CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.
PROF. CYRUS NORTHROP.
Great battles sometimes settle the fate of a country, and transfer in a day whole provinces from one dominion to another. There are no such decisive battles in the struggle for the intellectual and moral elevation of man. By no stroke of policy and by no combination of forces can you revolutionize the individual character of a whole people at once. It happens occasionally, however, in the contest between good and evil, that some convulsion occurs which in its influence on the mental and moral condition of a whole people is hardly less decisive than those political contests by which provinces are transferred from the control of one nation to that of another. Such a convulsion was our late civil war. It left the States where it found them, parts of the Union. It left all races morally and intellectually where it found them. But for the colored people of the South it had swept away in every direction, from zenith to horizon, the impenetrable clouds of more than Egyptian darkness which had brooded over them, and it had made it possible for the light of the sun to reach even these slaves. Then, indeed, the people which sat in darkness saw a great light, and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death, to them did light spring up.
The civil war made it possible for us to educate and Christianize the colored race at the South. It remained for us to take up the burden which the providence of God had laid upon us, and to do what we could to lift up these people to our level of civilization.
But need this education be Christian education? I answer emphatically, yes. The world undoubtedly is making great progress in thought, in discovery, in invention. More and more the dominion of nature is being conquered and her methods understood. Education is not the same as it was a century ago. Even religion is not to us quite the same that it was to our fathers. But whatever discoveries may be made or whatever progress attained, there are some things which the world can never advance so far as to be able to do without, and I but voice the sentiment of this audience when I say that one of these is Christianity.
And now who are these that in our Southern States are stretching forth their hands and begging us to come over and help them? They are those whose minds and hearts are not pre-occupied, but like those of children, receptive, ready for the seed which may be sown, and promising, if good seed is sown, a bountiful harvest at no distant day. They are placed, in the providence of God, at our very door, and are made a part of the governing force of this great republic. For them Christian education cannot be secured through the family, for there is little Christian family life; the father and the mother are as ignorant as the child; all are children. It cannot be secured through the State, for the State has no business to teach religion as these millions need to have it taught. It can be secured only through organized charity—by the help of such agencies as the American Missionary Association. What the fathers and mothers of New England have done for the Christian education of their children, the American Missionary Association must do for the South.
I have emphasized the word Christian as I have spoken of Christian education. Let me not in any less degree emphasize education. Matthew Arnold is not far wrong when he says that the object of religion is conduct, and that conduct is three-fourths of life. It is simply doing what we ought. But one of the things which a man ought to do is to make the most of himself as a power for good in the world, and that he cannot do without education. Man, without education, is a clumsy machine. The educated man is force which drives machines. This force, if uncontrolled, becomes destructive. The educated man, without principles, is more dangerous than the uneducated. The latter may become at the worst a brute; it takes the former to be a demon. But we do not on this account think less of education; we only insist that the force it generates shall be controlled by Christian principle. Thus controlled it is always beneficent, like fire and water and air, which, nevertheless, when uncontrolled, may become agents of the most fearful destruction.
The necessity for Christian education at the South may be looked at and clearly seen from two different points of view. To the Christian, these millions of the South are human beings, for whom Christ died and to whom He has commanded us to carry the Gospel. Properly developed, intellectually, morally and spiritually, they will be a part of the Kingdom of God, and will become powerfully influential in establishing that kingdom throughout the world. They are accessible, eager for knowledge, ready to accept the truths of Christianity, peculiarly impressible, lacking stability only because undeveloped, and they offer to us an assured hope of a more complete, immediate and glorious harvest than seems likely to be gathered in any other part of the world. Nowhere else on the round globe will your money or your efforts bring such returns as they will at the South. You have not to contend with an impregnable hostile faith, as among the Mohammedans or Buddhists. You have only to lift the clouds of ignorance, and to overcome the natural depravity of man—a depravity greater, perhaps, than in some other places, but on that very account more easily recognized, felt and repented of.
Nor can the necessity for Christian education at the South appear less imperative to the patriot. There is no element so dangerous to the stability of the republic as ignorance and its associated lack of principle. It is by votes that rulers are elected, laws made and the country governed. Just so long as we have a large element of ignorance in the republic, whose votes can be bought at the caucus or at the polls, will the most unscrupulous men rise to prominence in our politics, for they are the only men who will utilize this ignorance.
And now what of the future? We have tried all sorts of reconstruction measures with the South and all kinds of policies with the South, and all have proved in a greater or less degree failures. They stand as monuments of our lack of the keenest foresight. The best reconstruction measure which we can now adopt is to fill the treasury of the American Missionary Association full to overflowing, that it may carry forward at once and triumphantly this work of Christian education in the South. What it has done is sufficient assurance of what it will do, if the means are placed in its hands. It cannot establish throughout the South a common school system like that which blesses the North; it cannot carry education to every cabin in the South, nor open college halls, free of expense, to all who may desire a liberal education; but it can and will qualify large numbers of these people to carry education and Christianity to the rest; and that, after all, is the best thing possible, for no lesson is more needed by these people than that of self-reliance. Teach them to take care of themselves in the best way, and we shall have done for them the best that is possible. The day will not be far distant, then, when the common schools of the South will provide education for the white and the black alike as at the North, and when the church of God in the South shall hear the voice of God saying, “All souls are mine. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones.”