CASTE PREJUDICE.
REV. W. H. WARD, D.D.—ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND.
Christianity in India has utterly succumbed to caste once. The missionaries of the last century, after beginning nobly, yielded and allowed caste to rule in the Christian church. “I have carefully avoided all coercive measures,” said Schwarz, in 1787. Bishop Heber allowed caste. Not till 1833 did the English Church missionaries decide, through the voice of the noble Bishop Wilson, in a peremptory pastorate letter of July 5, 1833, that no mercy should be shown to the accursed thing. “The distinctions of caste,” said he, “must be abandoned decidedly, immediately, finally. Birth condemns no class of men, from generation to generation, to inevitable contempt, debasement and servitude. The enforcement of this order broke up churches. A Sudra would sooner give up his Christianity than take the communion with a pariah. The war has been long, and is not yet fully concluded. An American Lutheran missionary lately felicitated himself that now the two castes have been prevailed upon to take the Lord’s Supper together. In a London missionary station some ten years ago a few pariahs were converted, whereupon the Shanars, at their own cost, built a chapel for their low caste brethren, lest they should have to worship with them. A few years ago a missionary led several low caste Christians into a chapel door, whereupon the high caste occupants hastily scrambled out of the window. * * *
Do I say that caste is broken down? Not quite. Even yet it lingers: and where it lingers chiefest is, it shames me to say, in education and Christianity. To the infinite disgrace of the church, the chief denominations of the South divide on the caste line. The white Christians and churches are put purposely into one denomination, and the colored into another. We have white Methodists and black Methodists; white Baptist associations and black Baptist associations. What denomination is there but the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian and the Congregational, in which whites and blacks can stand equally before God? In the South both whites and blacks accept this condition, for the most part, as right. It does not occur to them to protest against it. Even the negroes accept the humiliation to which they have become accustomed. No voice of protest is raised. Whites and blacks alike seem satisfied that God’s church united above should be divided below. Why lingers Jerubbaal amid the wheat-threshings of Manasseh? Why comes no Gideon forth, inspired with the zeal of the Lord, to cut down this horrible idol of his father’s house? * * * *
When the colored race were slaves, the color marked the social distinction of service. That is all past now. They may be servants still. Then the social distinction still holds. We cannot break up these right social distinctions. We cannot prevent the existence of classes in society. We choose those of our own sort, with whom we are intimate. But in the name of God, in the name of the hopes and rights of the poor, in the memory of the accursed experience of the ages of serfdom, in the East and in the West, we demand that neither law nor recognized custom shall impose on social conditions the Satanic burdens, the hopeless, crushing weight of impassable caste. It is accursed in the hall of legislation, accursed at the ballot-box, accursed in the court-room, accursed in the church-pews, accursed at the Lord’s table—most accursed when it sets an impassable gulf between high and low, white and black in the school-room.
A QUESTION OF CASTE.
BY REV. HORACE BUMSTEAD, D.D.
It should be remembered that this prejudice in the South is more one of caste than it is one of race. It is in the former relation of master and slave that the distinction between the races has its strongest roots. The personal antipathy on the ground of feature and color—the race prejudice pure and simple—is not so great in the South as at the North, where fewer colored people are met with. I have heard a Congregational pastor, in one of the most enlightened communities of Massachusetts, declare that he did not think he could endure the presence of a colored cook in his kitchen. One of the best Northern teachers in the South confesses that when he first met with colored people in the horse-cars of Washington he would sit as far from them as possible. But Southern men and women who were nursed at the breasts of slave mammies in infancy, have played familiarly with colored children in childhood, and have been served all their lives by the darker-skinned race in a multitude of ways and in the closest personal proximity, can feel little, if any, of this personal antipathy. It is the distinction between a serving class and a ruling class which chiefly causes the separation here. But as the colored people acquire intelligence and property, and the white people learn more of the dignity of labor, this distinction will cease to coincide with the color line.