The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889

He was right—a thousand times right. We must face the facts and steer by them, and not attempt to be guided by sentiment and emotions. So long as the sight of a black face instinctively suggests to us rags and ignorance, and servility and menial employments, just so long this prejudice of caste will endure, and no amount of individual genius, culture, or character will be able to brush the mildew of caste from any individual black man's brow. That lady may be a Florence Nightingale, but if I whisper, and whisper truly, that she came from the slums, that her sisters are in the penitentiary, and her brothers are thieves, society will never forgive her for not being in the penitentiary herself. Society will pity her in ostentatious magniloquence, which is far worse than contempt or neglect; perhaps it will clothe her with silk and diamonds; but it will never treat her as it would not dare not to treat any lady whom it felt its equal. As has been well said, what is needed is not patronage nor pity, but fact—the recognition of fact. When the sight of a black face shall no longer remind men that it belongs to a race of which the immense majority close at hand are still showing what we have driven into them by the lash and bound in them by chains; when the black face shall have clothed itself in associations as full of comfort and culture and Christian worth as a white man wears, "Negro" will be as honorable as "Caucasian." And for this, through its churches which are schools, and its schools which are churches, the American Missionary Association is laboring and praying with splendid success.

I would like to remind you of the second point, which is emphasized by the statement in the report that a graduate, of Fisk University, with his wife, another graduate, has gone to Africa under commission of the American Board, and has there shown eminent abilities. Africa is the only continent on the planet that has never had a history. For millenniums it has been a locked closet. But in the providence of God the gaze of Christendom is now concentrated upon it. All the passions, good and bad, which push men are impelling the most adventurous and energetic of our race to look or to go thither. Love of money, love of adventure, love of power, love of man and love of God, are leading men to look into the 200,000,000 dusky faces there from which the veil has at last been thrown back. Meanwhile 8,000,000 of that race whose Christianizing means the regeneration of a continent vaster than Europe and the inauguration of a history perhaps to be more splendid than that which Europe has wrought out in two millenniums, are here for you and me to educate. Do you believe these facts are accidents? Do you believe that He who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him and restraineth the remainder of wrath has not ordained them according to the counsels of his own will? There never can be a Christian education which does not plant and foster the missionary spirit. Is it a dream? If so, let me die before I wake. Is it a dream that among 8,000,000 of our fellow citizens each of whom, as Dr. Strieby told us at New York, is qualified to live, perhaps to thrive, in the climate which has proved a grave to Anglo-Saxons, each of whom is qualified to visit Africa with a fair hope of making himself received as a child returning unto his own household? Is it too much to hope that, under the Christian education we may give them if we will, enough will desire to preach Christ to the dark continent to gem it with life and light as the sky is gemmed with stars?

I am too old to do it, but so complete is my conviction that the future of the race in the coming century shall move toward Africa as in the ages following Paul it moved toward the North and West of Europe, that were I a young man, loyal and devoted to my Master, and trying as he told his followers by Gennesaret to read in the morning and evening red the signs of the times, I should not go to Africa, perhaps; I would go to Tougaloo University, I think, and there devote all my energies and powers to instructing black men in the meaning and scope and inspiration and promise of the Master's words, "Go ye."

ADDRESS OF REV. F.P. WOODBURY, D.D

I feel that I have learned a great deal to-day; and as the last speaker spoke concerning Africa, an idea has come into my mind which I may express. Here we have on one side of the great ocean, Africa; on the other side, America. We have here a race conflict; on the one side eight millions of blacks, we will say, and perhaps eight millions of irreconcilable whites on the other. And these dominant eight millions of white men maintain, with the utmost pertinacity—and they have the power in their right hand so far as we can see—that they propose to rule and keep down those eight millions of black men. I have seen the title of a book recently published, "An Appeal to Pharoah," which is vouched for as a calm and temperate discussion of the question whether, after all, we are not going to get by this race difficulty by a great deportation to Africa. It is a good deal to raise the question of eight millions of men leaving one country and going across the ocean and settling in another continent. But isn't there something in it after all? Might it not compose the differences? I know that the cost would be very large, but careful estimates go to show that the cost is not anywhere near the amount we spent in our civil war. On the one side, we have these eight millions of black men—ignorant, very largely superstitious, still somewhat above those of the same color in Africa, and plunged here into an antagonism which is deep, and bitter, and hopeless. On the other side, we have these eight millions of white people who do not accept the results of the war. Isn't it better that eight millions shall go? I don't know. I think it deserves serious consideration.

But when the question arises for practical consideration, I think there is another and a little deeper question that we ought to remember, and that is this: Which eight millions ought to go? Is it these who have been faithful to the American flag, who are straight in the line of progress that this republic proposes to maintain, who are in the line of the development of all the ages, who are looking upward? Or is it the eight millions who are hopelessly side-tracked by the purposes of infinite God, and who are standing here in this republic, undertaking to maintain a conflict that is necessarily one of despair, as sure as God is at the head of the universe? Expatriation if you please, deportation if you will; but consider the question whether it shall be eight millions of American patriots who are to be sent over to Africa or eight millions who have come out of a rebellion and maintain their seditious and rebellious attitude to-day.

My friends, we all know that we are going to live together. There is no more baseless theory on God's earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and citizens, and because God has put them here for our work and our education. I tell you, my friends, the immediate problem seems to me only one form of a larger problem. What is the problem of the planet to-day? Is it not the problem as to which of two theories shall maintain itself concerning the masses which are at the base of society? Isn't that the problem in every nation? Isn't it the problem here concerning white and black, red and yellow alike? There is no possible doubt about it. The labor problem, do you call it? Here is one theory which holds that the masses shall be kept down. Here is the other system which maintains that they shall be elevated. We have got to live with them in the world, for I imagine there is nobody talking about sending them to the moon. Don't you know, and I know that the world is growing smaller every year? Talk about neighborhood—look over this continent. Germany is here; Ireland is here; France is here; China is here; Africa is here. We are neighbors to everybody. We are touching elbows across the ocean all the time. If you send anybody to Africa, why, he is only next door; and by and by we shall have air ships that will float up over there in a few hours! How are you going to manage this thing? We have got to live together in this world, and nearer and nearer to one another with every generation; and this country may just as well be the field in which to try the experiment out as any other country on the face of the globe. I think we are going to try it out to the end. There are symptoms of it all around.

But the conflict is here; it is in the air. It is not a conflict by sword. You know they tell the legend among the old mediæval stories that in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly conflict there, and carrying on the battle of the day. It seems to me, in some sense, true of us. The sword has done what the sword could do; it can do no more. But the conflict is here in the air, pronouncing itself with every event that drifts across our horizon. Harvard sets its seal on the brow of Clement Morgan, and the Memphis Avalanche has no other word for him than to call him "that dusky steer with the crumpled forelock."

My friends, we are going right forward in the field of conflict, which is the field of victory. One with God is a majority, and we are thousands with God. And we have on our side the weak and the helpless, too. I don't want any better aid than that. You know that Burke in that magnificent invective against Warren Hastings, when he rose to the very climax of it and told the story of those atrocious tortures to which the poor and ignorant and misguided peasants of India had been put, how they had had their fingers tied together and mashed with hammers, and other unmentionable things had been done to them, appealed to the parliament and said that if they should refuse justice those mashed and disabled hands, lifted high to Heaven in prayer, would call down the power of God for their deliverance. Is it not worse to mash and disable a mind and a soul than a hand? I tell you the prayers of the poor are on our side; and if we had nothing of all this magnificent achievement of this Association to look upon, we could look on those hands raised and those souls crying out from the social bondage of to-day, as they did from the physical bondage of a few years ago, and know that if God be for us we need not care who or what is against us.

ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR

I have but a very few words to add to this report. The facts speak louder than any statement of them can. When skirting the Asiatic shore of the inner sea, that lonely traveler, Paul, heard a voice, he looked across to the shores of Europe, and there in the night stood a great colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession of great world conquerors. It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in the might of his strength and cried, like the crying of an infant in the night, the crying of an infant for the light, "Come: come over into Macedonia and help us."

Now, my brethren, this was the cry of the strong for help. This was the cry of the peoples that were following the westward course of the star of empire. And yet, in their strength, they cried as though they were the weakest of woman born. And when that missionary, in response to that call, crossed the sea, though he came to that Macedonian city which had been the battle-scene of the contending forces of the Roman empire, he found access for the gospel into Europe through the open heart of one woman—Lydia, a seller of purple. And there, sitting down by the water course, where prayer was wont to be made, he just grouped those individuals into that unit of God's operations on the face of the earth, the local church. And this church was distinguished among the apostolic churches for its family traits, for the infusion of feminine grace and masculine strength, for the most domestic hospitality and the very faults of the close attritions of human life. There he planted the seed which has grown into our European and American civilization and Christianity.

And so ever at the cry of the strong for help the gospel has had just these three great prime factors to present for the solution of the problems of every age: first, the home, with its priesthood of the father and mother, the sanctuary of the house and the ministrations of family life; secondly, the school; and thirdly, between the home and the school, the church. When our Lord himself, from all possible sources, made selection of the first among the many means he has chosen for the redemption of this world, he chose a trained personality. As the medium for the transmission of truth, no improvement, no change has been found in all the progress of the gospel. By this trained personality—the heart that has been led to live with Christ awhile, and then go forth in his name and filled with his love to the hearts that have place for that love and rootage for that life—this wonderful product of our Christian civilization has everywhere been produced.

And I take it that in no one of the Christian agencies known to us are these three methods so wonderfully unified, so inseparably united, as the home and the church and the school are in the work of the American Missionary Association. They are one and the same. They are indissoluble. The long experience of this Association through this half century of specialized work does fit it, as the report has said, to give an almost commanding opinion in regard to the method of the work to be pursued among these very distinct classes. From the field as well as from the office, and from the experience of those longest at work, we learn that the school finds its ultimate aim only in the church; that, as a Christian agency, we are to work with the school only as a means to the end of building up that body of Christ on the face of the earth which is known by the name of his church. I do not see how the separation to any extent of school and church work can fail to break the unity of administration and hinder the progress of this gloriously on-going work.

I have just one word to add in regard to the reflex influence of this church work upon the home churches. My brethren, there has been a great dearth in candidates for the ministry until very recently. It strikes me that there is no such object-lesson in all our land, inviting men to consecrate themselves to the noblest of purposes, as the heroic ministry of this Association. It needs the heroic element to attract young men. It needs something which is very plainly worth their while to live for and to work for and to consecrate their energies toward, in order to attract them from the allurements of business and material progress to-day. The Indian service of the British Government, and even the service of the great commercial companies, have that element of heroism in it them which has attracted the very best brain and brawn of the English race to India. So it seems to me we will have to hold up these great organizations, which reach down to the hard places of the land, which occupy places that require men to man them, in order to recruit the ranks of our ministers. A man needs to know that he will have to be all the more a man to be anything of a minister now-a-days, to attract him into this great work. And this heroic type of Christian ministry and of Christian manhood and womanhood, shown in the half century of this society's work and existence, is to my mind one of the great attractions upon the best, the strongest, and the most consecrated of those men and women who devote their lives to the service of the church.

Its reflex influence upon every other branch of missionary activity in the church is very plain. It is to-day—I do not hesitate to say it—the hero of our organizations. It takes far less stamina, far less consecration, I believe, to go to India, or China, or Japan than it does to come out at the call of God and of this agency of His divine Providence and enter many a field manned by this Association. In the personnel of our theological seminaries I have long noticed that the choicest spirits, the men with the stamp of courage upon them, those who are not working for place, but for Christ, and him alone, are the men who take up this work. They are the men who, when they come back to the schools of the prophets, thrill our hearts as no other men do with the story of the conquests of Christ in their own hearts as well as out in the hard fields which they cultivate for his sake; and there will be no more glowing missionary meeting of the seminary with which I have the honor to be connected than when the reports of this meeting shall be carried back to the brethren. The prayers of the class-rooms, the prayers of the missionary meetings, the yearnings of the hearts of the men who are preparing to follow in the footsteps of those who have heroically led the way, are the wires for these unseen and yet never unused electric currents which unite the North with the South, the frontier with the citadels of our common Christianity.

We know very well the danger of a false education, of a school without A church, education without evangelization, a university without the heart of Christ beating in it. Great are the joy and confidence felt in the hearts of the constituency of this body that school and church are so inextricably interwoven with each other that if you plant a school it will develop into a church, and if the church comes it will eventually and inevitably re-act, and in a most blessed way in spiritual and often in material resources upon the school. We give largely to the school because there is a home beneath it and a church around it.

I regard these churches of the American Missionary Association with their evangelistic and nurturing agencies, prime sociological factors for bringing in Christ's dear kingdom in this land of ours. It is their mission not only to remedy evils, not only to restore rights, but to be great constructive agencies of a new Christian civilization. For when Christ came, he came preaching, not the gospel of the individual, not a gospel simply to save that man, that woman, that child, but the gospel of the Kingdom, the gospel which this great Association so effectually preaches and not only preaches but applies and administers as well. And the time will not be far hence when this whole subject of the environment of the spiritual life will force itself so imperatively upon the study of the churches at home that they will take the type of their work and the inspiration for their new developments from the leadership of this and kindred missionary organizations which have set them these most brilliant examples of being ahead of the thought and the feeling of their day.

ADDRESS OF REV. C.W. HIATT

More than fifty years ago De Tocqueville gave utterance to these prophetic words: "The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future existence of the United States arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory." I think that that prophecy has been iterated and reiterated before this convention until we ought finally to let it rest as an established fact. I believe we are menaced by these eight millions of people, who are twice as great in number as were the people of the United Colonies when they broke from the mightiest naval and military power in history; but I believe that the peril that we are menaced by in the presence of this black man arises from his perils. There is a peril from the black man, but it is a peril secondary to the peril of the black man upon this soil. I do not apprehend any uprising by Uncle Tom; but Uncle Tom is dead, and his son is here and his friends of a younger generation. These men are being gnarled and corrupted and imbruted, and are massing themselves, touching elbows one with another; and under the influences of the age in which we live are becoming a factor in our civilization which, unless we modify and change it under our Christian teaching, will render our Southland like that island on the north of the Caribbean Sea where to-day it is said that the name of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the original defender and liberator, is a hissing and a reproach.

It was a fine augury of the future when the work for the ex-slave began at Fortress Monroe in the atmosphere of religion. Mary Peake, meeting the advancing multitudes of refugees, gospel in heart and primer in hand, as by divine suggestion, laid the pattern of all our succeeding toil. Side by side of mutual helpfulness God has placed the alphabet and decalogue, the teacher and the preacher, the school-house and the church. "What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder."

The largest, grandest word in the title of this organization is "Missionary." When that word drops out its work will be done, for its call will have ceased. Our ultimate end and present purpose is, and always should be, simply this—to save. We cannot lift our fallen brother without the leverage of the cross.

No field is wider, none more difficult, than that to which our eyes are turned, embracing as it does four of the five families of mankind. They huddle together in the lap of Christendom, but feel no warmth. They are a demonstration of the fact that civilization never touches barbarism without polluting it. The Indian, finding his highest ideal in the rude and tipsy defender of our flag; the Chinaman, taking home more heathenism than he brings; the Negro, bound tighter by the vices of the whites than ever he was by their iron chains—these three, ignorant of the Christ and grasping the satanic weaponry of our sinful land and age, together form the most discouraging of mission fields. Our laborers are faced by all the serious problems of the foreign land—problems unrelieved by a single romantic charm. When we send our missionaries to Africa they go to labor among the Africans; and when we send them down South they go to teach "niggers."

Notice, then, what the report of this committee signifies in the presence of the fact that our laborers not only grapple with foreign languages, conceptions, idolatries, habits of benighted peoples, but all the time are hindered and assailed on every hand by these Bedouin Arabs of our land—the minions of mammon and the slaves of caste. To gather and hold and save in such a field as this, is task enough for the finest corps in the army of the Lord.

In the presence of these well-known facts, the report of the committee adds another chapter to the Book of Acts. It gladdens our hearts with thrilling music—the music of ringing sickle and reaper's song. From all over this mighty field, from mountain, and savannah, and shore, and plain, we hear the resonant footsteps of advancing troops—a solid regiment of converts marching in the army of our Christ and into the fellowship of his Congregational Church. I want you to notice that this church which we have planted in the South is just the kind of a church to take these people and assimilate them, to save them and to preserve them to their highest usefulness. And why? In the first place, because it is a church that will take them in. I saw the other day this inscription over a great arch erected in honor of our Pan-American guests in the city of Cleveland, "Welcome All Americans." Well, the Congregational Church has put three talismanic letters over the portal of every church that it has planted in the South and in the West, "A.M.A.—All mankind acceptable."

Every convert in our work has cosmopolitan views respecting the brotherhood of man. This means that one thousand people have seated themselves before an apostolic communion table. White, black, red and yellow, side by side in harmony before the broken memorials of the life of love. The spirit of color-caste is a post-apostolic devil. The most eminent convert of the evangelist Philip was as black as a middle vein of Massilon coal. Perhaps that is why they met in the desert and the spirit compassionately caught Philip away. The purest church and the purest ray of sunshine are alike—they absorb the seven colors of the spectrum. When the Creator flung the rainbow like a silken scarf over the shoulder of the summer cloud, he drew his color-line. Pentecostal blessings fell at Jerusalem, and have fallen ever since on the cosmopolitan church.