The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 11, November, 1885Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 11, November, 1885
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of industrial training.
Latest in development in connection with our schools, it may yet prove
first in value. Labor is heaven-ordained. It is the chief
instrumentality through which a people are elevated. Grace saves the
soul and transforms character instantly. It makes the savage and
sinner kind and good instantly; but it will not instantly make him a
good farmer, a skilled mechanic, a trained scholar. Up from the lowest
to the highest, man must toil patiently and laboriously. Nature will
tolerate neither jumps nor deceptions. It is no kindness to put a man
where he is out of place, and still less is it a kindness to make him
believe that he has a right to be there. He who climbs up into position
or who is foisted into it by any other instrumentality than by the toil
necessary to fit him for the position, the same is a thief and a robber.
The police forces of Nature will speedily put him under arrest. The
judicial forces of Nature will soon cast him into a prison, out of which
he shall not come until beginning at the bottom, by diligent labor, he
is willing to pay the last farthing at every step in the process of his
advancement. The implements and the products of industry are the gauges
of civilization. Between the roughly-hewn stone hatchet and the
finely-polished steel axe lies all the history of the world's progress.
The college, the library, the fine residence and the factory of modern
civilization are at one end of the line, the other end of which starts
from the dug-out and the hut. Man, in the highest estate, forget or
ignore it as he may, has that in him which connects him with the lowest,
and labor, the hard labor of his ancestors, extending through the ages
as well as his own, has been the means of bringing him where he is. If
the Indian and the negro are to be elevated, they must rise by the same
steps as have others. They must _work_ their way up. But they who are
above them, remembering the pit out of which they themselves have been
dug, must give them a chance to rise, and help them as they try to rise.
That they have the capacity for elevation along every line of human
development has been abundantly proved over and over again. The
industrial exhibit of the colored people at the recent Centennial
Exposition in New Orleans, was in every way gratifying to their friends.
Though these people are only 20 years out of the house of their 250
years' bondage, antedated by millenniums of barbarism, they sent
articles showing their progress in the industries that more than filled
the entire gallery assigned them in one end of the immense Government
building.
* * * * *
MOUNTAIN WORK.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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