Excerpt from Liberia's Next Friend: The Annual Discourse Delivered at the Sixty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Colonization Society, Held in Foundry M. E. Church, Washington, D. C. Sunday Evening, Jan'y 17, 1886 Providence turns heavy doors on the smallest hinges. No romance of fiction can equal the wonders of the way in which a divine purpose threads its course through all the maze of human history. From the first generations the trend of the human race has been turned hither and thither by things in themselves lighter than a feather. God first partitioned the land and water and settled the geologic and climatic conditions and then divided the nations to their several estates The third part of the Eastern hemisphere, according to tradition, fell to the sons of Ham in whose family there was an an cient curse. But in the economy of Heaven there is no curse without a bless ing - and often the blessing blossoms from the curse Africa became the asylum of the two greatest figures in the annals of time. A tear-drop on the cheek of a babe in a reed basket among the rushes of the Nile gave rise to the fortunes of a people out of whom came at last the world's Messiah! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.