Service by the Educated Negro: Address of Roscoe Conkling Bruce of Tuskegee Institute at the Commencement Exercises of the M Street High School Metropolitan A. M. E. Church Washington, D.C., June 16, 1903Bruce, Roscoe Conkling
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Service by the Educated Negro: Address of Roscoe Conkling Bruce of Tuskegee Institute at the Commencement Exercises of the M Street High School Metropolitan A. M. E. Church Washington, D.C., June 16, 1903
Bruce, Roscoe Conkling
African Americans; African Americans -- Education
Now, the practical usefulness of the preacher lies largely in the fact
that he supplies the sanctions for right doing,--the thunderings and
the lightnings and the noise of the trumpet, the mountain smoking,
and in all but above all Jehovah. To show the man in the street or in
the cotton field that for him lying and stealing are bad because, if
everybody were a liar and a thief, society would fall to pieces,--that
would be very well, but it would hardly make the man honest in word
and deed. If, however, you marshal feelings of awe and reverence in
defence of honesty, if you get God on your side, your success is more
assured and you may develop a “sensibility to principle which feels a
stain like a wound.” The preacher fortifies the common moralities with
these religious sanctions and that is no easy business. The preacher
must himself be righteous, resourceful, sympathetic, with the gift of
nearness to men. Such qualities education is peculiarly fit to bestow
or to develop, and hence an educated ministry is sorely needed by our
people from Boston to New Orleans.
An educated ministry would realize that social settlements, gymnasiums,
kindergartens, day nurseries, friendly visiting, homes for defectives
and orphans and the aged may fitly and usefully be organized and
maintained by the church. By such means the church may tend to
establish a kingdom of heaven on earth.
Among cultivated Negroes there is apparent an unfortunate tendency to
look at preachers askance. This is due largely to reaction against bad
preachers, and to failure to understand and appreciate the temporal
opportunities of the Church. I argue for the usefulness of good
preachers and of the “institutional” church. Though no member of this
graduating class should become a preacher or a preacher’s wife, every
member may wisely ally himself with the church and use his personal
influence to enlarge and strengthen church work, to make it definite
and human and nobly practical.
So much for the work in which personal influence is the determining
factor. Medicine and business are types of the work in which what I
have rudely called directing intelligence determines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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