers to the bottom of their hearts and soften them to tears;" who, in his famous letter to Millard Fillmore, (Nov. 21, 1850,) could say:

...

I would rather lie all my life in jail and starve there than refuse to protect one of these parishioners of mine. . . . William Craft and Ellen were parishioners of mine. They have been at my house. I married them a fortnight ago this day. After the ceremony I put a Bible and then a sword into William's hands, and told him the use of each. . . . There hang beside me in my library, as I write, the gun my grandfather fought with at the battle of Lexington-he was a captain on that occasion-and also the musket he captured from a British soldier on that day, the first taken in the war for independence. If I would not peril my property, my liberty, my life, to keep my parishioners out of slavery, then I would throw away these trophies, and should think I was the son of some coward, and not a brave man's child.f

Theodore Parker, who could say, "I should like of all things to see an insurrection of slaves;" who could pronounce that pathetic and touching but terrible discourse over the great Webster; this same Theodore Parker did not think it inconsistent with his high ideal of human liberty and equal rights to write in a private letter as follows:

Last night I could not coax the thermometer down below 79° any way we could fix it. Now, at eight and a half A. M., I dare not look at it, it is so high. In the midst of the heat there

* "North American Review," Nov.-Dec., 1878.

"Biography of Theodore Parker." By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. Bos

ton: James R. Osgood & Co. 1876. Pp. 410, 411.

Ibid., p. 475.