The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 3, March 1881Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 35, No. 3, March 1881
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
“I have the educational question very much at heart. Disguise
it as you may, the New England States, with their schools and
universities, have dictated laws to this continent. They have sent
New England ideas all over the West, and they dominate there.
Look at Prussia, that little Empire over which Napoleon rushed
and almost obliterated. Hardly a generation passed before it had
in turn humbled France and taken the power from its Empire. The
bright-eyed boys in your mountains and wire-grass may represent you
nobly before the world if you educate them. We must also educate
the colored race, and they ought to be educated for the benefit
of the Union, and by the friends of the Union. I would devote
the proceeds of the public lands to this purpose on a basis of
illiteracy. The colored people are citizens, and we must do them
justice. Let us give them every legal right. Social rights will
take care of themselves.”
* * * * *
OVERTURE TO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL.
It is felt by many of our missionaries South that their work would
be facilitated by a creed, prepared under direction of the National
Council, suited to the average intelligence of the Freedmen who
apply for admission to our new churches. To this end, therefore,
the Central South Conference, at its recent meeting in Memphis,
drew up an overture setting forth the reasons why such creed should
be provided, and presented it to the Council at St. Louis. After
preliminary statements, the overture adds:
“Our eight colleges and our two score normal and high schools,
with their more than 8,000 students, and these, with their 150,000
pupils in primary schools, where they teach, are rapidly preparing
the material out of which churches of our faith and polity will be
developed.
“These children of nature, with their ready faith but rude
culture, coming into the inheritance of this New Testament way of
the churches, need the ‘sincere milk of the word’—a declaration
of doctrine that shall not be in the nomenclature nor in the
philosophy of a past age, but in the language and after the spirit
of our improved New England theology. They need a form of sound
words such as that when they have once learned it they will not
need to be taught over again what it does not mean in spite of its
phraseology.
“As a duty of brotherly love and of honest recompense we owe them
the best things we have to give in the way of the freshest and
ripest statement of the ideas and doctrines which have leavened the
East and the West, and are now setting the South in foment.”
We trust the Committee appointed by the Council to formulate a
statement of doctrine will meet the want.
* * * * *
MIXED SCHOOLS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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