The New Gospel

The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially.  The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their future instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.  How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.  Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy [civil war] … [But] let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day.