As the masses become enlightened the demand for well educated men and women must increase. The “cornfield preacher” who depends upon the “Sperrit” will step down and out, and the seminary graduate, with “Bible religion” will take his place. Thoroughly trained and equipped colored lawyers and physicians will conquer the prejudice that now exists among their own people against them, and will conquer it the more easily if they are better prepared for work than their white competitors. All this need not come about in one generation. We can transmit the work, with our faith and our hopes, as a legacy to our children.
But, however divergent the views of different people may be upon these questions, there certainly is no immediate occasion for a howl against the higher education of the Negro, for there is not enough of it to feed the flames of a respectable controversy. Only a fraction of the so-called universities south of Washington open to colored students have a collegiate course of study, and the entire number of graduates from such a course can be expressed by two ciphers and a small significant figure. What are a hundred or two of college graduates among six or seven millions of people? The shades of Hahnemann himself might echo the question.
T. N. CHASE, in New York Independent.
THINGS TO BE REMEMBERED—NO 3.
The Danger! Whatever of sentiment or of poetry may have appealed to the imagination in the work of foreign missions, has been pretty much dispelled by contact with foreign races at our own doors. We find that they are intensely human, and that the task of saving them is intensely real. The enchantment which comes of distance is simple commonplace and matter of fact when the object is near at hand. Hence the danger, now to be apprehended, is that of disgust, or of indifference. Indeed we are not sure that the feeling has not taken on a stronger form, and might not now be called hatred, or scorn. If it be not one of these, what name shall we give to the feeling towards the Chinese on the Pacific; towards the Indian, driven from his hunting grounds and chased to the death by our soldiery; towards the Negro, whipped and shot by midnight raiders, unprotected by the government he helped to save, and left in his ignorance, his poverty and his animalism by God’s people, on whom he is cast for enlightenment and elevation?
How shall we see the vastness and urgency of the work for these races with such repugnances and disgusts meeting us on the very threshold? Moral ideas are of slow growth, and churches and communities turn to new objects of sympathy and labor reluctantly and sluggishly. While we hesitate and wait, the probability is that things will take shape and pass beyond our control; or, at best, that we shall but partially secure results which are now fully within our reach. At this moment the churches of America hold the key to the conquest of this world for Jesus Christ! Will they hold it a generation hence? Not unless they take advantage of their position to win these races to God before they are absorbed into the world, and are thus lost as a regenerating force with which to elevate the unsaved millions of mankind. Suppose, in our supineness, we see the Chinese driven back into heathenism; the Indian turned over to the soldiery for extermination, or a deeper barbarism; the Negro wrested from his rights, and unlifted from his passions, weaknesses and enthralments of mental and spiritual darkness: is there any reason to believe that the opportunity will ever return when it will be possible for us so completely to control, guide and mould them as we now can?
We are in jeopardy, therefore, of making the most fearful mistake in Christian ethics and in Christian practice. If these races pass from our hands uneducated and unsaved, the world will charge us with the commission of a crime against humanity itself. Now we can throw upon these fields, if we will, men enough to take possession of them in the name of Christ. Now, we can raise up out of these races the laborers to carry our learning, our art, our faith, to all who speak the same tongue, and to all in whose veins bounds the same blood. To this work Providence manifestly calls us—to do it is to walk with God, we verily believe. But whether the churches see it, or wish to see it; whether they are more ready to walk in their own light than in the light which shines from heaven, I cannot answer. I can only say the sun shines, and we have the eyes to see. If we miss the Divine plan and method it will not be for lack of light, but the mistake will be none the less sad, and the misfortune to the world none the less direful, because the ages may not undo it. From such a peril may the good Lord save his people, and open their eyes that they may see!