“How about the colored brethren?” queried Mr. Strong.
“The colored brethren must be left out,” was the answer, “not for social, but for ecclesiastical reasons. One of the first duties of this league of ours, if it ever gets into operation, will be the suppression of these colored churches. When the colored people abandon their own organizations, and join the other churches, they may come in as representatives from them. We will have no color-line in the Christianity for which this club stands. I’ll go as far as any other man in fraternizing with colored men; but with colored churches, never. The sectarianism whose only basis is the color of the skin is the meanest kind of sectarianism.”
The Century.
IT DECIDES NOTHING.
BY REV. D. M. WILSON.
We are told that the colored prefer to be by themselves. Were this true, it would decide nothing as to the proper method of church work. The several castes of India would have preferred to remain separate even after nominally embracing Christianity; but this could not be. Among Christians there is but one fold and one Shepherd. The very object of religion is to make men one in Christ and one in Christian fellowship. If this be not done, nothing is done to any good purpose. Our separate schools and separate churches have during the last eighteen years done more to separate and alienate the two races than two hundred and forty years of slavery had done. In the times of slavery both races were in the same churches. Why not now? One thing is too plain for an honest man to deny, and that is the fact that, had the whites treated the colored during these last years with the same courtesy that they extend to a Roman Catholic Irishman and his children, we would never have heard of a colored school or that ecclesiastical monstrosity, a colored church. The results are disastrous to both parties. The colored are left to themselves and the blind lead the blind. Nine-tenths of their preachers have no more fitness for preaching than they have for lecturing upon fluxions. Were one of their churches of average capacity for senseless noise and uproar within earshot of my residence, I would regard it a number one nuisance. But it is not their fault that they are by themselves. A brute only moderately domesticated soon understands when he is not welcome, and acts accordingly. When slavery had disappeared, the colored saw but too plainly that they were not welcome any longer in their old churches, and they went forth into a darkness deeper than they had before know.
The Independent.
MORE AT HOME BY THEMSELVES.
REV. JAS. H. FAIRCHILD, D.D.