The American missionary — volume 42, no. 9, September, 1888 — John Shaqi
The American missionary — volume 42, no. 9, September, 1888Various
Religion
The American missionary — volume 42, no. 9, September, 1888
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
3. But this work has a connection with our other Southern work
which has been little noted. These mountains extend down into the
very heart of the South, in a territory 200 miles broad and 500
miles long. In the late war, the people were loyal to the Union
almost to a man, and thousands of them fought for its preservation.
Slaves were few among them, and colored people are now scarcely
more numerous than they are in the North, though the proportion
is increasing. The result is a natural affiliation with what
are known as “Northern Ideas.” The feeling against a Christian
treatment of the colored people is neither so bitter nor so
deep-rooted as elsewhere in the South. It has been demonstrated
that no-caste churches and schools can be established and
maintained, and the general sentiment of the whole region can, by
vigorous missionary work, be moulded to the Christian view.
The people of this region—vivified and developed, intellectually
and spiritually, on the broad basis of Congregational Christianity;
believing in, and practicing, the doctrine that all men were
created free and equal and should have equal rights in all
public matters; and, in their new and fast-increasing commercial
importance, in constant contact with other portions of the
South—would furnish an unanswerable argument against the fears of
the Southern white people with reference to the amalgamation of
the races, and other direful results, which would follow a just
treatment of the colored man. “And seeing the man which was healed
standing with them, they could say nothing against it.”
* * * * *
EMANCIPATION IN BRAZIL—WHAT IS TO FOLLOW?
It is a curious fact that, in precisely the last fifty years,
slavery has been abolished by the four great nations holding the
greatest number of slaves and representing the three great forms
of the Christian religion—the Protestant, the Greek and the Roman
Catholic.
Thus England, a Protestant power, emancipated her slaves in the
West Indies in 1838; Russia, of the Greek Church, freed her serfs
in 1861; the United States, a Protestant nation, emancipated her
slaves in 1863; and now, Brazil, a Roman Catholic empire, completes
the circle by emancipating her slaves in 1888.
While these facts are remarkable, and present cause for profound
gratitude to God, there is yet a lesson of vital importance to be
learned which Brazil needs to understand, and which, indeed, the
other nations are not fully practicing.
In the British West Indies, very few white people remained after
emancipation, and the blacks lacked their guidance and example; and
besides this, it was years afterwards before the British Government
made any adequate provision for the education of the ex-slaves.
From these two causes have come nearly all the evils that have
grown out of the emancipation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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