Various

“ Christianity must conquer it as it did slavery—for the world. It can do this; its love can subdue the pride of the Caucasian, and its light and power uplift the negro, the Chinaman and the Indian. To the practical preaching of this love and light must the American Missionary Association devote its concentrated efforts, till all the people of this land shall come into the fellowship of the Gospel and into the glorious liberty of the children of God. ”

“ My friends, of all mistakes all history proves that is the most fatal, for when you pursue that policy which seems so easy at first you find that you have at last divided a nation into two strata—the upper a thin stratum of pride and arrogance sustained by terrorism, the lower a thick stratum of class ignorance which may at any moment be inflamed by fanaticism or exploded by unrest. ”

“ Generations were tramping on, each in the track of the others, to hopeless doom. They did not know God’s redeeming love. It is this spectacle of humanity rushing on to a hopeless eternity, that puts that solemn and intense tone into the Saviour’s voice as He talks and prays. They were to be men like Christ. They were to go into all the world, bearing the love of God. ”

“ Danger comes as it came in England two centuries ago and less when the church sided with a besotted monarchy and aristocracy. Danger comes as it came not so many years ago in our own country when the church was led, in some places at least, to make apologies for human slavery; but when she arrays herself at the head of great movements like this, and insists on doing works of self-sacrifice, of mercy, of justice, of right, tell me not of any fears of infidelity. ”

“ To the Union and to the Constitution we are indebted for our present prosperity, power and prestige, and the still more inspiring future which lies before us. The Union and the Constitution, to which we owe all that we are, and have been, and shall be, contained and recognized slavery. All who took part in forming the Union or in framing the Constitution, all who maintained them down to the war which brought emancipation, are in some degree and in some sense responsible for slavery. ”

“ You find more sympathy and more of the spirit of co-operation among 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. ”

“ The scene which some of us witnessed this morning, the giving over of an immense sum to the endowment of a college in this city, is but the token of a vast outpouring of munificence for advanced education such as this world never saw before. There is to be—mark the prophecy, fellow-citizens—great as has been the outpouring of wealth heretofore, and the statistics show in ten years, gifts to the amount of $60,000,000, we are told; there is to be in this time of revived prosperity an outpouring of wealth far greater, to which all this which we have seen is as nothing. ”

“ The people do not appreciate them nor ask for them. Education they beseech us for. The lower common-school education we can supply only here and there. We thank God, and we recognize it as a blessed evidence of the growth of healthy public sentiment, that every year more and more attention is paid in the States of the South to free public education, and that in this the colored people are having their part, and that the expense of supporting their schools is more and more cheerfully borne. But the States which are willing to educate children are not all ready as yet to educate their teachers. ”

“ May I be permitted to survey it from a much humbler elevation—from that of a simple instructor of young men, whose duty for years has been to show to young men, and, indeed, I am happy now to say, young women also—to show to them the indications in human history of the great hand of God leading humanity on through all that blooms and decays, through all that struggles and suffers, through all that falters or stands fast, to the great goal which Divine Providence has appointed. ”

“ Religion, depending under God, upon individual conscience and sense of duty, unaided by government, wins its way by the voluntary contributions and efforts of Christian men and women. Business, an agency of vast and unmeasured power in promoting the peaceful progress of mankind, results from a deeply seated and universal principle of human nature—self interest—and will most efficiently do its work when government wisely lets it alone. To complete reconstruction and regeneration in the South, the only force now left to the government is popular education. ”

“ In the electoral colleges which choose the President, in both Houses of Congress, in all the departments of the national government, ignorance at the South is as efficient for evil—as mischievous and dangerous—as if it was in New England or New York, or here in the Western Reserve. It was settled by the war for the Union beyond recall that the United States constitute one people and have one national life, one interest and one destiny. ”

“ Ah! my friends, you can make one despot see that his interest lies in the interest of his country. You can bring home to a single despot a sense of shame, a sense of honor, a sense of responsibility. You can never bring that home to a mob. It was said that the old Bourbon despotism of France was a despotism tempered by epigrams; but what wit, what wisdom shall temper a mob of uneducated millions, extending over thousands and thousands of square miles of territory. ”

“ The same principles and necessities hold in the departments of law and medicine. Is there any reason, in the nature of the case, why a young colored man does not need to have as good an education to fit him for these professions as a young white man does? In all enlightened countries, institutions of higher education are regarded as indispensible; they accomplish a work in the interests of society, the Church and the State, which cannot be left out with safety to any race or any country. But there are weighty reasons why the colored youth of the South need the advantages of a higher education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
The fourth great idea necessary to a permanent and final civilization, is the true idea of childhood—its worth and place in the elevating forces of humanity. That civilization which holds in cheap esteem the life of a child, is a low and vanishing one. ”

“ Where shall the young men of the South get these advantages except in schools for higher education? But there is one more consideration which I wish to urge. These six millions are the representatives of a race 200,000,000 strong and of a continent. No equal body of Africans was ever before placed in a condition so favorable for the development of whatever possibilities there are in the race. Under slavery they have been disciplined to toil and have learned the lessons of work; they have come to like the ways of civilized life and have acquired a desire and taste for its comforts and luxuries. ”

“ In almost all of the late slave-holding States, however, especially in those States in which the number of colored people is large, the efforts made since their reconstruction have conclusively shown that to establish and support an efficient system of free education without aid from the national government, in the existing condition of the South, is simply impossible. The situation of the South is so manifestly exceptional that it is needless to dwell upon it. Slavery and free schools would not dwell together. Slavery did not, could not, tolerate universal education. ”

“ To-day each vote of those individuals counts as much in the ballot-box as the vote of the most distinguished and intelligent citizen in the land. Would we preserve, therefore, and hand down to our children those institutions which were entrusted to our charge by our fathers, and which have been shedding on us blessings to which all other nations are perfect strangers, then we must educate and Christianize these millions of new-born citizens. I honor this organization especially to-day because it has done more than all other instrumentalities, perhaps, combined to bring about this grand result. ”

“ Hence, to gain votes, one party will sacrifice national policy and Christian principle, and the other will do the same rather than lose votes. Thus China must be affronted, and Christianity dishonored before the world. It is not, however, the American people as such who have done this thing—thank God for that! Whenever the national conscience has spoken at all on the subject, it has spoken against it. This anti-Chinese legislation is the adoption, in America, of the old barbaric cast-off policy of exclusion, which China herself has pursued for centuries toward other nations. ”

“ I think that when charity and the government are linked together for Indian work, the former should erect the buildings and maintain the teachers, the latter supply the wants of the body. United States beef and flour and shoes are as good as any body’s, but government employés, as our civil service stands, are not the men to elevate the Indian. The telling factor in all work for men is the person who does it. Unless that shall be supplied from the pure fountains of our Christian civilization it will not, as a rule, be supplied at all. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Our problem with these millions of negroes in our midst can be happily solved—not by force of any sort from without the States where they live; no more can it be solved by repression within those States. It can be worked out only on the basis of the Ten Commandments and of the Sermon on the Mount. On this platform we can work out any problem whatsoever—whether personal, social, political, national or ethnical—that Providence brings before us. On any lower or narrower platform we will fail, and always fail. We have learned—you of the North and we of the South—many things in the last ten years. ”

“ Whatever changes the future may bring, for the good brave work of the past, we and all lovers of Africa will praise God. Never was its mission work in the far-away land more promiseful, and we can but believe that days of large ingathering and of immediate advance are before it, so that past sacrifices and toils will not have been in vain, and the speedier successes of coming days will justify a missionary policy of the boldest and broadest character. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among other valuable discoveries, we have learned that the people of neither section are either all good or bad. As to this race question, we of the South have learned, and we are learning, that we can’t manage our problem by any mere repressive system; you have learned, and are learning, that it can’t be solved by any sort of force from without, whether force of law, force of troops, or force of denunciation. Such knowledge is precious; alas! that it cost us so much. ”

“ There is nobody after all quite so conceited, I think you will find that the world over, as the man who is ignorant. He sees that educated men make certain mistakes. He makes no such. Therefore, he at last arrives at the point, he very often does, and especially when his ignorance is shared by a great population, that somehow he is superior to those who are educated. Then comes the greatest of all dangers. Then comes the danger of despotism, the despotism of an unenlightened mob of millions; and of all despotisms, fellow citizens, this, all history proves, is the very worst. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Neither white nor colored people at the South had any knowledge or experience which would help them in establishing popular education. The colored people were eager to learn. To them education was a badge of freedom. But encumbered with we know not how many centuries of barbarism behind them, and certainly with two or three centuries of bondage, they were utterly helpless to do anything which presupposes knowledge and experience in relation to the complex methods and organizations of social life in highly civilized communities. ”

“ The influence and power of the minister among the colored people are exceedingly great. No people stand more in need of an intelligent, wise and educated ministry, and among no people can such a ministry do such a noble work for the proper training of the young men who are to constitute the religious teachers and guides of these six millions of colored American citizens just delivered from bondage, and now making trial before the world of freedom and citizenship. I urge the necessity of institutions for higher education. ”

“ Christian or heathen lands, is the most aggressive and formative influence that is now shaping the destiny of the human race. When you send out from Nashville, from Berea, from Atlanta and New Orleans young men and women who are both educated and religious, you send into the very masses of these untaught millions those who must teach what they have learned both from books and from Christ. ”