The American Missionary Association has been engaged for the past score of years in developing exceptions to these dicta, and it is time to raise the question seriously whether these only prove the rule or demand its revision!
We respectfully submit that the experiments made show a large number of exceptions; in fact, the number has been numerous exactly in proportion to the largeness of our opportunities and facilities for developing them. A serious doubt ought by this time to take possession of the public mind whether $32,000,000 spent in Indian wars during the past dozen years is not rather expensive target practice, and whether the results shown by those who, under great disadvantages, have been attempting to civilize and Christianize the Indians, are not of such character as to demand most emphatically that our method of dealing with them shall be changed.
We also challenge attention to the results of our educational experiments in the South, as demanding in all fairness that they shall be made on a national scale, and not simply by the private enterprise of philanthropists.
It is time the old answer of ignorance and stupid imbecility that exceptions only prove the rule should be thrown to the dogs, and we should as a nation convert the dangerous elements with which we have so wickedly and foolishly dealt into sources of national power and safety.
CONVERSION VERSUS EDUCATION.
It was a wild and weird scene that we looked down upon from the gallery of one of the prominent colored churches in a Southern city a few months since. The preacher had, at 10 o’clock, p. m., finished his part of the service, having preached an excellent and very simple sermon, in which there was nothing calculated to produce the violent scenes which followed, and having come down from the pulpit, the brethren and sisters took the meeting under their own management.
Up to this time it had been as quiet and decorous as a deacons’ meeting in New England. A stentorian “son of thunder” now led the singing, and a general movement of the whole assembly at once began. Soon, nearly a hundred “seekers” were kneeling at the “mourners’ bench,” a row of seats extending across the church, in all stages of physical and spiritual abasement. Prayer and song followed each other in rapid and boisterous succession, while the congregation of believers marched and counter-marched, each one discharging at once his duty and a volley of counsel or encouragement to the mourners as he passed along the line.
Black was the ground and prevailing color. The lights were hardly sufficient to resolve this nebulous blackness into faces, black sun-bonnets of the sisters, and black-coated forms of the brethren moving to and fro through the room, while the singers sang, the exhorters exhorted, the mourners mourned in dismal howls, and the shouters shouted and leaped in ecstatic joy. Now and then, one would come to the surface of all this uproar, to tell what voices he had heard, what visions he had seen, what dreams he had dreamed, and receive the assurance from the minister: “I have no more doubt that he has got religion, than I have of my own existence,” which would be the signal for a general shout of “glory to God!” that made the preceding bedlam seem tame, and gave renewed impetus to the marchings and songs and prayers.
These meetings had been in nightly session for weeks, and continued for weeks afterward, prolonged often, as on this night, until 2 o’clock in the morning. As we left, about midnight, our driver, an intelligent negro, said: “You are going away too early. Things will get pretty warm after awhile. ’Ligion strikes a nigger first in the foot and then works up; it is just beginning to work, it will be lively after awhile;” of which there could not be much doubt.