The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 10, October, 1885

by Various

DELIVERED IN THE UNION AND MT. VERNON CHURCHES, BOSTON, IN BEHALF OF THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION.

BY REV. E. S. ATWOOD, D. D.

I am here, by official request, to make some statements in the interest of the American Missionary Association, and under special injunction to be as little tedious as possible. There are two difficulties in the way. The modern Athenian, like his elder brother of Scriptural fame, delights in nothing so much as "either to tell or to hear some new thing," and this congregation is, or ought to be, already sufficiently familiar with the work which solicits a hearing. It is not an obscure enterprise thrust into the background by its unimportance, or hiding itself because of some questioning as to whether it has a right to be, and neither is it a project that has not yet passed the experimental stage, the conclusion as to its worth or worthlessness to be reached further on. An organization rooted in such prolific soil, and cultured with such husbandry, and so full of vital sap, that in less than forty years its growths branch so widely that millions refresh themselves in their shade, whose vigor is so forth-putting that it has flowered into colleges and universities and institutes whose names and fame are known wherever English speech has gone; that organization has passed out of and beyond the realm of criticism as to its value, and needs no runners to advertise it to the people among whom it is planted. It would be an insult to the Christian intelligence of this congregation to assume that the work required commendation to them, and equally a vain thing to attempt to tell the assembled Athenians any new thing about it.

There is another difficulty. Centuries ago, a wise man referring to the conditions of his time, wrote: "Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." If he had lived long enough, or late enough; certainly if he had lived in our day, he would have changed or enlarged his epigram and made it read, "Of the contriving of a multitude of philanthropic schemes there is no end; and the constant solicitations in their interest is a weariness of the flesh, and of the patience and purse as well." It is our lot to live in the noonday and the tropic of professedly beneficent and charitable enterprises. Many well-meaning men and women spend the larger part of their time in voyages of exploration, hoping to discover some new continent of want, needing settlement and cultivation. The Columbus of philanthropy is not an exceptional or an obscure personage in modern society. The consequence is, our offered opportunities are more than our ability or our disposition to make use of them. Our accredited benevolences are in growing excess of our benevolence. The further consequence is, that intelligent Christian expenditure is forced to adopt some principle of selection among enterprises that clamor for a hearing and a helping. An open hand is not all that is needed; it would be emptied before it had passed half round the circle of importunate applicants. The vigor and amount of the demands made upon the Christian Church necessitate a balancing and weighing of the comparative importance of claims that are so persistently and so enthusiastically pressed, with the acknowledgment and answer of those which are evidently broad and just and the refusal of those which are petty and professional. And the final consequence is, that any cause, however good, is at a disadvantage, especially if it has outworn its novelty. The temper of the age is not judicial, and in the hurry of our current life it is easier to give or withhold the dollarthan it is to stop and consider whether the dollar ought to be given or withheld. So it comes about that enterprises which ought to be their own sufficient commendation and appeal, are forced to enter the lists with a host of competitors, and compelled to spend time and strength which might be better employed, in justifying their right to be and live.

It is not wholly a misfortune for me that you stand in little need of information. If it were a thing essential, the limitations of the occasion would require that it be given either in the form of incidents or statistics, or both. There would be no poverty of material. Perhaps no other of the Christian crusades of the century could furnish so many occurrences which are a mixture of the tragic, the dramatic and the pathetic. The condition of the people among whom the work has been done, the methods of the work and the character of the workers have made the history of the enterprise anything but a common-place story. A panoramic view of it would show us the dingy hovels where men herded like beasts, forms and depths of degradation that shame a Christian land, scenes of outrage and terror, examples of wonderful courage and self-sacrifice, and show us also sudden and almost incredible transformations, the swift transition from mere animalism to manhood and womanhood; the rise among the most unlikely surroundings of well-equipped industrial and educational institutions; the kindled or quickened fever for knowledge in a race that had hardly an ambition higher than physical or emotional gratification, and the first swelling of a tide of regenerating influences, at whose bright flood an untold and immeasurable mass of want and woe and wickedness is to be buried forever out of sight. But incidents, while significant, are not conclusive, for, obliged to omit many, the advocate is likely to select for use those which have the most flame and color and so give the impression of over-statement, and prejudice the cause in whose interest he pleads. Of statistics also there is no lack, statistics that set forth millions of souls crying for light and knowledge, millions of dollars spent in their interest, and other millions needing to be spent. But an array of figures makes little impression upon anybody but professional accountants. Numerals are for the most part bloodless and powerless to arouse emotion and carry conviction, and the table of statistics that lumbers the page of the Annual Report, to any but the accustomed eye, is like old chaos, "without form and void, and darkness on the face of the deep," and so while incidents and items and sum totals are at our disposal in abundance, it is a matter of congratulation that we need to make only scant use of them to-day.

It certainly is not a misfortune that this Association is forced to measure itself with other benevolent enterprises in making its appeal for sympathy and support. It can afford to do so, for it risks nothing by the contrast. Without disparagement to any other form of Christian endeavor, it is not exaggeration to say that considering the work accomplished, or the largeness and importance of the work remaining to be done, and which it proposes to do, this organization is easily peer of the foremost. It is a Zion that will bear and courts inspection, not only such as may be made by a leisurely "walk round about it," but exact and minute scrutiny in which "judgment is laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet." In some near future, when the history of the continent for the last half of this century comes to be written, it will be seen that the American Missionary Association was one of the most influential factors in the solution of great national problems, in removing sectional differences, in obliterating race distinctions, in harmonizing conflicting policies, and, better and more marvelous than all else, in building up out of African and Indian, and Mongolian and Caucasian a kingdom of God in whose unity all diversities blend and all separating lines are effaced, and righteousness is the sole and sufficient foundation, and sanctified manhood and womanhood the walls of strength and splendor.

Do you realize, good friends, the contrast between America at the date of the founding of this society and the America of this year of grace? The interval of time is short, but we have been making history at a prodigious rate, a rate so rapid that in the rush of it the advance of to-day dims the recollection of the position of yesterday. Forty years ago this nominally free government was a tyranny. It posed before the world in the white fleece of liberty, but the covering was too scant to hide the ravening wolf underneath. The world held no such infernal riot of iniquity as American slavery. High treason against God and man, it bred unnumbered crimes. Generations were born in the darkness of captivity, moaned and struggled awhile for light, and died. In its greed for gain the nation coined the bodies and souls of men into money. Many a millionaire built his mansion on outrage and wrong. The timbers of his house were the bones of innocent victims. For every adorning some brother man had groaned and smarted under the lash. And yet how few dared or cared to protest against this hell upon earth. The Government said, "Hands off!" The churches were afraid to meddle with the matter or talked piously about "the patriarchal institution." Great publishing societies emasculated the tracts which they issued for the purpose of saving the souls of men, and tore out of them all reference to the iniquity which was destroying both soul and body. Foremost organizations that clamored for laborers and money to preach the glad tidings of deliverance to the swarthy dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, could not see as far as the banks of the Mississippi. Only one Christian organization in the broad land—this Association, dared to say, Slavery is an accursed thing. Riddance from it was only a dim hope, the remotest of possibilities. And all that less than forty years ago. To-day no foot of a slave presses the soil of the continent; to-day ancient irresponsible ownership of the souls and bodies of men is a nightmare of the past, and the haughtiness of unquestioned authority is changing to conciliation and growing respect for human rights; to-day an emancipated race has not only cast off the fetters from its limbs but is seeking and finding the larger liberty of completed manhood and womanhood. Wonderful and blessed change; you search history in vain to find its parallel.

In our review of these forty years it is natural that we should inquire as to what forces have been efficient in producing such large results, and quite as natural also that we should credit overweight to influences that have been dramatic and measurable, and overlook or depreciate subtler agencies that make little stir, and work below the surface. We say in a large way, that civil war was the procuring cause of the change that has been wrought, but as the war was not carried on for that purpose, it is more exact to say that incidentally and unintentionally it made the change possible. We assert more specifically that the Emancipation Proclamation was the one supreme factor in inaugurating the new order of things, and no smallest leaf should be plucked from the wreath of honor which crowns the heroic Lincoln. The scratch of the President's pen in that quiet room, writing the new and greater Magna Charta, will be heard for ever. History, like a vast whispering gallery, will reduplicate the sound and pass it on to the ages to come. It was heard at once the breadth of the continent and across the sea. It outran the tramp of armies, and distanced the roar of cannon. It went down through the valleys of Virginia, through the pine barrens and rice swamps of the Carolinas. It rang along the everglades of Florida; it reached to the cane brakes and cotton fields of Louisiana; the Alleghanies echoed it to the Sierras; the Father of Waters caught up the sound, and rolled it like sweetest music to theGulf, and in the hearing of it, millions woke to freedom. And yet the calm judicial estimate must take into account that the Proclamation was primarily, if not solely, a war expedient, not righteousness for righteousness' sake; and must take into account also that it effected nothing beyond a change in legal relations, voiding of power certain State statutes that legitimatized slavery. The mere shift of status under the law from bondage to freedom, provided the opportunity, but it did not and could not supply the force adequate to effect those industrial and intellectual and moral transformations which are the most conspicuous evidences of progress. The stalwart element which had been slowly developed in public sentiment had far more efficiency than the official edict, but the influence of public sentiment was atmospheric and vague, rather than direct and intelligent.

A few years ago it would have been considered absurd; even to-day it may seem to some an exaggeration to attribute a large part and the better part of the changes which have been wrought, to the work of the American Missionary Association; but as the historic judgment clears with time, that fact is becoming more and more apparent. Long before the President's Proclamation had been dreamed of as a possibility, while statesmen and members of the Cabinet were busy with their fine jugglery of explanation, endeavoring to persuade the rebellious South that in fighting them they intended no harm to their favorite institution; while army officers, with an eye single to their constitutional obligations, were returning fugitive slaves to their masters in arms, while Northern churches shivered if they heard the word emancipation spoken in their pulpits—even then this Association was busy at Hampton with missionaries and teachers among the hundreds gathered there, whom General Butler had set free cutting the Gordian knot of difficulty with a legal phrase, flinging over them the protection of the flag as "contraband of war." It was a strange, exciting, pathetic scene, that at Hampton; who that saw it will ever forget it? That sleepy village, drowsing in the heat, in full sight of the picket lines of the Southern army; the sunrise and the sunset announced by cannon answering cannon from the opposing hosts. That dingy brick building, swarming in all its rooms and stairways and window seats with a motley crowd of all ages and both sexes, mostly in rags, holding in their hands tattered books of various titles and dates, the very roadsides lined with children and gray-haired men and women puzzling over the alphabet, some of them with no better helps than bark or chips on which the letters were rudely scrawled; the delicate cultured women from Northern homes moving about from group to group, full of enthusiasm and ready with helpful directions; the noisy shout of reciting voices every now and then interrupted by the blast of the bugle, or the hoof beats of a troop of cavalry sweeping past—that, and there was the primary school of the new order, the experimental beginning, which since then has been manifolded in every State once cursed with slavery, and to the benign influences of those efforts is chiefly due the advance which has been made in intelligence, and healthy ambition and domestic comfort, and religious growth, and manhood and womanhood, among the servile and despised race on this continent. The story of the hardships and self-sacrifice, and heroism of this Society, is a story that can never be told. Later on, similar enterprises and efforts were undertaken, but with all due credit to their importance, they were all copied after "the pattern shown them in the mount." In this world of short memories, we cannot too often review the record which constitutes the claim of this Association to signal affection and honor.

The fact of splendid accomplishment in the past is freely and generally admitted, but within recent years the question has been frequently raised whether the Association has not fulfilled its mission, and whether the logic of events does not justify the cessation of its special work? That is a fair question and has a right to an intelligent and definite answer. It might be a sufficient reply to say that the collateral work of the Society among the other alien races on the continent is of sufficient importance to demand the continuance of the organization and constitute a claim for generous support, but we may leave that out of account and consider that line of effort in which it is best known and with which it will always be specially identified in the common thought, and narrow the inquiry down to the question whether the condition and prospects of the Freedmen of the South are such that the discontinuance of this work could be safely allowed or result in anything but lamentable disaster.