The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 04, April, 1889 — John Shaqi
The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 04, April, 1889Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 04, April, 1889
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
THE INADEQUACY OF THE SUPPLY.
But, as the disciples said in regard to the five barley loaves and the
two fishes, "_What are these among so many?_" The means in both cases
are utterly inadequate, and the need of multiplying is as imperative
here as it was on the shore of Galilee. We have a Negro population of
eight millions, which has doubled in the last twenty years, and
increases at the rate of six hundred per day--requiring, if adequately
supplied, the founding of a new Fisk University or Talladega College
every twenty-four hours. There are 1,500,000 illiterate voters in the
South, and how can the North, while admitting with President Harrison,
that if the public security is threatened by this ignorance the remedy
is education, withhold its share of the necessary means?
How can the churches of the North, who know that the future destiny of
these ignorant masses depends upon their _religious_ far more than upon
their secular education, refuse the needed gifts for that purpose? Here
is where the miracle wrought on the shore of Galilee needs to be
repeated. Our Lord and Master is not here now in bodily presence, and he
entrusts to his church the duty of multiplying the bread of life for
these vast perishing masses. The churches of the North must awake to
this great duty. If done at all, it must be done promptly. Present means
are wholly inadequate. Every individual Christian at the North should
feel his personal responsibility and should respond by a great increase
of his contributions for this purpose. It is not too much to say that
the religious influences sent from the North in school, in industrial
training, in the preparation of Christian ministers and teachers, and in
the planting of Christian churches, will well-nigh constitute the
pivotal point of the whole movement. A loss now can never be regained,
but the achievements of the present should be a stimulus for the future.
The North withheld neither treasure nor blood to save the Union and to
free the slave. Treasure and toil will now save the South and the
Nation.
* * * * *
SOME CURIOUS AND SUGGESTIVE FACTS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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