It is felt by many of our missionaries South that their work would be facilitated by a creed, prepared under direction of the National Council, suited to the average intelligence of the Freedmen who apply for admission to our new churches. To this end, therefore, the Central South Conference, at its recent meeting in Memphis, drew up an overture setting forth the reasons why such creed should be provided, and presented it to the Council at St. Louis. After preliminary statements, the overture adds:
“Our eight colleges and our two score normal and high schools, with their more than 8,000 students, and these, with their 150,000 pupils in primary schools, where they teach, are rapidly preparing the material out of which churches of our faith and polity will be developed.
“These children of nature, with their ready faith but rude culture, coming into the inheritance of this New Testament way of the churches, need the ‘sincere milk of the word’—a declaration of doctrine that shall not be in the nomenclature nor in the philosophy of a past age, but in the language and after the spirit of our improved New England theology. They need a form of sound words such as that when they have once learned it they will not need to be taught over again what it does not mean in spite of its phraseology.
“As a duty of brotherly love and of honest recompense we owe them the best things we have to give in the way of the freshest and ripest statement of the ideas and doctrines which have leavened the East and the West, and are now setting the South in foment.”
We trust the Committee appointed by the Council to formulate a statement of doctrine will meet the want.
MIXED SCHOOLS.
Opposition to mixed schools in the South is not confined to the white race. Intelligent colored people see that these mean no opportunity for them as teachers, at least for some years to come. Those who would be willing to wield the birchen rod over colored children are as yet largely in excess of those who would consent to have a colored teacher wield it over them.
Mixed schools are needed in all the sparsely settled neighborhoods, which includes, of course, all the country outside of the larger villages, as none other can be effectively maintained. None others can be harmonized with the democratic ideas upon which our institutions are based, and it is safe to say that anything which is favored by every public and private interest, and is opposed only by prejudice, will in the end gain the day. Victories are being won with such rapidity that we can afford to wait patiently for this one, which when gained will prove the Appomattox of this war.
Almost all that can be gained for the negro by legislation has been accomplished; to overcome prejudices which wrong and hinder him, will now depend largely upon himself. The gratifying fact, attested by prominent men all over the South, is that he is playing his part with commendable manliness, and is gaining what will never be long withheld from those who deserve it—the respect of his white neighbors.