Southern people than you found ten years ago. I rejoice in this
change of feeling in the South, and it is easy to understand it.
Time, the healer, has done his blessed work. Grace has overcome,
and the grave has buried much of bitter feeling on both sides. You
have learned your work better, and we have learned more perfectly
its value. A good deal of your work I have seen; I believe it is
good. I have looked into your school methods; they are yielding
happy results. I have considered “examination papers” from some of
your schools; they would have done credit to any school for any
race. I have listened to speeches and essays from colored youth at
your commencements; there was the evidence of sound culture and
true religion in them. When I heard them I “thanked God and took
courage.”
It is often asked, “Why don’t the South do more in this work of
educating and lifting up the negroes?” Sometimes the question has
been asked angrily—perhaps because ignorantly.
I believe the South can do more than it is doing—certainly more
than it has done. But I think it likely that we have done as much
as any other people in like circumstances would have done. History
does not record of any people such vast, rapid and radical changes
of opinion and sentiment on subjects that had been fiercely fought
over on hundreds of bloody fields, as has taken place in the South
during the last fifteen years on the questions that grow out of the
negro’s emancipation and enfranchisement. But the Southern States
have done more than most people suppose. There are nearly one
million negro children in our public schools in the South.
In speaking of what the South has done and has not done in the
work of educating the negroes, let it be remembered that the white
people of the South have not been on beds of roses since 1865. The
war and its consequences made the South poor beyond conception by
those who have not had our experience. It left the North rich. The
majority of our people have had a sharp struggle to live; most of
them have been unable to educate their own children.
Let me tell you of a man I talked with last summer. I went with
my family and a little party on what we might call a camp-fishing
expedition. As we approached the place where we proposed to spend
a few days in recreation, my attention was attracted by a white
woman pulling fodder in a little field near a cabin. That night her
husband came to our camp, offering such welcome as he could. We had
a long talk together. He had been a Confederate soldier, and he
had on his body the marks of seven bullet wounds. He never owned a
slave, he had fought for what he had been taught to believe were
the rights of the States. He is a laborer on the farm of the man
who owned the land where he lived. He gets $140 a year, cabin rent,
a few acres tended by his wife and little girls, and the privilege
of his winter wood. He said his employer is one of the kindest of
men, and does for him all he can do. The landlord himself has small
margins of profit. The poor fellow has five children, the eldest a
bright girl, aged fourteen. She looked dwarfed and older than her
years; she had been nurse and drudge for the little ones. These
children came to our camp by invitation, and the oldest promised to
come one afternoon and show my own children how to fish. I had my
heart set on her coming; I wanted my children to know more about
such people. She did not come at the time appointed, but that night
she came to tell us why. Her cotton dress was wet with the dew and
her little hands were fodder-stained. She said to me: “I am sorry
I could not come; mother and I had so much fodder to take up that
we have just got through.” This child and I had much talk together.
I asked her: “Daughter, can you read?” Her face brightened as she
said: “Yes, sir; a little.” “Can you write?” The brown eyes sought
the ground as she answered: “No, sir.” “If I will send you some
books, will you try to teach your little sisters to read?” The glad
look in her eyes I shall never forget, as she answered: “Yes, sir;
I will try.” We sent her a good supply and it made them all glad.
They are not beggars; the father would not take money for a fine
bunch of fish he sent, with his compliments, to my wife, and when
he found that we had left some money for little services by the
children he flushed and could hardly be persuaded to let them keep
it.
Some people call these “white trash.” I declare to you I never
heard a Southern white man or woman use the expression in speaking
of such persons.
Mr. President, there are tens of thousands of white people in the
South as poor as my friend of the fishing camp. If you can help
them, in Christ’s name do it.
As to our higher schools, some of our best colleges have died
since 1865; others are dying now. Such a death is a loss, not to
the South only, but to the whole country. Yours have grown rich.
I do not envy you; I rejoice in your strong and well-furnished
institutions. But you should be patient toward us, and, I am not
ashamed to say, you should help us as God gives you opportunity.
Men and brethren, it is time to have done with 1860–65. Said a
Brooklyn man to me last year who, unsolicited, had helped two
Southern schools: “I think my friends here approve what I have
done; but if any should ask, ‘Why did you not give this money to
your own people?’ my answer is: ‘They also are my people—we are one
people.’” On that platform we can become a Christian nation strong
enough to bless the world.
Northern money has done much to “develop the South” during the last
decade in pushing railroads and other great industrial enterprises.
It is all welcome, and ten times as much. But I do not question
that each $100 invested in Christian education in the South since
the war has done more to develop it in every best sense than each
$1,000 placed in railroads and factories. But enough on these lines
of thought.
I must say a word or two as to the relations of your work to
Africa. The first atlas I ever saw made a desert of sand cover
all the wonderful lands that Livingstone, Stanley, and others
have discovered, and they printed across the map of Africa
28,000,000, with an interrogation point to indicate a guess as to
the population. Now we are studying the maps of interior Africa,
and they tell us of great nations and a population that may reach
200,000,000! Can any man who believes in the Bible, or in God,
doubt for one moment that Providence is in the history of the
negroes in the United States? Can we doubt that these millions of
negroes, now committed to us as the wards of the Christian church,
must, some day, attempt and accomplish the evangelization of Africa?
I rejoice that your Association has its eye and heart upon Africa.
I saw two photographs in the chapel of Fisk University last May
that stirred my soul; they were the faces of two missionaries who
had gone from that great Christian school to Africa. One Sunday
evening I preached in the chapel. A youth from your Mendi Mission,
a native of Africa, getting ready to be a missionary, sang for
us in his home language a familiar Sunday-school song, “I Have
a Father in the Promised Land.” Some day they will be singing
Christian songs in every village of the Dark Continent. How the
thought of the Divine fatherhood and of the brotherhood of the
eternal Son has changed Europe and made America. Some day these
thoughts will change Africa. What we call civilization can’t do
it; the gospel of Jesus Christ can. The Christian negroes are
getting ready for their work, and you and others working in the
same fields, are helping them to get ready. The missionary fire
is beginning to burn in their hearts. When they go forth, bearing
the sacred symbol of our Lord’s love to men, every Christian
man and woman in our land should help them. That movement—and
it is coming—will, at no distant day give your colonization and
missionary societies all they can do. Was there ever a greater
need or a more hopeful field, a greater duty or a brighter promise
of success? Mr. President, you may be sure that from thousands of
Christian hearts all over the South the prayer goes up, “God bless
the work of the American Missionary Association, with all others
who are preaching the gospel to the poor.”
* * * * *
FROM ADDRESS OF GENERAL CLINTON B. FISK.
The American Missionary Association is one of those societies that
has long been near my heart, having a large place in it. From its
very beginning I watched its growth, but had no idea in the years
before that I should ever have such intimate relations with it.
Being in the South at the close of the war with the care of two or
three millions of colored people thrown on my hands, I naturally
looked about to see what was being done for schools and what for
Christian culture. I found the American Missionary Association on
the skirmish line. They were gathering up the broken fetters of
the slaves, selling them for old iron and putting the money into
spelling-books and Bibles, building school-houses and sending
self-sacrificing, earnest Christian men and women to the South to
teach these people; and I naturally fell very much in love with
them.
I got a letter a day or two since. It was written by the Mayor of
one of the chief cities of the South to myself. I picked this out
of a large bundle of correspondence of the same sort. He addresses
me and says: “You will doubtless be surprised at receiving a letter
from me. In 1865 I was Mayor of this city, which position I now
occupy. In that memorable year 1865, through your instrumentality
and by order of Major-General George H. Thomas, I was suspended
from office. But that is a matter of the past, and for one I favor
letting ‘bygones be bygones.’ The charge against me was using my
official position for the oppression of the colored people and
opposing their education. However true that might have been at
the time, certainly such a charge cannot be made against me now.
Immediately after the close of the war and upon the restoration of
civil law, I was chosen one of the School Commissioners of this
district, and gave active aid, amidst much opposition, in the
establishment of Public Schools. I have labored earnestly in the
cause ever since, and I am proud to inform you that my efforts have
in a measure been crowned with success. We have now a splendid
school system and a magnificent school building for the whites.
We wish now to do as much for the colored people. There is much
opposition in every locality in the city to the establishment
of a colored school in their midst. Yet, notwithstanding this
opposition, I have proffered to sell a lot of my own for the
purpose on very reasonable terms.”
Now, that is a great change to come about in seventeen years. So
I simply sat down and wrote him a letter which he could use as
“substance of doctrine.” I said: “My dear Mr. Mayor, go on to
perfection. Do the same thing for the colored people you do for the
white people, and blot ‘colored’ and ‘white’ out of your memory.
Make a school for the children. It is not easy to send them to the
same school; I know all about that.” The colored boy is perhaps
more opposed to associating with the white boy in the school than
the white boy is to associating with the colored boy. It takes a
long time to overcome those strong prejudices on the part of the
colored people.
Just after the establishment of Fisk school, which commenced in
such a halo of glory under the auspices of this Association, there
came into my headquarters in Nashville an old Irish woman, bringing
her two little boys with her, and she said, “Misther Gineral Fisk,
’ave you heny hobjection to my sinding these little chaps to your
nigger school?” I said, “Not at all, if the ‘niggers’ haven’t any
objection.” But it will take a long time before they will drift
into one school. I am glad that all of ours are open. How singular
it would look to write over the portals of all our schools in the
South, “White children admitted here!” Let us do all we can for the
education of both races. That particular class to which my friend
Haygood made such admirable reference, those poor white people of
the South, appeals to us as scarcely any other interest in the
South does to-day. Let us remember them. I am glad, sir [addressing
Dr. Haygood], that you are going to be in a position to help a
great many colored young men and women to become teachers.
Now, my friend Dr. Haygood is a wonderfully modest sort of a man.
They chose him only a few weeks ago to be a bishop in his church.
And they did a good thing. Nearly all that great conference of
Southern Methodists voted for this man to take the highest place
in their church, notwithstanding all his grand utterances, his
earnest words, on many a Northern platform. They indorsed him and
said, “Come up higher!” He took over night to think about it, and
wrote them a letter declining to take such place as that. He said,
“God has called me to be an educator, and an educator I will be.”
To a man who turns his back upon a bishopric of the church and then
accepts the Secretaryship of a fund to promote the education of the
colored people, we can all give the right hand of fellowship. Now,
let us all go out of this meeting with a new covenant of love and
service for the Master.
It has well been said that the world itself is a musical instrument
not yet fully strung; but when every coast shall be peopled by
the lovers of our Lord Jesus Christ; when every mountain barrier
shall be overcome; when every abyss shall be spanned, for the
uninterrupted progress of the King’s highway of holiness, and the
people of the earth shall flock together, as in the prophetic
vision, to the mountain of the Lord’s house; then this world shall
give its sound in harmony with the infinite intelligence, and
angels and men shall shout together, “Hallelujah, the Lord God
Omnipotent reigneth.” Between that glad day and us there are years
of toil and travail. But there shall come the triumph. Truth is
marching on, steadily—slowly, sometimes, through the centuries, but
ever marching on, as resistless as the tides, whose each succeeding
billow washes further up the sands. It may be
“ ... weary watching, wave on wave;
And yet the tide heaves onward.
We climb like corals, grave on grave,
But pave a path that’s sunward.
We’re beaten back in many a fray;
Yet newer strength we borrow;
And where the vanguard rests to-day,
The rear shall camp to-morrow.”
Let us go forth, with our faces to the stars, and do something each
day of our lives to bring the world nearer to Christ, who died for
it.
* * * * *
FROM ADDRESS OF REV. A. J. F. BEHRENDS, D.D.
There are a few themes so great, so charged with living importance,
that an earnest man never wearies of their study. Like the rays of
the sun, they are invested with perpetual freshness and force. Of
these themes, the very greatest is the conquest of the world to
Christ by the preaching of the Gospel and by the power of the Holy
Ghost. But foreign missionary societies, whose special aim it is to
carry the Gospel of Christ to the millions of heathenism, are not
the exclusive guardians of this great trust. They are the advance
guard of the army of conquest, clearing the way and widening
the field, but their very presence as the scouts and scattered
outposts of Christianity proclaims the presence of a greater army
of occupation, pressing close upon their leadership. Back of your
foreign work is that of home missions, the religious care of the
ignorant, vicious, and neglected within our own borders; back of
home missions is the manly culture of our professedly Christian
constituency, the care and compact handling of our local churches;
back of your local church life and work are those of your separate
homes—influences secret, subtle, but all-pervasive, for in the
Christian homes are the primary historic sources of all great
inspirations and achievements, both for personal character and for
social improvement. Far out on the world’s great battle-field,
separated from each other by many a league, are the pickets of
the army of the Lord; its great and growing supports are in the
Christian nations, the Christian churches, the Christian homes.
Reinforcements at any point of the long line must increase the
efficiency of the entire body. But the law of solid progress must
be from the home, as the training school of personal devotion,
through the church and the nation, to the broad world. I am afraid
that we have not fairly estimated the importance of the third
factor in the solution of the complicated problem of the world’s
Christianization. We are not lacking in an appreciation of the
value of domestic piety. We are not blind to the evangelistic
vocation of the church, though the energetic revival of this
conviction may be said to date from the close of the last century,
and it has as yet only partially leavened the great body of nominal
Christendom. But we are even farther from having mastered the
thought that nations are born of a divine purpose, and summoned to
missionary service.
God is marching on, not simply for the salvation of individual
souls, and their preparation for a future heaven, but for the moral
regeneration of nations, and the conversion of the world into a
kingdom of righteousness and love. In this great task nations
will yet be called to take an active part. Having ceased to be
obstructive, having passed beyond the line of moral indifference,
they are yet to prove themselves to be among the mightiest of
positive forces for the world’s regeneration. And I confess that
I have wholly misread the signs of the times if the Anglo-Saxon
nationalities are not summoned and destined to bear a conspicuous
part in the future of the world’s moral history. For you and
for me there can be no call of greater urgency than that this
youngest of the nations of the world, in which we are proud to
claim our citizenship, whose birth is the marvel of history, whose
development is the amazement of our time, whose guidance and
discipline seem as clearly providential as were those of ancient
Israel, shall be Christian, in order to the assimilation of all the
heterogeneous elements of our population, and the consequent use
of our united forces for the good of the race. No duty crowds us
more closely than that we prove ourselves worthy of our ancestry,
equal to our opportunities, building up on this new continent a
compact commonwealth, whose glory it shall be that its streams of
beneficence gladden all lands and enrich all peoples.
We cannot render the most effective Christian service to the world
until we ourselves have become thoroughly leavened with the spirit
of the Gospel, and any plan involving the Christianization of the
American people must provide for the solution of that great problem
with which this Association deals. You have not succeeded in
making the white man the Christian he ought to be until he and the
black man can clasp hands in the brotherhood of Christ. National
unity must remain incomplete until all antagonisms have vanished,
and the reconciliation is complete; and our moral influence on
the world cannot be what it may be and ought to be until we have
amicably and finally settled our domestic difficulties. American
patriotism and Christian philanthropy—these are the two great
considerations by which the work of the American Missionary
Association appeals to the prayerful and practical sympathies of
the Christian public.
* * * * *
RELATION OF THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION TO CIVILIZATION.
BY REV. F. L. KENYON.
There are two civilizations in this nineteenth century that are
striving for the mastery. They differ in their source; the one is
from heaven, the other from earth. They differ in their objects.
The one has for its object the elevation of the animal in man to
the supreme place. The other has for its object the elevation of
the intellectual and moral and spiritual in man to the dominant
place. They differ also in their supports and instrumentalities.
The superstructure of the one rests upon ignorance and vice.
The other rests upon and is built up by and through the school,
the church, and the home. Thus it will be seen that the higher
civilization has a triangular foundation, and when we remember
that the triangle represents the highest perfection, we may get
a hint at least that this must be the final civilization. The
school, where the mighty power of a true education dispels and
destroys the threatening illiteracy of the world. The church, where
the wonderful transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ
incarnates itself in true manhood and womanhood. The home, where
the love principle is dominant and all controlling.
The higher civilization, which is to be the ultimate civilization
for humanity, must include within its bounds, as constituent
factors, every portion of the human race. The defect of previous
civilizations was in their omitting one or more of these great and
necessary factors.
The first of these is the idea of God. And this, first, as a
personal God. This is necessary so as to make God accessible
to us. In the second place, the true idea of God must include
righteousness. He must be a righteous God. This involves the ideas
of justice and law, without which no civilization can be perfect.
Eliminate these qualities from civilization and in the place of
government will come anarchy, which always and naturally produces
destruction. In the third place, the true idea of God includes the
fact that he is a loving God. The Johannean conception on this line
is the ultimate of all conceptions, viz.: God is love. It is very
clear that the final civilization must have this idea of God in all
the breadth which I have simply outlined.
The second great idea is the “equality of man,” an equality not
of conditions but of rights. Equality before God’s law and love,
before human law and institutions. From this equality of man comes
the great doctrine of freedom for all. Slavery cannot exist in a
final civilization, because this final civilization is built up
in part on the idea of equality of man. From this equality of man
comes that other great social doctrine of the brotherhood of man.
Any civilization which ignores the equality of man, and these great
included ideas, freedom and brotherhood of man, cannot, in the
very nature of things, be the higher and the final civilization.
All former civilizations failed to recognize this great fact,
and this is one of the reasons why they became effete and passed
away. I believe God has chosen this land, and has raised up this
Association for the purpose of working out this problem.
The physical view is a low one, and really belongs to the lower
civilization. In comparison with the intellectual, and moral, and
spiritual, the physical sinks into insignificance.
The third great idea of the permanent civilization is “the true
idea of woman.” In the earlier civilizations woman was held as
inferior to man, because perhaps she could not endure the fatigues
of the chase or engage in wars, and such brutalizing pursuits.
The very signs of her superiority were read as evidences of her
inferiority. In some her position was hardly anything but that of a
slave or a toy. In that civilization which had the highest culture
of any of the old civilizations, an educated woman was classed in
the common thought of the people as an impure woman. Thank God
such a civilization as that was not the final one. In the final
civilization woman has her place alongside of man—co-equal and
co-ordinate.