(2.) But that the Negro in the United States means, under Providence, a forward movement in the work of evangelizing the world may be inferred from the moral and Christian element he has forced into American politics. The final cause of a special Providence may not be apprehended by the large part of those who are the witnesses of its procedure; but its drift may be noted from the things they are constrained, under God, to think and say and do about it. A nation may be girded to a task, even without recognition of the hand or purpose of Him who girds; but that nation will be saying and doing very significant things. Now, the great enthusiasms of our political life for the century following the achieving of our independence have resulted in one way or another from the presence of the Negro. And this is the same as to say that the Negro has been the unwitting cause of the moral and religious elements in politics; for there are no great enthusiasms which have not a basis in either morals or religion. The courts, Cabinet, Congress, legislatures, the pulpit, the platform, the hearth, have furnished the arena for debate, harangue and purpose, which have enlarged our views of the brotherhood of man, kindled an unexampled enthusiasm for humanity, and deepened those moral convictions which are the basis of sound character. But for all these superior achievements in virtue, the black man has been the occasion, and must have our thanks. Selfish men, irreligious men, profane men, under the guidance of an unseen hand, have become the stout advocates of the Christian principles of brotherhood and of duty to carry a Gospel to every Creature. * * * *
This advocacy of righteousness toward man, and of the rights of man as man, has become so much a matter of course with us that we are likely to overlook its vast significance. Even on our Puritan soil it was not from the beginning so. The “austere morality and democratic spirit of the Puritans” even did not keep them clear of sin of human bondage. “Their experience of Indian ferocity and treachery, acting on their theologic convictions, led them early and readily to the belief that these savages, and, by logical inference, all savages, were the children of the devil, to be subjugated, if not extirpated, as the Philistine inhabitants of Canaan had been by the Israelites under Joshua. Indian slavery, sometimes forbidden by law, but usually tolerated, if not entirely approved, by public opinion, was among the early usages of New England; and from this to negro slavery—the slavery of any variety of pagan barbarians—was an easy transition.” But at the time of the Declaration of Independence public sentiment had already greatly changed.
In the original draft of this document there was a specific indictment of George III., which was prophetic of the “furnace blast” beneath which the nation for a hundred subsequent years was to “wait the pangs of transformation” into a man-loving, mission-promoting people. Mr. Jefferson, in the draft of the immortal Declaration, reflected the public thought and feeling so closely that he has been accused by many of plagiarism. We seem thus early to find the pre-intimations of a nation in its public acts ranging itself on the side of a vast scheme of Providence. The indictment referred to is as follows: “Determined to keep an open market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” Mr. Jefferson, in his “Works,” says: “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia;” and he adds, “our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” It is as impossible, at present, as it is needless to proceed from this initial point through discussions for the formation of platforms and parties, and from these to specific laws, and from laws to the violation of them, and civil war. If a just God has been ruling among the affairs of the nation, it is infidelity to doubt that He has been guiding this vast and tumultuous slavery conflict to some great end for the enlargement of His kingdom in the earth. The moral and religious aspects of American political questions for the last three generations have a Divine significance unsuspected by the actors in our national drama.
(3.) But of greater significance still is the fact that the coming of the Negro incorporates a missionary element in our national life. In the large advance movement now making for the evangelizing of the race, it is evident that the colored people are not to go out through a Red Sea into a wilderness, to become a peculiar people to whom shall be committed the oracles of God, and from whom shall arise one like the Messiah. No person is now so superficial as not to see that, whether we will or not, the Negro has come to stay. He is becoming even more and more an element in the sum of those experiences which we call our national life. He has not come to fit himself to become an uplifter; he is rather here to do that work which shall fit and cause this new and great nation to become in a peculiar way the uplifter of peoples. It is the resistance of this idea which has been the fundamental reason of all our national turbulence. Providence meant one thing; the selfishness of man another. God has given unmistakably the “sign of the prophet Jonas;” man sees nothing but the redness of a lowering sky. Can we fail to be impressed with the fact that a being whose not remote ancestors were, if not savage, at least barbarian, has now come into the possession of every element of American civilization? The negro has our language, dress, civil customs, religion, domestic and social life, and in the main, our vices. He is a voter, law-maker, executive, educator, freeholder, priest, and head of a Christian household. He has reached high proficiency in many branches of learning, and is skilled in all the arts with which we are acquainted. In a vast number of cases, through crime be it granted, he is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He is less a ward than citizen, and hardly more pupil than instructor. His absolute severance from fatherland,—his history, his tenacity of life and of race characteristics, yet, while retaining race characteristics, his greedy absorption of the best elements of civilization,—his poverty and his possibilities, awakening our sympathies and challenging our benevolent enterprise,—his tenacious hold upon our soil, our customs and our hearts,—these and many things beside indicate that he has come to stimulate, to lift us to a higher form of evangelical enterprise than that exhibited hitherto by any people. We are not merely to make missionaries of the black people; but we through them are to be ourselves made missionaries. It seems to be the will of God that the nation should set itself to the work of Christianizing the world.
(4.) To add yet another evidence that the signs of the times are to be interpreted in the line of advancing evangelization, I would mention the genius of the Negro for piety. Colonel Preston, who has written intelligently on the subject of the religious education of the Negro, says that he has adopted all the vices of the white race except suicide, duelling and religious skepticism. His voice is not more flexible and pure than, his faith is confiding and strong. And this is not a small matter. The world doubtless has great need of brains, but it has vaster need of character. Of the stones God can raise up children to Abraham; but it requires no miracle to raise up children to Plato. There is no fear for the brains of any race that will accept Christianity. To virtue, knowledge will surely be added. It is foolish for us Anglo-Saxons to assume that we have found the best expression of religion. It would be like the claim of the Pharisee, who assumed that the end of the law was fulfilled in himself. The worldliness of the church is at the present time more conspicuous than the churchliness of the world. A person who lives simply according to the doctrine of Christ is so singular as to get special notice in the church news of the religious press. So long as it can be truthfully said that “it is only by a special and rare experience that young men in the church settle the question of their life-work by the simple test of usefulness and duty; and if a young man is found pondering the question in this view, it is regarded as a case of unusual piety, and he is directed at once to the ministry; and if an older man begins to inquire how he can do the most good with his property, it is accepted as evidence of special growth in grace, a ripening for heaven”—so long, I say, as this can be truthfully said, it is perfectly within bounds to affirm that the current expression of the religion of Christ is nothing less than a shame. It is rational to hope that the Negro may help us to a fitter expression. I admit his crudities, extravagancies and immoralities, but he has a genius for religion nevertheless. It has been conjectured that there was a period when the ancestors of the Athenians were to be in no otherwise distinguished from their barbarian neighbors than by some finer taste in the decoration of their arms, and something of a loftier spirit in the songs which told of the exploits of their warriors. But these rude attempts were prophetic of their æsthetic triumphs; they had a genius for the beautiful.
It seems to me that Africa is the fitting continent in whose mysterious solitudes the greatest explorer of this generation should die in service and on his knees. He symbolized the possibilities of the Negritto race for the expression of the life of the Son of God, and mutely prophesied of the ages to come. This race, with its greed for civilization and its natural capabilities for religion, is in vital connection with the foremost nation of these latter times. Does not this signify the incoming of a more thorough righteousness, a loftier faith, and a great advance movement for Christianizing the world?
Whether I have correctly formulated the course of Providence or not, it is clear that the Negro is in the United States for a purpose, and that purpose is no petty one. He has been the occasion of the most exhaustive discussion of the subject of the rights of man, of the formation of a great national party, and of the largest civil war of modern times. He is now the most considerable element in national politics. If Providence is a scheme of means and ends, in which particular events are chosen to further great ends, and if a just God is presiding over the destiny of our nation, it is simply illogical to conclude that the foothold of the Negro on the continent is not a thing of vast significance. And if this be true, every question concerning him has a new importance. If Pharaoh had understood that the Hebrew bondsmen were a chosen generation, he would have carried on the brick business in a different way. This whole Negro question needs study in a new light, “lest haply we be found even to fight against God.” Governor St. John, of Kansas, in answer to a question from the South, how to stop the Negro exodus, has recently said:
“Rent the Negro land and sell him supplies at fair prices. Stop bulldozing him. Respect the sanctity of his family. Make him feel that he is just as safe in his person and family, and in all civil and political rights, as he can be in Kansas or any other Northern Slate. Then he will not want to come North. Unless you do this, the Red Sea will open before him and he will pass over dry-shod; and you of the South, attempting to stop him, will be overwhelmed, as was Pharaoh and his hosts.”
These are sharp words, and their rebuke is doubtless needed. It is probably not important to stop the Negro exodus. For both the Negro and the white race it is needful that large numbers be removed from the scenes of their old servitude. The Negro will rise faster and will more readily be the connecting and reconciling link between two antagonistic forms of civilization. This is but a stage in those wilderness wanderings by which he is being fitted to perform his part in the drama of the world’s renewing. In Kansas and everywhere he must have chance to develop according to what is in him, and there need be no fear that he will not act his part well.
This theme suggests many practical matters concerning the importance and the methods of home evangelization. These cannot be discussed in this paper; but I wish to raise again the question asked by large numbers of our most sagacious men, viz.: whether, in view of what seem to be vast providential designs concerning the inhabitants of this continent, our home work is not suffering comparative neglect? This is my deliberate conviction. For the colored man, at least, we are doing but a fraction of what it would be profitable to do. He is very far as yet from entering into his rest, and for long years yet we are to share with him “the pangs of transformation.”