“The wisdom, the righteousness, and the grandeur of Abraham Lincoln’s act of emancipation, no man will deny. That it has conferred infinite blessings on our country, on both races, and on the world, very few will question. This estimate of the act, and of its results, will not be changed by the good conduct or the bad conduct of either race. But it is said that the question of the blessing conferred on the colored race depends on their conduct. What they most need is, what Burns calls ‘the glorious privilege of being independent.’ What this requires is, the willingness to labor, and the prudence and self-denial to save the fruits of labor. My young colored friends, let this, then, be among your good resolutions: I will work, and I will save, to the end that I may become independent.”
That is good advice for any poor man, black or white. This picture of the signing of the Emancipation Act can commemorate all of which it is capable, only if the privilege of freedom be embraced as the opportunity of manly toil, and the occasion of all patient effort to become the equal of other men, not in external advantages and rights half so much as in capacity and character.
This is what we are working for among our colored brethren, and especially among the youth, and with a measure of success which makes us full of hope for their future and ours. We must be patient to hold out the chances, and keep open the opportunities, as well as they to toil and strive to use them. Most of all do we feel that when we have succeeded in leading them to an intelligent Christian experience, we have awakened in them the highest motive of which the human mind is capable, and brought them under the most powerful stimulus to the worthiest of all ambitions—to fit themselves, not for high stations, but for useful work.
CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH.
Is the A. M. A. devoting a proper share of its work to the extension of Congregational Churches in the South? The question is a fair one, and deserves a frank answer. But the answer, to be just to all interests concerned, must take a broad view of the whole subject. The paramount duty of the nation, and especially of the churches, to the emancipated slaves, is to fit them for their new position as citizens, and their true destiny as men and Christians in America, and as missionaries to Africa. Anything short of this is less than our whole duty. The blacks are all religious in their way, and nearly all are connected with churches. In the matter of outward profession and inward emotion, the quantity is all that could be asked. It is in the quality alone that a change is needed. No Christian Church can discharge its duty to them by merely denominationalizing them into its ranks, leaving the essentials of character and Christian manhood unchanged. The Congregational Churches of this country certainly will not be satisfied with this low aim.
But these Congregational Churches are, by the nature of the case, compelled to work in methods differing from those of other denominations. Methodists, Baptists, and, to some extent, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, pre-occupy the ground. Congregationalists were almost unknown among the blacks before the war, and their efforts must naturally meet with sectarian prejudice, somewhat in proportion to the ignorance of the people. But, nevertheless, Congregationalism has a great responsibility in regard to this people, in laying foundations on which to build the essentials of character in civil and Christian life. It is with this aim that the Association has, from the beginning, sought to do its work—moving, with the progress of the colored people, from the common-school to the more effective normal, collegiate and theological teaching. The wisdom of its efforts is attested by the commendations of those, both in the South and North, who are most competent to judge, and also by the more convincing fact, that it can point to 100,000 scholars in schools taught by its former pupils, to the education it has given to many colored ministers, and to the missionaries, born in slavery, trained in its schools, and now sent to Africa.
The church work must for a time, at least, grow out of, and keep pace with, this Christian teaching, which prepares the people to appreciate, and the minister to preach, a pure Gospel and a practical morality. It were easy to scatter the seeds in a thin and shallow soil, and gather a harvest that would wither while it was gathering. A writer in one of the religious papers, who censures the Association, makes this great boast, followed by a frank confession: “With half of three millions of dollars I can Congregationalize every negro in the South; but, of course, the work would not be permanent.” The italics in this quotation are ours, for we wish to call attention to the acknowledgment, and to say that this transient work is precisely what the Association does not attempt. It will not take the money of its patrons to start ephemeral growths. It prefers, and we are sure its intelligent friends will prefer, that it should plow deep, harrow thoroughly, and sow “wholly a right seed,” that the gatherings may be an hundred fold for the garner of the Master.
An effort is made to stir up Congregationalists to plant white churches in the South. The project is not new, but its results thus far have not been encouraging. Soon after the war, the Home Missionary Society and the Congregational Union invested large moneys in establishing such churches there, and we suppose that their experience will lead them to ask for very clear evidence of more favorable auspices before they will wish to renew the attempt. But if it were renewed, it would only be an exaggeration of the difficulties at the West, where feeble rival churches, in poor and small communities, struggle against inevitable death. For, in the South, we should have two feeble Congregational churches, the one white and the other black, in still poorer and smaller places. And more than all that, the A. M. A. has started its church work on the only true Gospel basis, founding churches without distinction of color. Its churches are not black by its ordination, and are only made nearly so by the caste prejudice of the whites. It ought to be understood that the progress of any people in civilization and Christianity is a growth, taking form and bearing fruit according to soil and climate, and that it cannot be produced to order, or at the behest of mere theorists.