The American Missionary, Volume 34, No. 11, November 1880Various
Religion
The American Missionary, Volume 34, No. 11, November 1880
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
To the same effect are the words of our honored President Hayes, in
his speech at Canton, Ohio, on the 1st of September last: “Ignorant
voters are powder and balls for the demagogues. In the present
condition of our country, universal education requires the aid of
the General Government.” * * * * * *
Education, then, is called for. But the danger that specially
attacks us is in the South. * * * There is more than twenty per
cent. of illiteracy all through the Southern portion of our land.
* * * But this illiteracy is largest, unquestionably, among those
who are black. It has been stated that in one of our Southern
States ninety per cent. of the colored people are illiterate; in
another, ninety-one per cent.; in another, ninety-three per cent.;
in another, ninety-five per cent.; and in Mississippi and Texas
ninety-six per cent. Eighty-eight per cent. of the entire colored
people in the South are illiterate—or were in 1870; undoubtedly it
has changed somewhat since.
We are to labor, then, in our desire to secure popular education,
especially among the blacks, and through the blacks we are to reach
the whites. * * * But, as we educate the blacks, we ask ourselves,
What sort of education shall it be? And I would say, it must be a
Christian education. It can be nothing else if it is to accomplish
its work. Public men, speaking on political subjects, refer only
to a secular education. It is well that they should enforce that
and insist upon it; but were we to content ourselves with secular
education alone, we should make the most grievous mistake of the
century. It is impossible to rely upon secular education for the
saving of the nation; we must make it a Christian education as well.
Look at the influences of a merely secular education as seen in
biography and history. What has the highest secular education done
for men? It has made them simply one-sided, imperfect specimens
of manhood, deformed and dwarfed in some of those most essential
characteristics that give a man influence here, and happiness
hereafter. A man like Hume could defend suicide. Highly-trained
intellects like those of Voltaire and Rousseau could advocate
licentiousness, both by word and by life. Men and women like J.
S. Mill, George H. Lewes, George Eliot, and that gifted but vile
woman, Sara Bernhardt, have traduced the idea of marriage, and
put a stigma upon the purest relationship that God has given to
earth. Education, mere intellectual training, has done nothing
for the morals of these people. There was a prisoner executed
a few years since in the State of New York, whose great grief
before his execution for the terrible crime of murder, was that he
could not live long enough to complete a very learned work which
he was preparing on some science. And even the honored State of
Massachusetts has on its criminal record the name of a professor in
one of its highest institutions of learning who committed murder in
a moment of passion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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