From consideration of our previous lesson, we should make the deduction
that Christianity is incompatible with savage life. The Christian can no
longer be a savage, notwithstanding the habits of civilization may be
yet too weakly established to guaranty against lapses to former habits.
The habits of the savage must be changed so as to approximate civilized
life before Christianity can be successfully taught him. Hence one error
into which the missionary and the teacher of the Negro sometimes fall.
They confine their labours to instructions concerning the more abstruse
doctrines of Christianity; but the savage has no capability to
comprehend them: his mind has never been prepared for their reception.
The child can never comprehend the laws of astronomy till he has first
learned mathematics. The savage must first be made to comprehend the
necessity that individual wants must be supplied by individual labour,
and all the consequent attendants of such a state of things, before the
possibility can exist that he will comprehend the higher moral duties.
Because, without that, he remains passive under such teachings; and in
such case, the more familiar such lessons are made to him the less they
affect him. Instances are not wanting where such a state of facts exists
in circles of society where it would seem they should be the least
expected! and from whence the great truth is deducible, that mental and
physical idleness is a most deadly poison to good morals and
intellectual improvement, and the conduct of such men is always found
searching the way back to a deteriorated condition.
The animal propensities require to be forced into habits contributive to
the relations and duties of civilized and Christian life. The mind must
be made to comprehend what our relative duties are, both experimentally
and habitually, and also the impossibility of their being dispensed
with, before it will be able to perceive the laws which bind our action
to their performance. And it may be here remarked, that a perception of
these laws sufficiently strong to influence the conduct of a man will at
least place him in the position of Agrippa before Paul. The history of
man does not point to an instance where an individual has regenerated
himself from the depth of human degradation, except under the pupilage
and control of a superior wisdom.
Upon this state of facts was founded the necessity of a Saviour for the
children of men.
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