John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an ExperimentBrummitt, Dan B. (Dan Brearley)
Religion
John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an Experiment
Brummitt, Dan B. (Dan Brearley)
Christian fiction; Methodists -- Fiction
"I mean," Pastor Drury replied, "that everybody is like that. If we had
given the Negro no education at all, we could probably have kept him
contented for a good many years with just being 'free.' If we had given
no Negro anything but a common-school chance, the race would have been
pretty slow to develop discontent. But Hightower went to Yale, and Du
Bois went to Harvard and Germany, and Pickens went to Yale, and so on.
Thousands of colored men and women have been graduated from colleges of
liberal arts. And so they are not satisfied with conditions which would
have been heavenly bliss to their grandfathers and grandmothers."
"I know I'm stupid," said J.W., a trifle ruefully, "but I've always
supposed that education was good for everybody. Now you seem to say that
education makes people discontented."
"Of course it does," said Mr. Drury, "that's the reason it is good for
them. Would you be content to call a one-room shack home, and live as
the plantation hand lives? If you would, the world's profit out of you,
and your own profit out of yourself, wouldn't be much. Real education
does exactly mean discontent. And the people who are discontented may be
uncomfortable to live with, if we think they ought to be docile, but
they get us forward."
"Maybe you're right," J.W. conceded, "and the church is not to be
blamed. Still, if our work for the black man has made him troublesome,
and given him ideas bigger than he can hope to realize, how does that
fit in with our Christianity? Shouldn't the church be a peacemaker,
instead of a trouble-maker?"
"Now, John Wesley, Jr.," the other said, in mock protest, "that sermon
of mine on 'Not Peace, but a Sword' must have been wasted on you. Our
Lord most certainly came to make peace, and he spoke a great blessing on
peacemakers. But he was himself the world's greatest disturber. Peace
while there is injustice, or ignorance, or any sort of wickedness, has
nothing to do with Christ's intentions. I know that the old-time
slave-traders of the North, and the more persistent slave-buyers of the
South, were always asking for that sort of peace. But they couldn't have
it. Nobody ever can have it, so long as Jesus has a single follower in
the world."
"Well, what has all this to do," asked J.W., "with our church's special
work for the colored people?"
"Ah, yes," the pastor answered, "that's the very thing you must find out
before you make that address of welcome."
By this time J.W. had gathered up a pile of books, pamphlets, reports,
and papers--enough, he thought, to serve as the raw material of a Ph.D.
thesis, and he said to Mr. Drury, "Would you mind if I took this home?
I'll bring it all back, and it's not likely I'll damage it much.".
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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