OVERTURE TO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL.
It is felt by many of our missionaries South that their work would be facilitated by a creed, prepared under direction of the National Council, suited to the average intelligence of the Freedmen who apply for admission to our new churches. To this end, therefore, the Central South Conference, at its recent meeting in Memphis, drew up an overture setting forth the reasons why such creed should be provided, and presented it to the Council at St. Louis. After preliminary statements, the overture adds:
“Our eight colleges and our two score normal and high schools, with their more than 8,000 students, and these, with their 150,000 pupils in primary schools, where they teach, are rapidly preparing the material out of which churches of our faith and polity will be developed.
“These children of nature, with their ready faith but rude culture, coming into the inheritance of this New Testament way of the churches, need the ‘sincere milk of the word’—a declaration of doctrine that shall not be in the nomenclature nor in the philosophy of a past age, but in the language and after the spirit of our improved New England theology. They need a form of sound words such as that when they have once learned it they will not need to be taught over again what it does not mean in spite of its phraseology.
“As a duty of brotherly love and of honest recompense we owe them the best things we have to give in the way of the freshest and ripest statement of the ideas and doctrines which have leavened the East and the West, and are now setting the South in foment.”
We trust the Committee appointed by the Council to formulate a statement of doctrine will meet the want.