Various

“ Indeed, giving seemed to be, to her, a supreme luxury. The whole amount which she contributed to the Association, for its work of physical relief and Christian education, was not far from $4,000. And the school which she has left in her daughter’s name, the support of which is mainly from her bequest, will go on perpetuating her influence for the years and generations to come. Many, in the great day, will rise up and call her blessed. Are there not other dear saints of God, friends of the poor and the needy, who will imitate her spirit and her example? ”

“ If it should be said that these are a few picked men, whose cases do not indicate the intellectual capacity of the race, I reply it is only a few picked men of any race who are capable of high intellectual attainments, and that, because the rarest of talents is that ambition for high attainments which will carry one through toils and sacrifices to the far-away prize. I know no better test of intellectual capacity than the ardent desire for knowledge, and that desire the freedmen have in a remarkable degree. ”

“ Those that come do care, and care so much that they brave bitter reproaches in coming, from those whom they leave behind.
Then, besides the limited education which they are able to get in our schools, there is an unconscious education, which they must be, all the while, unconsciously receiving, as they breathe the air of a free and Christian land. Their views are broadened; the old crusted conservatism is broken; and they can speak out, with a force and an authority which, it seems to me, no Chinese who had never left his native district could possibly use. ”

“ We ought to have, then, at least one American missionary—not necessarily a great man, but a man of earnest piety and business capacity, and sound common sense—a man who would give to his mission the atmosphere, which, I am sure, our brethren recognize in the mission here, of Christian kindliness and brotherly love—not that of a condescending benevolence, but that of a hearty Christian brotherhood. ”

“ If Africa is to be evangelized, as I believe it will be, it must be done through the children of the summer and sunny clime, educated and Christianized in the South. You in America can’t see this as plainly as one who mingles with this people, and has all chances to investigate in regard to this matter. If I could speak to every institution in the South, I would ask each one of them to be true to God and this common cause of humanity, which I would to God would seize all Christendom, so that the many who have for ages sat in darkness, might be brought into the light. ”

“ If one member suffers, all the body is afflicted.
Do you say, “It is not our concern”? But it is every one’s concern. Is the ignorance and vice of your own town or city not your concern? You have to pay for it dearly. Your taxes for police, for courts and for prisons are only a small part of what it levies on you. It, too, pervades the air and mingles its deadly poison with it, and you breathe it in. You are proof against it; it only imperceptibly lessens the tone of your health and vigor. ”

“ But it is the part of every wise man to see the danger, and to do what he can to avert it. The Federal Government cannot do what is needful. The States will not do it. Christian charity, with far-sighted wisdom and self-denying philanthropy, can alone be relied on for the work required—the training of these races. It is an illustration of the truth, that all self-interests are met, not by a narrowly planned seeking of them, but by that broader conformity to the great law of love which, loving God first, has love for each one in his place, and seeks the highest good of all. ”

“ In their Christian education is our only surety for the future. Education for their intelligence, and Christianity for their morals, and as a foundation on which both intelligence and virtue may rest secure.
The same danger would be swelled by the numbers of the Indians and the Chinese if they were citizens. As it is, the Indian can only become so by forswearing all the relations which are most sacred to him, and which mean to him family and religion. And the Chinaman, it has just been decided, cannot vote, at least in California, because he is neither white enough nor black enough. ”

“ But in one sense the freedman is something more than a man; he is an American citizen; and he is more than an ordinary citizen; he is a voter. He has been entrusted by the nation with the highly important duty of giving expression to the municipal, the State, and the national will in legislative, judicial and executive acts. He is an integral part of the sovereignty of this nation. We may or may not think it a national mistake to have made him so important a functionary. But the negro is here. ”

“ No man can go beyond me in appreciation of the sublime movement represented by the American Home Missionary Society. But in this other department I find that most of the same arguments are to be used. Do we call for the Christianizing of the people of our country? Here are millions of them at the South in need of that process. Do we plead for the saving of our country from the spiritual despotism of Rome? The Jesuits, using hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly, are scheming to Romanize the congenial material found in the ex-slaves. ”

“ They have done only their duty in making the costly experiments. And now the apostolic spirit of our Congregational churches seems to say to the white people of the South, “Seeing ye count yourselves unworthy of these good things, lo, we turn to the freedmen.”
If, in some distant part of the globe, a people had just been discovered, numbering 5,000,000 souls, speaking our own language, hungering for our ideas, our civilization and our Christianity, it would thrill the Christian world to go in at once and possess that land for Christ. That thing we may do in our own country, under our own flag. ”

“ The negro, it must be confessed, has lost the place he once held as an attractive object of philanthropy. Invested with the legal rights of a man, and thus by necessity thrust forward into comparison and competition with other men, he not only exhibits his inferiority on a conspicuous stage, but manifests some traits which make him repulsive and odious. The negro cause has thus sunk from an impassioned crusade to a common-place charity. ”

“ The truth thus expressed is a chief source of our enthusiasm in our Chinese mission work. “China for Christ” is our motto. I wish to lay before the readers of the Missionary some of the facts in view of which we believe that we do reach China, though we are working here 10,000 miles away.
There is nothing improbable in the idea. Indeed, it scarcely could be otherwise. Hardly a steamer sails for China that does not carry one or more of our pupils back to his native land. Most of these are heathen still; but they are heathen with their eyes at least half-opened. ”

“ Here are 1,000,000 black voters who cannot read. Then by their side, only lower down in the social scale, are 1,100,000 white voters who also cannot read the ballots they are to cast; and the conviction is now gaining ground that the most effectual, if not the only way, to lift up that class is to put under them the leverage of the educated negro. ”

“ It is easy to see that a Chinese, returning to his native land from California, would be likely to have special advantages for doing missionary work. In the first place, by a process of natural selection, they are picked men. It is not the dullards or the drones that undertake to cross the Pacific, and make their way to fortune in a land so strange to them as this. And by the same process it is, again, among those who come, the picked men that enter our schools. The great mass do not care enough about learning to follow up each hard day’s work with two hours of evening study. ”

“ That the colored people are progressing, and that rapidly, too, in an educational point of view, is a fact beyond any doubt, we will venture to say, in the minds of those who have given the subject even a casual investigation. We are impressed with the idea that our people in general have not yet given to this system of free education that reflection to which it is so richly entitled. But we are also impressed with its growing favor, and the importance that will be attached to the institution at no distant day. ”

“ And some of us who now, with our years, could not pass muster to go and cope with a foreign language, have yet not a few years left in which we may do an essentially foreign missionary work in our own language, in that tongue, which, more than any other spoken by man, is freighted with the associations and the spirit of the Gospel of the Crucified One. ”

“ I hear incidentally that the parents of another of our brethren have been visiting all the shrines near them, and, with wailings and prayers, have placed their votive offerings where they thought they would do good, hoping that thus he would be won back from Christian heresy to their ancestral orthodoxy. What passes here in this regard is not unknown at the old Chinese homesteads; and what is known is felt.
But we ought not to be content with these spontaneous and sporadic operations. We do not rise to the height of our great opportunity while we leave this thing to work itself. ”

“ Now, as the policy of the party unfriendly in a greater or less degree to the freedman, is based on the assumption of his inferiority, so the policy of his friends and benefactors—and he has friends at the South as well as at the North—must be based on the counter assertion of his manhood. It is not necessary—it is somewhat dogmatic, it is at least premature—to assert his equality in all respects with the white man. That is an ethnological question which it may take ages to settle, and when settled it will be mainly a matter of scientific interest. But that the negro is a man ”

“ They need not be afraid of overdoing it; for if, by any good fortune of ours and good-will of theirs, we should, after paying all our current claims, have a small balance, it will go at once to lessen this still burdensome debt.
Remember, too, that the work is ever increasing on our hands, save as we have to keep it down. Millions of these freedmen must in the next ten years, if ever, be brought under the influence of sound learning and true religion. This generation must not pass away till it be possible for every colored child to read the word of God. ”

“ The power of Christ, who touched the leper with His life-giving hand, is still with us. But we must go in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. We cannot bar the negro out; he has the right to sit in our midst, even among the senators of the land; and if he be still ignorant, and immoral, and superstitious, he will spread corruption around him. The only way to prevent him from contaminating us is to let virtue go forth from us to convert and cleanse him. ”

“ He would be a daring prophet who, in face of these examples, and of the instances of moral greatness actually produced by this race, should assert that something noble in character, some unique type of spiritual excellence, some splendid order of manhood, may not yet emerge from this now degraded and unpromising race. What the nature, the moral capacity of the American negro is, future ages will determine ”

“ The Chinaman and the Indian, too, make claims upon us which their cruel treatment by our fellow-citizens only serves to emphasize. Africa, also, as a culmination of our work, is calling for new laborers of her own sons to come and bring back to those sitting in darkness the light which is the life of men. But, in order to this, our teachers and missionaries must be numbered by hundreds and thousands, where now they are numbered by scores and hundreds. ”

“ With the closing of the year, therefore, we invite the intelligent and liberal men of the land to consider once more the work of this Association, in its bearing upon this nation, and in its bearing upon the nations, to which these races belong. We do not see how we can vindicate ourselves as righteous men, as men [260] who fear God and love our neighbors, if we neglect this work brought to our doors and laid upon us by sanctions as solemn and pressing as were ever imposed on men. ”

“ One party in the South, not including the best elements of Southern society, but for the present the dominant one, has already matured and avowed its solution of the problem. “The negro,” they say, “belongs to a race constitutionally and forever inferior—a race foreordained to serve in some capacity the superior white race. You have declared by law that he shall not be a chattel; we are determined that he shall not be more than a serf. Rule over us he shall not; rule with us he shall not; if he must vote, he shall vote as we bid him ”

“ The claim of the three despised races in the United States is enforced by a motive of self-interest, by the relation of their leavening to the future prosperity and even perpetuity of our nation. Especially is this true of the freedmen, as large enough in their numbers to have weight, and endowed with privileges which make their numbers powerful for good or evil. ”