178                      CHURCH REVIEW.

countered Scipio at Zama; but his army, consisting chiefly of mer-
cenaries, was unequal to the army which Scipio commanded, and
was defeated, B. C. 196." And this is historical record. But that
there is no single Roman that bears comparison with Hannibal
-no, not even Scipio himself-authority gives this statement.
   "The senate which voted its thanks to its political enemy, Varro,
after his disastrous defeat, 'because he had not despaired of the
Commonwealth,' and which disdained either to solicit or to ap-
prove or to threaten or in any way to notice the twelve colonies
which had refused their accustomed supplies of men for the army,
is far more to be honored than the conqueror of Zama." And in this
my first or antiquarian period alone are you able to judge where
the crown of superiority rests; for the Ethiopian sons seemed to
possess wholly this period. Thousands of other evidences await
the pen; but time will not tarry, and circumstances allow it not.
And here I conclude with the learned Arnold: "He who grieves
over the battle of Zama, should carry on his thoughts to a period
thirty years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature,
have been dead, and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of
Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization
of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together bar-
barians of every race and language into an organized empire, and
prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the
free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe."
                End of the first Antiquarian Period.


                                 XI.
                          THE BLACK HERO.*

                     BY MRS. F. A. W. HARPER.

             ONWARD to her destination
               O'er the stream the "Hannah" sped--
             When a cry of consternation
               Smote and chilled our hearts with dread.
             Wildly sweeping, fiercely raging,
               All relentless in their sway,

  * In 1888 the steamer "John H. Hannah," heavily laden with cotton and having
on board a large number of passengers, took fire near Baton Rouge, La. Suddenly
the flames, leaping from cotton bale to cotton bale, enveloped the ill-fated boat. The
pilot remained at his post until death stared him in the face and then forsook the
wheel. The burning vessel swept into the swift current of the deep rolling tide and
all seemed lost. Suddenly the fireman, a black man, rushed up to the pilot-house,
seized the wheel and headed the boat for the bank. In due time it struck the mud-
bank and most of the passengers were saved. The black man stood and held the
wheel till literally burned to death--dying a willing martyr to save his fellow-men.
The citizens of New Orleans, recognizing his glorious heroism, bought a home and paid
for it, and gave it to his wife and children, and added a handsome sum of money.




			

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 09, Num. 2

Black Hero

W.

Volume:  09
Issue Number:  02
Page Number:  178
Date:  10/01/1892