THE CLAIM OF NEED.
What claim on us of the Caucasian race—us of the Christian Church—have the Negro, the Indian, and the Chinaman, the three despised races in the United States? We, who have the leaven, what do we owe to those who have it not? We, who are the leaven, what to that which is a foreign and corrupting mass, that we may transform it into not only that which is leavened, but, as all which is itself leavened becomes, into leaven itself?
What claim on us have they?
We answer, the claim of need. We do not even say, of want, which is conscious need, but of need; the mere absence of that which we have to enjoy, the mere contrast of their want with our plenty, that of itself is, perhaps, the greatest of all claims.
That is not the truest generosity which waits to be besieged with tears and cries for help, which lingers behind the closed door of its comfortable home, until it is called out by special application, and its sympathies are moved by loud appeals—as that is not the truest need which proclaims its wants most loudly—but that which goes and looks, and, knowing or suspecting want, seeks it out, patiently and lovingly, to relieve it.
So God has treated this sinful world. He looked from heaven, he saw, he bowed the heavens and came down. It was the need, and not the prayer, of the world which brought the Lord Jesus to its relief.
Once here, He sees a man lie in the porches of the pool Bethesda; He only sees him, and He asks at once, “Wilt thou be made whole?”
He sees the multitudes in the wilderness, and it is only bread they lack, and He has compassion on them, and from the storehouse of the Father’s wealth, supplies their need.
He sees the sins of the world, in which the world is taking pleasure and rejoicing, and against their rejection, their blasphemy, and their persecution, dies by their hands to free them from their sins.
And if need be a claim, then the claim is in proportion to the need. That is the loudest call which comes from the deepest depths. But what are these? Not poverty, for that may consist with all which is best and worthiest in this life—with intelligence, virtue, and faith in God. But the opposites of these—ignorance, immorality, and superstition.
We need not tell you that the 5,000,000 of freed men in the South, the 300,000 Indians of the Northwest, and the, at least, 150,000 Chinamen on the Pacific Coast, are, by our standard, in this direst want. The negroes and the Indians, unlettered and unintelligent, given over by the habits of their lives, these to the vices which are found among the degraded classes which are domesticated, and those to the immoralities which attend a wild life, and in both cases, made worse by the neighborhood of those possessing greater knowledge and power, but who have used this knowledge and power only to depress them, and to make them serve the interests of intelligent greed and lust.
The negro, religious, but full of superstition and sensuousness, whose religion consists largely in seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and singing songs of a heaven they are unfit for—a religion, too, which has been almost utterly divorced from morality. As General Armstrong says: “The story of the devout old Auntie who would go to the communion service, and not let one poor old goose (that she had stolen) come between her and her blessed Lord, shows how little a broken commandment disturbs the peace of the unenlightened.” The Indian, with a vague and dreamy notion of a Great Spirit, and a happy hunting ground, and a definite fear of the medicine men, who send evil spirits to possess them, and drive away disease with a dance. The Chinaman, with the remains of an ancient civilization, which has taught him to imitate and to worship his ancestors and to burn Josh-sticks to Confucius, and, though temperate as to the use of alcoholic liquors, has learned the worse drunkenness of the opium pipe, and to whom the thought of a Saviour from sin, and a life of doing good, is an unheard-of gospel. But we may not dwell longer here. This depth of need may only be hinted at. That it is real and pressing, no one can doubt.
It is a claim which these races have in common with all who are in want. We merely ask the question: Can you find needs more real, degradations more deep, and therefore claims more pressing, than these we need only not shut our eyes to see, for which we need not cross the ocean, nor even our own continent—the needs of the three despised, oppressed, and largely neglected races in these United States?