The church, therefore, should be emphasized at all points and at all times. It should command for its preachers the best and the ablest men. Both races need this. Only this can destroy the conditions which made it possible that white blood should now be running in the veins of three-fourths of the colored people. The Southern pulpit has failed to sufficiently enforce either good morals or practical righteousness. For lack of this, slavery was possible, and dueling and violence covered the land with blood. The remedy for this is a new and right system of moral teaching. This, we repeat, is the peculiar function of the pulpit. That this may be made possible, churches pure and intelligent must be established all over the South. It should be done now, because we are laying the foundations and determining the character of the coming generations. If the first crop of leaders are morally weak, they will enfeeble their successors, and perhaps vitiate the seed and the crop for all time to come.
We need to put into the African blood the iron of the Puritan faith and purpose, so that they may do for the African continent what our fathers did for America. The first men sent to that dark land should hold the ideas and principles out of which may be evolved churches, schools, homes and Christian states, from the mouths of the Nile and the Congo clear down to the golden Cape. If we cannot inoculate the colored race with those moral sensibilities and forces which will render them charitable, humane and just, then we look to them in vain for help in the salvation of our own land, as well as in the founding of Christian institutions and Christian states for the continent of Africa.
HEALING OF THE NATION’S WOUND.
It was a gaping, festering sore that was left by the fratricidal war. A speedy healing was not to be expected. It took nearly a century for the mother country and America to get over their grievance. There is much of encouragement that this later feud will be more speedily composed. There have been some special influences at work. The occurrence of the Centennial tended to divert attention from the old trouble, to arouse the spirit of patriotism and to abate ill-will. The prevalence of an epidemic at the South for two seasons gave the North an opportunity to express moral and material sympathy, which did much to awaken reciprocal good-will on the part of the people of that section.
When President Garfield was shot, the people of the South rose up with as much indignation and sympathy as those of the North. It was a benediction for the Nation to be lifted by such a ground-swell of emotion, and that the impulse of Christian patriotism. We feel confident that President Garfield, restored to soundness, will by this dreadful dispensation be all the more disposed to temper his administration with fairness and righteousness, such as will carry on the process of healing in the body politic.
The Peabody fund and its judicious disbursement at the South is doing its work of palliating feeling. Miss Willard’s tour of temperance lecturing through the South was a hopeful revelation of harmonious sentiment. Dr. Mayo’s eminently successful educational visitation was in the same line.
Then it is also clearly manifest that the scheme of the North for aiding the South in the education of the colored people is coming to be recognized there-away as one of pure philanthropy and patriotism. The testimony of Dr. Haygood in his book, “Our Brother in Black,” to this effect, is but the expression of not a little of latent sentiment. He pronounces “immortal honor” upon these teachers. He says that without such service the South would be uninhabitable by this time. Our teachers and preachers, dwelling there from year to year, and returning North betimes, become interpreters of the mutual and improving good feeling. They command respect at the South, they retain affectionate regard at the North, and so become a bond of union between the two sections. More and more this process will go on with happiest results.
The National Cotton Exposition to be held this fall at Atlanta, upon a gigantic scale, will be another mighty loom for weaving the fabric of national good-will.