THE PROVIDENTIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA.
REV. E. H. MERRELL, PRESIDENT OF RIPON COLLEGE.
The significance of the negro in America cannot be understood without study in the light of the providence of God. It is not presumption to seek in the course of events the divine thought; it is rather presumption to assume that events occur without a divine purpose. “They that love to trace a divine hand will always have a divine hand to trace.” It is true that men have committed unspeakable folly in attempting to force the thoughts of the great God into the channels of their intellectual pettiness. Philosophies of history written with a provincial scholarship, under the eye of an unsound philosophy or the extravagancies of religious enthusiasm, must from the nature of the case be unsound; so a too particular and minute description of the ways of Providence in the interest of a preconceived theory of life, or of some specific reform or “cause,” leads to fanaticism and exposure to contempt. There are sins committed only by the good, if the solecism may be tolerated, and among them is a profane assumption of knowledge in regard to the purposes of God. But, on the other hand, it is greater folly to assume that God has left the world out of His thought and providential care, and that the course of the world is not made by the efficiency of His word. It is absurd, also, to assume that great providential courses are undiscoverable by the intelligence of man. “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for the sky is red and lowering. O, ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but ye cannot discern the signs of the times.” We may make ourselves quite ridiculous in attempting to literalize the tails, wings, breastplates, teeth, hair, faces, crowns, shapes of the horse-like locusts of John’s apocalypse; but it is quite within the reach of our faculties to find the key to his book and to unfold its prophetic instructions and consolations. The use of the tabernacle as the dwelling-place of Jehovah’s glory it is possible to find by a simple exercise of the ken of philosophic interpretation; but the symbolic import of the coverings of fine twined linen and woven goats’ hair and rams’ skins dyed red, we must leave to the dogmatism of unlettered exegesis. It is not our fault, then, that we are looking too intently for the ways of God through the history of the world, but rather that we do not look aright. * * * * If it be true that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will;” that “He changeth the times and the seasons; He removeth kings and setteth up kings;” that “promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south; but God is the Judge; He putteth down one and setteth up another;”—if it be true that the Lord “that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth” by Himself also, “frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad;” that He “sayeth of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure,” surnaming him, and girding him, though he knew him not;—if, in short, the Lord is God, and His providence extends over nature, over nations, over individuals, over free acts, and over sinful acts,—surely we shall not gather the significance of any great matter in the world’s progress without such a study of the facts, and such an interpretation of them as shall disclose the main trend of the divine purposes.
I think I hazard little in saying that the foothold of the Negro in the United States is providentially significant in relation to a great onward movement for the evangelization of the world. And in this statement I have more in view than the Christianizing of the dark continent. In relation to this, it may signify much; but in relation to the whole kingdom of Christ, it signifies more.
(1.) The truthfulness of this statement holds our conviction when we view the facts in relation to the great end of all history; and this is no transcendental or visionary gaze. It is the perpetual characteristic of human folly to see events only in their immediate relations; whereas, the present moment can interpret nearly nothing. Philosophy concerns itself with remote causes and ends. “Providence,” says Guizot, “hurries not Himself to display to-day the consequence of the principle He yesterday announced. He will draw it out in the lapse of ages. Even according to our reasoning, logic is none the less sure because it is slow.” God’s thought is from eternity; but it is only because God has purposed that a science of history is possible, or the end of history discoverable. Its philosophy is often based on the assumption of the unity of the race; for the unity of the race it is better to say, the unity of the divine purpose. Said Augustine of old: “God cannot have left the course of human affairs, the growth and decay of nations, their victories and defeats, unregulated by the laws of His providence.” And as the latest deliverance of philosophy we have from Professor Flint, “The ultimate and greatest triumph of historical philosophy will really be neither more nor less than the full proof of Providence, the discovery by the process of scientific method of the divine plan, which unites and harmonizes the apparent chaos of human actions contained in history into a cosmos.” Suppose we assume, as the end of history, the establishment of a kingdom of righteousness, or the perfection of the members of the race for an endless society; that the increase of wealth, the extending of knowledge, the refinements of culture, have ultimate value only in relation to such a kingdom or society; that the method of procedure toward the attainment of this end involves the encouragements and chastisements, the rewards and disciplines, the pulling down amid building up, the slaying and making alive, which belong to the law of discipleship for character. Suppose, further, that we find ourselves living in a period when the Christian world is peculiarly stirred with missionary enthusiasm, and laboring to bring the whole world to membership in the everlasting kingdom; and yet, again, that we have brought to the midst of the most Christian nation millions of the most barbarous people, and put in such relation to that nation that the questions concerning them necessarily involve religious and missionary aspects—assuming all this, and taking into view the profound agitations, the vast numbers of beings involved, the enormous commercial interests that have been staked, the slow uprooting of inveterate race prejudices, the transforming of societies, the hot wrath of God in sweeping commonwealths with the besom of civil war, it becomes easily credible that the Negro in the United States signifies a great providential on moving the conversion of the world. To find in this Negro problem nothing but the lust which brought him to our shores, or the instrumentality of the wealth which he has been the means of accumulating, or the object of a sentimental pietism which would colonize him, or a nuisance for progressive abatement, is to attempt to solve the puzzle of a bewildering maze without the exercise of wisdom, or to have exit from a labyrinth without a clew. But, with the right end in view, all the mysteries of it are easily solved.
It has been recently said, by an able English writer, that the great plague of 1348-9 “is a totally new departure in English history, incomparably more important in its permanent effects than the conquest of William, the civil war of the fifteenth century, the civil war and the revolution of the seventeenth. It has left abiding results on the present condition of England. To it we owe the peculiar position of the English aristocracy and the equally peculiar position of the peasant. It created the poor law and the trades’ union. It was the origin of Lollardism, which was itself the precursor of the Reformation. Fortunately, it occurred after representative institutions had become a necessary part of English political life, or it would have destroyed them.” Under Providence, Lollardism and the Reformation were the final cause of pestilence, and it might have counted far more if the end had been more exactly understood at the time of the desolations.
(2.) But that the Negro in the United States means, under Providence, a forward movement in the work of evangelizing the world may be inferred from the moral and Christian element he has forced into American politics. The final cause of a special Providence may not be apprehended by the large part of those who are the witnesses of its procedure; but its drift may be noted from the things they are constrained, under God, to think and say and do about it. A nation may be girded to a task, even without recognition of the hand or purpose of Him who girds; but that nation will be saying and doing very significant things. Now, the great enthusiasms of our political life for the century following the achieving of our independence have resulted in one way or another from the presence of the Negro. And this is the same as to say that the Negro has been the unwitting cause of the moral and religious elements in politics; for there are no great enthusiasms which have not a basis in either morals or religion. The courts, Cabinet, Congress, legislatures, the pulpit, the platform, the hearth, have furnished the arena for debate, harangue and purpose, which have enlarged our views of the brotherhood of man, kindled an unexampled enthusiasm for humanity, and deepened those moral convictions which are the basis of sound character. But for all these superior achievements in virtue, the black man has been the occasion, and must have our thanks. Selfish men, irreligious men, profane men, under the guidance of an unseen hand, have become the stout advocates of the Christian principles of brotherhood and of duty to carry a Gospel to every Creature. * * * *
This advocacy of righteousness toward man, and of the rights of man as man, has become so much a matter of course with us that we are likely to overlook its vast significance. Even on our Puritan soil it was not from the beginning so. The “austere morality and democratic spirit of the Puritans” even did not keep them clear of sin of human bondage. “Their experience of Indian ferocity and treachery, acting on their theologic convictions, led them early and readily to the belief that these savages, and, by logical inference, all savages, were the children of the devil, to be subjugated, if not extirpated, as the Philistine inhabitants of Canaan had been by the Israelites under Joshua. Indian slavery, sometimes forbidden by law, but usually tolerated, if not entirely approved, by public opinion, was among the early usages of New England; and from this to negro slavery—the slavery of any variety of pagan barbarians—was an easy transition.” But at the time of the Declaration of Independence public sentiment had already greatly changed.
In the original draft of this document there was a specific indictment of George III., which was prophetic of the “furnace blast” beneath which the nation for a hundred subsequent years was to “wait the pangs of transformation” into a man-loving, mission-promoting people. Mr. Jefferson, in the draft of the immortal Declaration, reflected the public thought and feeling so closely that he has been accused by many of plagiarism. We seem thus early to find the pre-intimations of a nation in its public acts ranging itself on the side of a vast scheme of Providence. The indictment referred to is as follows: “Determined to keep an open market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” Mr. Jefferson, in his “Works,” says: “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia;” and he adds, “our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” It is as impossible, at present, as it is needless to proceed from this initial point through discussions for the formation of platforms and parties, and from these to specific laws, and from laws to the violation of them, and civil war. If a just God has been ruling among the affairs of the nation, it is infidelity to doubt that He has been guiding this vast and tumultuous slavery conflict to some great end for the enlargement of His kingdom in the earth. The moral and religious aspects of American political questions for the last three generations have a Divine significance unsuspected by the actors in our national drama.
(3.) But of greater significance still is the fact that the coming of the Negro incorporates a missionary element in our national life. In the large advance movement now making for the evangelizing of the race, it is evident that the colored people are not to go out through a Red Sea into a wilderness, to become a peculiar people to whom shall be committed the oracles of God, and from whom shall arise one like the Messiah. No person is now so superficial as not to see that, whether we will or not, the Negro has come to stay. He is becoming even more and more an element in the sum of those experiences which we call our national life. He has not come to fit himself to become an uplifter; he is rather here to do that work which shall fit and cause this new and great nation to become in a peculiar way the uplifter of peoples. It is the resistance of this idea which has been the fundamental reason of all our national turbulence. Providence meant one thing; the selfishness of man another. God has given unmistakably the “sign of the prophet Jonas;” man sees nothing but the redness of a lowering sky. Can we fail to be impressed with the fact that a being whose not remote ancestors were, if not savage, at least barbarian, has now come into the possession of every element of American civilization? The negro has our language, dress, civil customs, religion, domestic and social life, and in the main, our vices. He is a voter, law-maker, executive, educator, freeholder, priest, and head of a Christian household. He has reached high proficiency in many branches of learning, and is skilled in all the arts with which we are acquainted. In a vast number of cases, through crime be it granted, he is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He is less a ward than citizen, and hardly more pupil than instructor. His absolute severance from fatherland,—his history, his tenacity of life and of race characteristics, yet, while retaining race characteristics, his greedy absorption of the best elements of civilization,—his poverty and his possibilities, awakening our sympathies and challenging our benevolent enterprise,—his tenacious hold upon our soil, our customs and our hearts,—these and many things beside indicate that he has come to stimulate, to lift us to a higher form of evangelical enterprise than that exhibited hitherto by any people. We are not merely to make missionaries of the black people; but we through them are to be ourselves made missionaries. It seems to be the will of God that the nation should set itself to the work of Christianizing the world.
(4.) To add yet another evidence that the signs of the times are to be interpreted in the line of advancing evangelization, I would mention the genius of the Negro for piety. Colonel Preston, who has written intelligently on the subject of the religious education of the Negro, says that he has adopted all the vices of the white race except suicide, duelling and religious skepticism. His voice is not more flexible and pure than, his faith is confiding and strong. And this is not a small matter. The world doubtless has great need of brains, but it has vaster need of character. Of the stones God can raise up children to Abraham; but it requires no miracle to raise up children to Plato. There is no fear for the brains of any race that will accept Christianity. To virtue, knowledge will surely be added. It is foolish for us Anglo-Saxons to assume that we have found the best expression of religion. It would be like the claim of the Pharisee, who assumed that the end of the law was fulfilled in himself. The worldliness of the church is at the present time more conspicuous than the churchliness of the world. A person who lives simply according to the doctrine of Christ is so singular as to get special notice in the church news of the religious press. So long as it can be truthfully said that “it is only by a special and rare experience that young men in the church settle the question of their life-work by the simple test of usefulness and duty; and if a young man is found pondering the question in this view, it is regarded as a case of unusual piety, and he is directed at once to the ministry; and if an older man begins to inquire how he can do the most good with his property, it is accepted as evidence of special growth in grace, a ripening for heaven”—so long, I say, as this can be truthfully said, it is perfectly within bounds to affirm that the current expression of the religion of Christ is nothing less than a shame. It is rational to hope that the Negro may help us to a fitter expression. I admit his crudities, extravagancies and immoralities, but he has a genius for religion nevertheless. It has been conjectured that there was a period when the ancestors of the Athenians were to be in no otherwise distinguished from their barbarian neighbors than by some finer taste in the decoration of their arms, and something of a loftier spirit in the songs which told of the exploits of their warriors. But these rude attempts were prophetic of their æsthetic triumphs; they had a genius for the beautiful.
It seems to me that Africa is the fitting continent in whose mysterious solitudes the greatest explorer of this generation should die in service and on his knees. He symbolized the possibilities of the Negritto race for the expression of the life of the Son of God, and mutely prophesied of the ages to come. This race, with its greed for civilization and its natural capabilities for religion, is in vital connection with the foremost nation of these latter times. Does not this signify the incoming of a more thorough righteousness, a loftier faith, and a great advance movement for Christianizing the world?
Whether I have correctly formulated the course of Providence or not, it is clear that the Negro is in the United States for a purpose, and that purpose is no petty one. He has been the occasion of the most exhaustive discussion of the subject of the rights of man, of the formation of a great national party, and of the largest civil war of modern times. He is now the most considerable element in national politics. If Providence is a scheme of means and ends, in which particular events are chosen to further great ends, and if a just God is presiding over the destiny of our nation, it is simply illogical to conclude that the foothold of the Negro on the continent is not a thing of vast significance. And if this be true, every question concerning him has a new importance. If Pharaoh had understood that the Hebrew bondsmen were a chosen generation, he would have carried on the brick business in a different way. This whole Negro question needs study in a new light, “lest haply we be found even to fight against God.” Governor St. John, of Kansas, in answer to a question from the South, how to stop the Negro exodus, has recently said:
“Rent the Negro land and sell him supplies at fair prices. Stop bulldozing him. Respect the sanctity of his family. Make him feel that he is just as safe in his person and family, and in all civil and political rights, as he can be in Kansas or any other Northern Slate. Then he will not want to come North. Unless you do this, the Red Sea will open before him and he will pass over dry-shod; and you of the South, attempting to stop him, will be overwhelmed, as was Pharaoh and his hosts.”
These are sharp words, and their rebuke is doubtless needed. It is probably not important to stop the Negro exodus. For both the Negro and the white race it is needful that large numbers be removed from the scenes of their old servitude. The Negro will rise faster and will more readily be the connecting and reconciling link between two antagonistic forms of civilization. This is but a stage in those wilderness wanderings by which he is being fitted to perform his part in the drama of the world’s renewing. In Kansas and everywhere he must have chance to develop according to what is in him, and there need be no fear that he will not act his part well.
This theme suggests many practical matters concerning the importance and the methods of home evangelization. These cannot be discussed in this paper; but I wish to raise again the question asked by large numbers of our most sagacious men, viz.: whether, in view of what seem to be vast providential designs concerning the inhabitants of this continent, our home work is not suffering comparative neglect? This is my deliberate conviction. For the colored man, at least, we are doing but a fraction of what it would be profitable to do. He is very far as yet from entering into his rest, and for long years yet we are to share with him “the pangs of transformation.”
“Before the joy of peace must come
The pains of purifying.
God give us grace,
Each in his place,
To bear his lot,
And murmuring not,
Endure, and wait, and labor.”