CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.
REV. ADDISON P. FOSTER, JERSEY CITY, N. J.
We have all noticed that of late public attention has been much drawn to the need of universal education in this land as a means of national safety. That book to which reference has been made several times in this meeting, and which every thoughtful man must read if he would inform himself in regard to the trend of popular thought to-day, “A Fool’s Errand,” by Judge Tourgee, concludes with an argument for the need of national education in these words:
“The remedy for darkness is light; for ignorance, knowledge; for wrong, righteousness. * * * Make the spelling-book the sceptre of national power. Let the nation educate the colored man and the poor white man, because the nation held them in bondage and is responsible for their education. Educate the voter because the nation cannot afford that he should be ignorant. * * * Honest ignorance in the masses is more to be dreaded than malevolent intelligence in the few.”
To the same effect are the words of our honored President Hayes, in his speech at Canton, Ohio, on the 1st of September last: “Ignorant voters are powder and balls for the demagogues. In the present condition of our country, universal education requires the aid of the General Government.” * * * * * *
Education, then, is called for. But the danger that specially attacks us is in the South. * * * There is more than twenty per cent. of illiteracy all through the Southern portion of our land. * * * But this illiteracy is largest, unquestionably, among those who are black. It has been stated that in one of our Southern States ninety per cent. of the colored people are illiterate; in another, ninety-one per cent.; in another, ninety-three per cent.; in another, ninety-five per cent.; and in Mississippi and Texas ninety-six per cent. Eighty-eight per cent. of the entire colored people in the South are illiterate—or were in 1870; undoubtedly it has changed somewhat since.
We are to labor, then, in our desire to secure popular education, especially among the blacks, and through the blacks we are to reach the whites. * * * But, as we educate the blacks, we ask ourselves, What sort of education shall it be? And I would say, it must be a Christian education. It can be nothing else if it is to accomplish its work. Public men, speaking on political subjects, refer only to a secular education. It is well that they should enforce that and insist upon it; but were we to content ourselves with secular education alone, we should make the most grievous mistake of the century. It is impossible to rely upon secular education for the saving of the nation; we must make it a Christian education as well.
Look at the influences of a merely secular education as seen in biography and history. What has the highest secular education done for men? It has made them simply one-sided, imperfect specimens of manhood, deformed and dwarfed in some of those most essential characteristics that give a man influence here, and happiness hereafter. A man like Hume could defend suicide. Highly-trained intellects like those of Voltaire and Rousseau could advocate licentiousness, both by word and by life. Men and women like J. S. Mill, George H. Lewes, George Eliot, and that gifted but vile woman, Sara Bernhardt, have traduced the idea of marriage, and put a stigma upon the purest relationship that God has given to earth. Education, mere intellectual training, has done nothing for the morals of these people. There was a prisoner executed a few years since in the State of New York, whose great grief before his execution for the terrible crime of murder, was that he could not live long enough to complete a very learned work which he was preparing on some science. And even the honored State of Massachusetts has on its criminal record the name of a professor in one of its highest institutions of learning who committed murder in a moment of passion.
Look at history, if you will, and is not the record the same? Take such nations as Greece, for example,—that wonderful land that reached the highest perfection in culture, in history, in song and in eloquence. Yet that land was sunk in the depths of impurity, and some of the crimes that were prevalent in those days I would not dare to mention in your presence. Take Rome,—that wonderful city, that ennobled the idea of law, that produced such marvelous intellects in the Augustan age. Yet in the very triumph of its intellect, as the capstone of intellectual pride went on to that magnificent temple of literature, the foundations of national virtue were rotten to the core and began to tremble, and presently the whole structure fell in ruins.
I tell you, my friends, there is no safety in mere secular education; it must be Christian as well. We need to put education into the control of principle; otherwise our education may simply give us a certain evil power over other men, and eventually bring ruin upon us. We need to put principle in control in order that whatever we may know shall be turned in the direction of purity, of uprightness and of helpfulness to our fellow-men. And so here, if we are to have an education for the blacks, or an education for the land, we must not content ourselves with what has been called for by these public men.
I say, then, that just here the work of this Association comes in. However much may be done by others, however much a secular education may attempt to accomplish, it can never cover the ground that is absolutely necessary. We have a secular education in the North, and it is doing much, but it has never done a religious work; nor will it ever do such in the future. We cannot expect that it should; and we feel a peculiar sensitiveness in this matter,—perhaps a sensitiveness that is not too great. We cannot trust the State to educate our young religiously. I, for one, confess a profound distrust of all State universities. I too often have seen those universities, in their attempt to be non-sectarian, ministering to the interests of that intensest of sectaries—the infidel. I will go even further than this, although I may carry but few of you with me in this conviction. I fear the methods of higher education in our high schools are not always what they should be. I have too often seen those who were the disciples of Huxley and Tyndall in science, and of Spencer and of Taine in sociology, literature and history, teaching their pupils doctrines that were insidious in their religious influence. I should be glad for one to see a return to the old-time academy system of New England, under which students who valued education enough to pay for it, were taught all branches of a higher learning on a Christian foundation, and trained first of all and most of all in character building.
But whatever you may say in regard to this matter, I am sure that I shall carry you with me in this conviction, that in the South, in our labor among the blacks, our institutions must be of this character and can be of no other. We must have institutions that shall furnish Christian homes. Those who come to our institutions, come from places where they have no such Christian training as have most of those who are in public schools in this more favored portion of the land; and those in the South, if they are to have a Christian training at all, must have it in schools that are under the management of Christian men, in chartered and endowed institutions, cared for by Christian boards of trustees. It is this Association that is doing precisely this kind of work; and this Association and others like it will, I firmly believe, be called on by God for years to come to labor with the same devotedness as they have in the past for the salvation of the land.
My friends, our land is in danger. I am profoundly moved with an anxiety for a land which should be dearer to us than life. It has seemed to me, as I have looked over this broad extent of country, that there were flames of fraud and violence springing up here and there, that were working disaster to our republic, and that would in time—if we may judge by the history of other republics that have been similarly controlled by evil influences, as France in the last century and Spain in this, and Greece and Rome in the centuries gone by—bring this our beloved land to wreck and ruin. And yet we have a God above, and He has given us methods of fighting the flames.
This summer the woods of New Jersey were all ablaze, and the farmers went out into the forests to fight the fire that they might save their homes and their property from desolation; and the method they pursued was this: to build against those fires a back fire that should rage more furiously and destroy the other flame as it advanced. It is your business and mine to
“Take up the torch of truth
And wave it wide,”
to take up this blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and carry it all through the South, and touch points here and there until at length we have the fires blazing all over the land, and ignorance is dispersed in the light of the Gospel. Already, in almost every Southern State, these fires are lighted and the work goes gloriously on. Let us not lose heart, but thank God that He has given us the privilege of joining in this grand work.