The Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church recently opened a University for white students in Chattanooga, Tenn. Some colored students applied for admission. They were refused, but this was not the end. A colored minister, Rev. B. H. Johnson, pastor of one of the Methodist Episcopal Churches of Chattanooga, meeting Professor Caulkins of the university in a store, offered him his hand, but as it was a black hand the professor would not accept it. That would have been a recognition of “social equality.” The colored brother felt, and felt justly, that he had been insulted. When knowledge of the insult reached the Executive Committee of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, whose funds in large part built and support the university, steps were immediately taken to learn the exact facts in the case. They moved cautiously and wisely, that no wrong should be done and that no unjust judgment should be pronounced, and when they had made a thorough examination of the whole case, heard from both sides and from all sides, they voted that through the trustees of the university the professor be asked to resign at once. The Executive Committee has done right and should have the cordial backing of the entire Methodist Church. A mistake was made when the colored students were refused admission. No matter if they were hired by wicked white men to go and force the issue. All the more should an issue be met when forced by such people. Better that a millstone be hanged around the neck of the institution and that it be drowned in the midst of the sea than that it be made an occasion of offense to one of Christ’s little ones. Christ is in the world in the person of these little ones, and he who insults them insults Him, and he who insults Him insults all who love Him.
We take the following extracts from a letter received by Dr. Strieby from our good friend, Mr. Robert Arthington, of Leeds, England. As a little mirror, showing “ourselves as ithers see us,” it has special significance. We have often thought that the indifference of the Christian people of this country to the question of the salvation of the Indians was a sad spectacle for our brethren in other lands to look upon. Would that the churches might be made to feel this:
“Dear Dr. Strieby—I trust the ‘missionary laugh’ will, by the great mercy of God, ‘never come on the air by my side.’ Oh, that it might be so with all real Christians.
“In the November Missionary the Indians are mentioned. I am at this moment intensely desirous that the Indians of the South American continent should be reached by the Gospel message. This appears to me to be very difficult, sadly, sadly difficult. But the case in the North American continent seems to me to be altogether different. There, as it regards your part, is a government, and a people, which and who approve of all men’s reading the Christian Scriptures. Grand, glorious, if only they would be more practical. Why does not the Government at once solve the problem by sending persons well fitted for the purpose to teach each tribe to read? Then when they can read, the American Bible Society might introduce extensively to the whole of the Indian tribes in the United States the inestimably precious word of God.
“For goodness’ sake, if not for God’s sake, O, Americans, arise and do this necessary thing. There is no time to be lost. You have “heaped teachers” to yourselves, and you leave these poor men and women, as worthy as yourselves, except real Christians, to their darkness, devoid of the light, joy and infinite good beyond description of a personal intimate knowledge of the sacred Christian Scriptures.”