REPORT ON SECRETARY STRIEBY'S PAPER.
BY REV. G.B. WILLCOX, D.D., CHAIRMAN.
The paper by Dr. Strieby impresses your committee as an admirably comprehensive and discriminating statement of the policy and work of the Association. As to the reconstruction of our educational and missionary societies, to the suggestion of which much of the paper calls attention, and from which he dissents, we should do well to make haste slowly. Some time in the future it may become practicable. But we discover no finger of Providence pointing toward it at present.
If the thought were to reduce our societies to which these interests are intrusted to two, calling for but two annual collections where we now have three or four, it needs no prophet to foresee the effect of that on the amounts collected. If the suggestion is of the reconstruction, not of the societies, but only of the work—if it proposes that our educational and missionary enterprises be so divided that no one society shall to any extent conduct both—it has certainly an attractive look.
But is it more than a look? The educational institutions of several of our societies were born out of the inmost life of those organizations and lie on their bosom for nourishment to-day. To ask the American Board, for example, to turn over its colleges and schools to some other society, for that, of course, is involved in the plan suggested—would be like asking one of our Christian mothers to send her babe to the foundlings' home. Some of us are old enough to remember that the venerable and now sainted Dr. Anderson was at first vehemently opposed to the schools planted by the missionaries in India. It was confounding things that differ. The work of a missionary society was not to manage schools. The schools were discontinued. But the Board soon discovered that it was doing its work with but one hand. The schools came back and came to stay. Now we conservatives are rather jealous of our progressive brethren calling for a reconstruction of the American Board. We know not whereto this thing may grow.
If the colleges and schools of the American Missionary Association were secular, if they had no vital oneness of life with its churches, there might be room for the plan suggested. But they are as thoroughly Christian in their aim as the churches. The churches are as indispensably educational as the schools. As Dr. Strieby remarks, the teacher is often the pastor. The pastor finds a great part of his flock in the school. The teachers teach in his Sunday-school. The prayer-meeting depends on them for its success. The unseen shuttles of mutual sympathy, flying back and forth incessantly, are weaving the two together, and working out the one pattern of the Divine life in souls, that covers both. The plan proposed would, at least to the eye, disentangle all complications. It would lay out the work in the Year-Book with clean-cut precision. But vital things are not always improved by vivisection. It would doubtless simplify our apprehension of the organs of a man to lay the lungs on one side of the table, the heart on another, the liver on a third, and the brains on a fourth. But how far it would enhance the vitality and usefulness of the man is another question. There is an organism which is often, and without harm, in that fashion distributed. But it is a mannikin—not a man.
The one most formidable evil among our colored countrymen is their deplorable ignorance of the connection between religion and morality—or rather the fact that religion, on its outward side, is morality. The sable deacon who, when confronted with a list of his sins as dark as his countenance, replied triumphantly; "Well, bredren, I'se broke ebery commandment ob de ten—but bress de Lord, I'se nebber los' my 'ligion," was no monster of iniquity. He was only saturated and sodden with the delusion which submerges Pagan, Mohammedan, and Papist alike, and throws no little of its froth over Protestant, too often, that duties toward God and toward man are not blended, or even dove-tailed together. But they are weights in opposite scales. Be only devout in your penances or your hallelujahs, and your life among men is of little account. Now, that notion can not be corrected in such a people as that one with which we have to do in the South by an occasional Sunday sermon. In the day-school it must be reiterated morning, noon, and night in various applications, line upon line and precept upon precept. And so, on the other hand, teachers, as well as scholars, must be reminded by pastors, with a little Puritan iron in their blood, of their Christian, as well as educational obligations. One member of your committee who has had practical experience in the Southern work reports that some teachers, occasionally even now, need to be reminded of the Christian service that the Association, as well as the Master, expects from them. But divide these different functions, put the churches and Sunday-schools under other auspices, and, self-evidently, that temptation would be so much the worse. We must have groped out of the morning twilight toward the millennial day much further than we have before any such plan can be reduced to fact.
Dr. Strieby speaks in the paper of his clerical friend of twenty-five years ago, who thought the work of the Association would be transient. It reminds us of Mr. Seward's remark that three months would end the civil war. We are in for a long campaign. The sad fact is not to be blinked that, with the enormous increase of the colored population, the illiteracy among them is greater to-day than at the close of the rebellion. We have need to sing at times:
O, learn to scorn the praise of men:
O, learn to lose with God.
As Dr. Goodwin grandly told us yesterday, our work is under the Master's order. Success is no concern of ours. But success, because it is His concern, is sure. Every losing battle in His service turns in time to victory. We remember in Count Agenor de Gasparin's "Uprising of a Great People," how spell-bound, awe-struck, he appeared to be before that magnificent ground swell of the loyal nation, rolling on, as a traveling mountain range, to sweep the rebellion as drift-wood before it. The eight millions of the freedmen and their children are rising. If, for the present, there are refluent waves that sadden us it is God who brings in the tide. "And when I begin," saith the Lord, "I will also make an end."