The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885Various
History
The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 08, August, 1885
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
"It costs more to maintain a double system of public schools than to
provide for all the children under a single system. This increases
taxes, while at the same time the schools cannot be as efficient, and
this diminishes intelligence. For in scattered farming communities,
the districts must be so large under the double system that many
families are out of reach of the school. And the number of towns that
can have graded schools is greatly reduced by the requirement that no
school shall receive pupils of more than one race. Normal schools are
also made more difficult to maintain, and teachers' institutes
rendered less efficient. A lower average of intelligence is as
inevitable under such adverse conditions in the educational machinery
of a State, as slower speed in a racehorse is inevitable when he
carries heavy weight.
"Similar things may be said of churches. Any community that insists
on separate churches for different races dooms itself to a lower
grade of spiritual experience and a lower degree of Christian
activity. How must every good work be retarded if, in addition to the
separation of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others which
we find nearly everywhere, there must also be a further separation of
these by races; if in every neighborhood, however scattered the
population, there must be a white Methodist church with its white
Methodist preacher, and also a colored Methodist church with its
colored Methodist preacher, a white Baptist church and preacher, and
also a colored Baptist church and preacher, a white Presbyterian
church and preacher, and so on through the list. In many cases such
churches have service only once in a month, and the members attend no
other in the meantime. It is plain that of two regions alike in other
respects, the one that insists on race distinctions in the worship of
the one God and Father of us all, and will not allow men of different
races to stand side by side in doing Christian work, must maintain
its religious institutions at greater cost and with less efficiency
because of this race separation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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