without study in the light of the providence of God. It is not
presumption to seek in the course of events the divine thought;
it is rather presumption to assume that events occur without
a divine purpose. “They that love to trace a divine hand will
always have a divine hand to trace.” It is true that men have
committed unspeakable folly in attempting to force the thoughts
of the great God into the channels of their intellectual
pettiness. Philosophies of history written with a provincial
scholarship, under the eye of an unsound philosophy or the
extravagancies of religious enthusiasm, must from the nature of
the case be unsound; so a too particular and minute description
of the ways of Providence in the interest of a preconceived
theory of life, or of some specific reform or “cause,” leads to
fanaticism and exposure to contempt. There are sins committed
only by the good, if the solecism may be tolerated, and among
them is a profane assumption of knowledge in regard to the
purposes of God. But, on the other hand, it is greater folly
to assume that God has left the world out of His thought and
providential care, and that the course of the world is not made
by the efficiency of His word. It is absurd, also, to assume that
great providential courses are undiscoverable by the intelligence
of man. “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather:
for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather
to-day: for the sky is red and lowering. O, ye hypocrites, ye
can discern the face of the sky; but ye cannot discern the
signs of the times.” We may make ourselves quite ridiculous
in attempting to literalize the tails, wings, breastplates,
teeth, hair, faces, crowns, shapes of the horse-like locusts
of John’s apocalypse; but it is quite within the reach of our
faculties to find the key to his book and to unfold its prophetic
instructions and consolations. The use of the tabernacle as the
dwelling-place of Jehovah’s glory it is possible to find by a
simple exercise of the ken of philosophic interpretation; but
the symbolic import of the coverings of fine twined linen and
woven goats’ hair and rams’ skins dyed red, we must leave to the
dogmatism of unlettered exegesis. It is not our fault, then,
that we are looking too intently for the ways of God through the
history of the world, but rather that we do not look aright.
* * * * If it be true that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom
of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will;” that “He changeth
the times and the seasons; He removeth kings and setteth up
kings;” that “promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from
the west, nor from the south; but God is the Judge; He putteth
down one and setteth up another;”—if it be true that the Lord
“that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad
the earth” by Himself also, “frustrateth the tokens of the liars,
and maketh diviners mad;” that He “sayeth of Cyrus, He is My
shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure,” surnaming him, and
girding him, though he knew him not;—if, in short, the Lord is
God, and His providence extends over nature, over nations, over
individuals, over free acts, and over sinful acts,—surely we
shall not gather the significance of any great matter in the
world’s progress without such a study of the facts, and such an
interpretation of them as shall disclose the main trend of the
divine purposes.
I think I hazard little in saying that the foothold of the Negro
in the United States is providentially significant in relation to
a great onward movement for the evangelization of the world. And
in this statement I have more in view than the Christianizing of
the dark continent. In relation to this, it may signify much; but
in relation to the whole kingdom of Christ, it signifies more.
(1.) The truthfulness of this statement holds our conviction
when we view the facts in relation to the great end of all
history; and this is no transcendental or visionary gaze. It is
the perpetual characteristic of human folly to see events only
in their immediate relations; whereas, the present moment can
interpret nearly nothing. Philosophy concerns itself with remote
causes and ends. “Providence,” says Guizot, “hurries not Himself
to display to-day the consequence of the principle He yesterday
announced. He will draw it out in the lapse of ages. Even
according to our reasoning, logic is none the less sure because
it is slow.” God’s thought is from eternity; but it is only
because God has purposed that a science of history is possible,
or the end of history discoverable. Its philosophy is often based
on the assumption of the unity of the race; for the unity of
the race it is better to say, the unity of the divine purpose.
Said Augustine of old: “God cannot have left the course of human
affairs, the growth and decay of nations, their victories and
defeats, unregulated by the laws of His providence.” And as the
latest deliverance of philosophy we have from Professor Flint,
“The ultimate and greatest triumph of historical philosophy
will really be neither more nor less than the full proof of
Providence, the discovery by the process of scientific method of
the divine plan, which unites and harmonizes the apparent chaos
of human actions contained in history into a cosmos.” Suppose we
assume, as the end of history, the establishment of a kingdom of
righteousness, or the perfection of the members of the race for
an endless society; that the increase of wealth, the extending
of knowledge, the refinements of culture, have ultimate value
only in relation to such a kingdom or society; that the method
of procedure toward the attainment of this end involves the
encouragements and chastisements, the rewards and disciplines,
the pulling down amid building up, the slaying and making
alive, which belong to the law of discipleship for character.
Suppose, further, that we find ourselves living in a period
when the Christian world is peculiarly stirred with missionary
enthusiasm, and laboring to bring the whole world to membership
in the everlasting kingdom; and yet, again, that we have brought
to the midst of the most Christian nation millions of the most
barbarous people, and put in such relation to that nation that
the questions concerning them necessarily involve religious and
missionary aspects—assuming all this, and taking into view
the profound agitations, the vast numbers of beings involved,
the enormous commercial interests that have been staked, the
slow uprooting of inveterate race prejudices, the transforming
of societies, the hot wrath of God in sweeping commonwealths
with the besom of civil war, it becomes easily credible that
the Negro in the United States signifies a great providential
on moving the conversion of the world. To find in this Negro
problem nothing but the lust which brought him to our shores, or
the instrumentality of the wealth which he has been the means
of accumulating, or the object of a sentimental pietism which
would colonize him, or a nuisance for progressive abatement, is
to attempt to solve the puzzle of a bewildering maze without the
exercise of wisdom, or to have exit from a labyrinth without a
clew. But, with the right end in view, all the mysteries of it
are easily solved.
It has been recently said, by an able English writer, that the
great plague of 1348-9 “is a totally new departure in English
history, incomparably more important in its permanent effects
than the conquest of William, the civil war of the fifteenth
century, the civil war and the revolution of the seventeenth. It
has left abiding results on the present condition of England. To
it we owe the peculiar position of the English aristocracy and
the equally peculiar position of the peasant. It created the poor
law and the trades’ union. It was the origin of Lollardism, which
was itself the precursor of the Reformation. Fortunately, it
occurred after representative institutions had become a necessary
part of English political life, or it would have destroyed
them.” Under Providence, Lollardism and the Reformation were the
final cause of pestilence, and it might have counted far more
if the end had been more exactly understood at the time of the
desolations.
(2.) But that the Negro in the United States means, under
Providence, a forward movement in the work of evangelizing the
world may be inferred from _the moral and Christian element he
has forced into American politics_. The final cause of a special
Providence may not be apprehended by the large part of those
who are the witnesses of its procedure; but its drift may be
noted from the things they are constrained, under God, to think
and say and do about it. A nation may be girded to a task, even
without recognition of the hand or purpose of Him who girds; but
that nation will be saying and doing very significant things.
Now, the great enthusiasms of our political life for the century
following the achieving of our independence have resulted in
one way or another from the presence of the Negro. And this is
the same as to say that the Negro has been the unwitting cause
of the moral and religious elements in politics; for there are
no great enthusiasms which have not a basis in either morals
or religion. The courts, Cabinet, Congress, legislatures, the
pulpit, the platform, the hearth, have furnished the arena for
debate, harangue and purpose, which have enlarged our views
of the brotherhood of man, kindled an unexampled enthusiasm
for humanity, and deepened those moral convictions which are
the basis of sound character. But for all these superior
achievements in virtue, the black man has been the occasion,
and must have our thanks. Selfish men, irreligious men, profane
men, under the guidance of an unseen hand, have become the stout
advocates of the Christian principles of brotherhood and of duty
to carry a Gospel to every Creature. * * * *
This advocacy of righteousness toward man, and of the rights of
man as man, has become so much a matter of course with us that we
are likely to overlook its vast significance. Even on our Puritan
soil it was not from the beginning so. The “austere morality and
democratic spirit of the Puritans” even did not keep them clear
of sin of human bondage. “Their experience of Indian ferocity and
treachery, acting on their theologic convictions, led them early
and readily to the belief that these savages, and, by logical
inference, all savages, were the children of the devil, to be
subjugated, if not extirpated, as the Philistine inhabitants of
Canaan had been by the Israelites under Joshua. Indian slavery,
sometimes forbidden by law, but usually tolerated, if not
entirely approved, by public opinion, was among the early usages
of New England; and from this to negro slavery—the slavery of
any variety of pagan barbarians—was an easy transition.” But at
the time of the Declaration of Independence public sentiment had
already greatly changed.
In the original draft of this document there was a specific
indictment of George III., which was prophetic of the “furnace
blast” beneath which the nation for a hundred subsequent years
was to “wait the pangs of transformation” into a man-loving,
mission-promoting people. Mr. Jefferson, in the draft of the
immortal Declaration, reflected the public thought and feeling
so closely that he has been accused by many of plagiarism. We
seem thus early to find the pre-intimations of a nation in
its public acts ranging itself on the side of a vast scheme
of Providence. The indictment referred to is as follows:
“Determined to keep an open market where men should be bought
and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable
commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no
fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people
to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which
he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also
obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against
the _liberties_ with crimes which he urges them to commit against
the lives of another.” Mr. Jefferson, in his “Works,” says:
“The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants
of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and
Georgia;” and he adds, “our Northern brethren also, I believe,
felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their
people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty
considerable carriers of them to others.” It is as impossible,
at present, as it is needless to proceed from this initial point
through discussions for the formation of platforms and parties,
and from these to specific laws, and from laws to the violation
of them, and civil war. If a just God has been ruling among the
affairs of the nation, it is infidelity to doubt that He has been
guiding this vast and tumultuous slavery conflict to some great
end for the enlargement of His kingdom in the earth. The moral
and religious aspects of American political questions for the
last three generations have a Divine significance unsuspected by
the actors in our national drama.
(3.) But of greater significance still is the fact that the
coming of the Negro incorporates a missionary element in our
national life. In the large advance movement now making for the
evangelizing of the race, it is evident that the colored people
are not to go out through a Red Sea into a wilderness, to become
a peculiar people to whom shall be committed the oracles of
God, and from whom shall arise one like the Messiah. No person
is now so superficial as not to see that, whether we will or
not, the Negro has come to stay. He is becoming even more and
more an element in the sum of those experiences which we call
our national life. He has not come to fit himself to become an
uplifter; he is rather here to do that work which shall fit and
cause this new and great nation to become in a peculiar way the
uplifter of peoples. It is the resistance of this idea which
has been the fundamental reason of all our national turbulence.
Providence meant one thing; the selfishness of man another. God
has given unmistakably the “sign of the prophet Jonas;” man
sees nothing but the redness of a lowering sky. Can we fail
to be impressed with the fact that a being whose not remote
ancestors were, if not savage, at least barbarian, has now come
into the possession of every element of American civilization?
The negro has our language, dress, civil customs, religion,
domestic and social life, and in the main, our vices. He is a
voter, law-maker, executive, educator, freeholder, priest, and
head of a Christian household. He has reached high proficiency
in many branches of learning, and is skilled in all the arts
with which we are acquainted. In a vast number of cases, through
crime be it granted, he is bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh. He is less a ward than citizen, and hardly more pupil than
instructor. His absolute severance from fatherland,—his history,
his tenacity of life and of race characteristics, yet, while
retaining race characteristics, his greedy absorption of the best
elements of civilization,—his poverty and his possibilities,
awakening our sympathies and challenging our benevolent
enterprise,—his tenacious hold upon our soil, our customs and
our hearts,—these and many things beside indicate that he has
come to stimulate, to lift us to a higher form of evangelical
enterprise than that exhibited hitherto by any people. We are not
merely to make missionaries of the black people; but we through
them are to be ourselves made missionaries. It seems to be the
will of God that the nation should set itself to the work of
Christianizing the world.
(4.) To add yet another evidence that the signs of the times
are to be interpreted in the line of advancing evangelization,
I would mention the genius of the Negro for piety. Colonel
Preston, who has written intelligently on the subject of the
religious education of the Negro, says that he has adopted
all the vices of the white race except suicide, duelling and
religious skepticism. His voice is not more flexible and pure
than, his faith is confiding and strong. And this is not a small
matter. The world doubtless has great need of brains, but it
has vaster need of character. Of the stones God can raise up
children to Abraham; but it requires no miracle to raise up
children to Plato. There is no fear for the brains of any race
that will accept Christianity. To virtue, knowledge will surely
be added. It is foolish for us Anglo-Saxons to assume that we
have found the best expression of religion. It would be like
the claim of the Pharisee, who assumed that the end of the law
was fulfilled in himself. The worldliness of the church is at
the present time more conspicuous than the churchliness of the
world. A person who lives simply according to the doctrine of
Christ is so singular as to get special notice in the church news
of the religious press. So long as it can be truthfully said
that “it is only by a special and rare experience that young
men in the church settle the question of their life-work by the
simple test of usefulness and duty; and if a young man is found
pondering the question in this view, it is regarded as a case of
unusual piety, and he is directed at once to the ministry; and
if an older man begins to inquire how he can do the most good
with his property, it is accepted as evidence of special growth
in grace, a ripening for heaven”—so long, I say, as this can be
truthfully said, it is perfectly within bounds to affirm that
the current expression of the religion of Christ is nothing less
than a shame. It is rational to hope that the Negro may help us
to a fitter expression. I admit his crudities, extravagancies and
immoralities, but he has a genius for religion nevertheless. It
has been conjectured that there was a period when the ancestors
of the Athenians were to be in no otherwise distinguished from
their barbarian neighbors than by some finer taste in the
decoration of their arms, and something of a loftier spirit in
the songs which told of the exploits of their warriors. But these
rude attempts were prophetic of their æsthetic triumphs; they had
a genius for the beautiful.
It seems to me that Africa is the fitting continent in whose
mysterious solitudes the greatest explorer of this generation
should die in service and on his knees. He symbolized the
possibilities of the Negritto race for the expression of the
life of the Son of God, and mutely prophesied of the ages to
come. This race, with its greed for civilization and its natural
capabilities for religion, is in vital connection with the
foremost nation of these latter times. Does not this signify the
incoming of a more thorough righteousness, a loftier faith, and a
great advance movement for Christianizing the world?
Whether I have correctly formulated the course of Providence
or not, it is clear that the Negro is in the United States for
a purpose, and that purpose is no petty one. He has been the
occasion of the most exhaustive discussion of the subject of the
rights of man, of the formation of a great national party, and
of the largest civil war of modern times. He is now the most
considerable element in national politics. If Providence is a
scheme of means and ends, in which particular events are chosen
to further great ends, and if a just God is presiding over the
destiny of our nation, it is simply illogical to conclude that
the foothold of the Negro on the continent is not a thing of vast
significance. And if this be true, every question concerning him
has a new importance. If Pharaoh had understood that the Hebrew
bondsmen were a chosen generation, he would have carried on the
brick business in a different way. This whole Negro question
needs study in a new light, “lest haply we be found even to
fight against God.” Governor St. John, of Kansas, in answer to
a question from the South, how to stop the Negro exodus, has
recently said:
“Rent the Negro land and sell him supplies at fair prices. Stop
bulldozing him. Respect the sanctity of his family. Make him feel
that he is just as safe in his person and family, and in all
civil and political rights, as he can be in Kansas or any other
Northern Slate. Then he will not want to come North. Unless you
do this, the Red Sea will open before him and he will pass over
dry-shod; and you of the South, attempting to stop him, will be
overwhelmed, as was Pharaoh and his hosts.”
These are sharp words, and their rebuke is doubtless needed. It
is probably not important to stop the Negro exodus. For both
the Negro and the white race it is needful that large numbers
be removed from the scenes of their old servitude. The Negro
will rise faster and will more readily be the connecting and
reconciling link between two antagonistic forms of civilization.
This is but a stage in those wilderness wanderings by which he
is being fitted to perform his part in the drama of the world’s
renewing. In Kansas and everywhere he must have chance to develop
according to what is in him, and there need be no fear that he
will not act his part well.
This theme suggests many practical matters concerning the
importance and the methods of home evangelization. These cannot
be discussed in this paper; but I wish to raise again the
question asked by large numbers of our most sagacious men, viz.:
whether, in view of what seem to be vast providential designs
concerning the inhabitants of this continent, our home work
is not suffering comparative neglect? This is my deliberate
conviction. For the colored man, at least, we are doing but a
fraction of what it would be profitable to do. He is very far as
yet from entering into his rest, and for long years yet we are to
share with him “the pangs of transformation.”
“Before the joy of peace must come
The pains of purifying.
God give us grace,
Each in his place,
To bear his lot,
And murmuring not,
Endure, and wait, and labor.”
* * * * *
CHURCH WORK IN THE SOUTH.
BY REV. C. L. WOODWORTH.
The subject before us is “Church Work in the South.” This
work, though it seems to be fundamental to every missionary
organization, has yet been sharply challenged both as to its
propriety and expediency. Put thus on the defensive, it may be
well to recur to first principles, in order to satisfy ourselves
that the church is the _unit idea_ in all Christian labor. And
to unfold that idea in the conversion of men, and to make it
potential in society, through the preaching of the Gospel and
the sanctified lives of believers, is the end of the family,
of the school, and of all the forces which go to civilize and
uplift communities. That work which does not aim at the church
as its end, however refining and ennobling it may be in itself,
fails, utterly and infinitely, to realize the ideal of the New
Testament, or the ideals of history as seen in the progress of
Christ’s kingdom in the earth. When, therefore, a society like
the one whose anniversary we are now celebrating presents itself
for our suffrage and our support, it becomes our privilege, and
perhaps our duty, to question its mission and its right to live.
Should it appear that secular education is the object mainly
aimed at, then we would say it has just as much right to live as
there is reason for the work it is doing. But if, on the other
hand, it should appear that the regeneration of men, and the
founding of pure and intelligent churches, is its central thought
and aim, and that all other instruments in its hands are but
tributary to this, then we would say it has just as much right to
live as there is force and authority in the last command of our
ascended Lord. This will become evident if we examine:
(1.) The _Commission_ under which a society like this does its
work. The warrant for a missionary society, as for all missionary
effort, is found in the words of our Saviour to his disciples,
just before he went up on high: “All power is given unto me in
heaven and on earth; go ye, therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever
I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you alway, even unto
the end of the world.” Analyze these words, as repeated by
three evangelists, and, we submit, they leave upon the mind the
single, distinct impression that the work he commissioned his
disciples to do was to teach or to preach Christ; was to call
to repentance, and show how sin could be atoned and remitted
through the blood of the Crucified. That message is given to
this society—the most important ever committed to men; and
to proclaim it freely and fully, all its resources of men and
of money, of learning and of influence, should be put under
contribution. This is the work than which nothing greater nor
grander can be conceived.
(2.) This will further appear if we study the _model_ of
missionary work, which is presented to us in apostolic labor and
example. If the _words_ of our Saviour define the work to be
done, the example of the Apostles defines and illustrates the
_manner_ in which it should be done. And beginning at Jerusalem,
we find that the Apostles and the company of the believers gave
themselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. When
the endowment of power had come, they began to speak in other
tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. They were now divinely
empowered and set apart for their work. The Holy Ghost is now
their inspirer and guide, and when the multitude came running
together to see what this strange thing could mean, Peter, with
the eleven, stood up and delivered that searching discourse which
went with convincing and converting power to the hearts of 3,000
men.