The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 12, December, 1881Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 12, December, 1881
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
Especially do we need this higher education in order that we may
train preachers. We do not want to send a man with an imperfect
education as a missionary to Africa. Why should we send to
their black brethren in this country men imperfectly educated
as preachers to them? They, surrounded as they are by all the
stimulating influences of our modern civilization, need all of
this higher education which we can possibly induce them to take
on. Doing this for a series of years, we may at last realize
the triumph of Christianity among them. The greatest problem of
Christianity which our generation sees is the question how these
two races, so linked together, shall treat each other; but I
believe that the time is to come when we shall see them living
together in perfect harmony; when we shall see the blacks supplying
their peculiar elements to a higher civilization, and we, the white
race, shall have risen to a position exercising a true Christian
spirit, which, without the negro linked with us, we never shall
find; and then shall we see the triumph of Christianity dealing
with this now dark problem, but then showing the glory of a grand
success.
* * * * *
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.
PROF. CYRUS NORTHROP.
Great battles sometimes settle the fate of a country, and transfer
in a day whole provinces from one dominion to another. There are
no such decisive battles in the struggle for the intellectual
and moral elevation of man. By no stroke of policy and by no
combination of forces can you revolutionize the individual
character of a whole people at once. It happens occasionally,
however, in the contest between good and evil, that some convulsion
occurs which in its influence on the mental and moral condition
of a whole people is hardly less decisive than those political
contests by which provinces are transferred from the control of one
nation to that of another. Such a convulsion was our late civil
war. It left the States where it found them, parts of the Union.
It left all races morally and intellectually where it found them.
But for the colored people of the South it had swept away in every
direction, from zenith to horizon, the impenetrable clouds of more
than Egyptian darkness which had brooded over them, and it had made
it possible for the light of the sun to reach even these slaves.
Then, indeed, the people which sat in darkness saw a great light,
and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death, to them
did light spring up.
The civil war made it possible for us to educate and Christianize
the colored race at the South. It remained for us to take up the
burden which the providence of God had laid upon us, and to do what
we could to lift up these people to our level of civilization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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