What a review is that, and almost within the space of a single generation. The success that has already been accomplished is reason why, at the very outset, we may call you to a hopeful and an enlarged interest in this work; for history is telling us to-day, if she tells us anything, that it is not a hopeless thing to attempt to provide efficiently for all the despised of our land. And, let me say, I should not hesitate to make that hopeful appeal, if there were no such glowing record to present. I would not change the tone of it, though the years rolled back, and you and I stood to-day where those men stood thirty and four years ago; for Christ has said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and has said distinctly that our neighbors are pre-eminently those who have fallen among thieves and are lying wounded by the way. That simple command is enough to assure us that our labor shall not be in vain. You and I know whom we have believed, and we know that whatever He commands is commanded in infinite wisdom and infinite love. We know that what He says we are to do, it is possible to do, and that in some way it shall be done. The stars in their courses, and earth, and hell, may fight against Christ, but sooner or later He is to reign.
Therefore, when the Master calls us, his requirement is enough to warrant us in our advance. On that simple requirement, backed by, and reflected in, the impulse of every regenerate soul, you may ground your missionary motive. That is the corner-stone on which, with abiding cheer and infinite courage, the missionary, and every friend of missions, may build forever. Therefore, while we have this firm foundation, and all the more that we have it, it is for us to note the actual progress that has been made. While we recur to these absolute considerations, let us not, through any attempt at unnecessary heroism, forget the fulfillment that has already been vouchsafed to the promise and to the command of Christ.
And now that I am speaking of motives, let me say that I cannot conceal my feeling that, with special and peculiarly appealing considerations, God is binding upon us the work for the so-called alien races of this country. Let me illustrate. Here, for example, are four millions of Freedmen—strange designation for the inhabitants of a Republic that has already celebrated its centennial! Suppose that a stranger to our history should ask us the meaning of it, what must be our confession? Why this, and nothing else: that the ancestors of those Freedmen, by fraud, and violence were wrested from their distant and native land; that for two centuries they were held in sheer and open bondage; that they were denied the commonest rights of humanity; bought and sold like beasts of the field; debarred from the privileges of education and true Christian instruction; that, while their toil went to build the colleges and schools and churches of the dominant race, they were left without any reward but the desolation of their bondage; that, when they piteously plead, their appeal was met with derision; that, when they respectfully protested, the protest was crushed back with blows and curses; that when they ventured to resist, the resistance was answered unto death, with lashes and bullets and the fangs of pursuing hounds; that manhood was deliberately degraded among them; womanhood was well-nigh obliterated; truthfulness was made dangerous for them, and chastity absolutely impossible; and then at last, that to keep them in such a bondage, the whole power of the National Government was pledged and put forth; that, by Constitution interpreted and special laws enacted, by military might and civic decree, by private volition and public compulsion, it came to pass that there was not one spot of safety for them in all the land over which floated the flag of their country; that, in their effort to escape from their bondage, not a single door might lawfully be opened to them, nor any hearth-stone give them shelter; but, taking the pole-star for their guide, they must flee from the Republic to the land of a king or queen.
Pardon me that I have opened the record. I confess it makes me sick at heart. With you I wish it had never been enacted; with you I wish it might be buried to-day in the deepest depths of oblivion. But I tell you, when we stand, as we do practically to-day, in the face of those men, and in the face of God who made us and them of one image and of one blood, we have no right to forget that guilty past. It is one of the mighty motives that are still to be invoked in their behalf. Like the blood of Abel, it cries to us for atonement. It says to us to-day, “In your nation, aided and abetted by you or your fathers, under your flag, that wrong was inflicted; and until that wrong is thoroughly righted, neither the remembrance nor the cry can be allowed to pass.” It says that you owe them every reparation in your power; that they have a valid lien on every dollar of your property, and on every possible degree of your culture. It is not enough that you have made them free—to have denied that would have been to perpetuate the wrong itself. It is not enough that you have given them the franchise—that in itself were a barren gift. Give them the rather that manhood that was their birth-right withheld. Lift them up, if you can, into truthfulness and purity, intelligence and industry; make them free with the freedom of the Gospel of Christ, and then that past may be forgotten.
And brethren, I make an appeal of that same sort to-day for the Indian and the Chinese;—the Indian, abused, deceived, made a fool of; a nominally Christian civilization degrading him beyond even his original degradation. And the Chinese, in that part of the land where they have chosen to dwell, despised, defrauded, spit upon. My claim is that whatever appeal you propose to disregard, it is not becoming for you to turn a deaf ear to those whom you have so foully wronged.
Moreover,—and I beg you to ponder this also,—you owe a debt of gratitude, in the case of the Freedmen at least,—with whom this Association is chiefly concerned,—that has not yet been discharged. And now, is it imagined that I am speaking of something far-fetched and fanciful? Does any body suppose that I am about to summon you by a visionary and distant appeal? Or, if anyone guess wherein it is claimed that that debt consists, is it supposed that time has made that claim no longer valid? Some may so reflect; I cannot share the feeling, for I cannot so easily forget the days and the months when the scales of our national destiny hung in equipoise, or seemed to vibrate towards the nation’s overthrow. It seems incredible, I know, but such was the fact. We had put forth what appeared to us well-nigh the last resource for the national defense; on every side the prospect was dark; it seemed sometimes as if we should be driven to question whether we were not doomed to overthrow—the heavens black above us, the billows rolling, and the very earth beneath our feet trembling and being moved. For the enemy smote us in the field and the traitor betrayed us at home. And you remember with what unspeakable thankfulness we then saw those who had suffered so much at the nation’s hands coming to our rescue, forgetting their personal wrongs, and fighting for the flag that had hitherto been to them an object of dread. You remember with what eagerness we offered them at last their freedom, lest the enemy should offer it to them before us. Why, what were we not willing to pledge, and to do, for the Freedmen in those days? We felt that they were helping us to save this Republic, and that the balance of power was in their hands; and did we mistake? Does history say that in the excitement we misread the facts? No, the after events proved the correctness of our thought; and it stands written in simple, imperishable lines to-day, that among the saviors of the country, there were none more deserving than those of darker skin, who forgot their wrongs and stood in the breach for you and me.
And so it comes to pass that, not only in obedience to the command of Christ but by the threefold consideration of repairing a wrong, and paying a debt, and averting a danger, we are called to the continuance and the enlargement of the work of this Association.
I have suggested two lines of action, parallel and coincident; the one educational, and the other strictly religious. I want to say to you now, that the inspiration for those movements must come in large measure from the Christian North; for, if you ask the South to be wholly responsible for her own improvement, then you ask reformation to precede itself, and a disordered and perverse sentiment to be its own awakener and its own corrective. Should you suppose that a nation of Freedmen, after two centuries of bondage, would have the sufficient desire for improvement, not to say the means adequate for its accomplishment? I deem it to be perfectly clear that this Association is right in thinking that one great part of its work is in laying the foundations, and affording the facilities, for increased instruction among the Freedmen. It is undoubted good sense, I take it, to establish here and there a common school, and here and there a normal school, and a moderate number of colleges, to the end that in them, during this formative period of the Freedman’s life, you may train his future teachers,—not attempting to make the way of mental improvement over-easy; not attempting any pampering plan of encouragement; but simply affording opportunity to those who will struggle and practice self-denial. God bless the institutions at Hampton, and Carlisle, and Berea, and Nashville, and Atlanta, and Talladega, and New Orleans, and Tougaloo, and that institution that has the good fortune, sir, to have you for its presiding officer (Howard University). For, do you know it? the former students of those very institutions are to-day teaching one hundred thousand of their own countrymen.
And then the religious work, the saving of souls—what a call for enlargement in that work! for that underlies even the educational work. Every teacher I know is an ardent and an earnest worker for Christ, and all your attempt is to make the way to education, the way to the cross of Christ; but, besides that, there is the preaching of the Gospel, and the gathering of churches, and the opening of Sunday-schools. I used to wonder why you asked us to preach to the Freedmen. Were they not already religious? Were they not gathered in churches? But I came to know the terrible fact that religion among the Freedmen, was not the religion of the understanding mind and the consecrated heart, but, rather, in the olden time, of uninstructed impulse and uncontrollable passion; and to-day the prevailing testimony concerning those old-time churches is, that in them religion is not founded on a regenerate, or even a moral, life.