Читать книгу The Choctaw Freedmen and the Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy - Robert Elliott Flickinger - Страница 65

"Christian education is not narrow, it takes in every phase of training that is essential to produce a well developed and useful life. It touches and tints industrial training with a brighter and richer glow. It quickens the faculties of the mind, adds keenness to the power of perception, forms permanent habits of industry and strengthens the will or purpose to do right.

"Christian education emphasizes the fact that it is not merely book learning—storing the mind with knowledge of facts or training the hands to work, but includes moral elevation, as well as intellectual development. It includes everything that tends to make the life purer, better and more useful. It begets and fosters a spirit of hopefulness. It develops that patience and perseverance that is needed for the best performance of every day's duties.

"Christian education emphasizes personal purity, purity of the family life and the sacredness of the marriage relation. Its whole trend and effect is upward. Its genius is moral, spiritual, industrial, domestic, social and individual elevation. It creates a hunger and thirst for higher and better things. It is the mountain summit from whose height one gets a broader vision, a clearer view of the possibilities and demands of life and a truer conception of all human relations.

"This is the provision that must be made for our black brother. Nothing less will meet his needs. A great responsibility rests with negro leaders who have attained a good degree of intelligence and refinement, but a greater responsibility still rests upon the people of richer blessing and greater power.

"If the spirit of true democracy, which declares, 'opportunity for every one, according to his capacity and merit,' and the spirit of Christianity, whose principle is, 'Help for the weaker as the stronger is able to give it,' be exercised toward the negro, many of the difficulties will vanish, better conditions will prevail and more desirable results will be secured."

This cry of humanity from the black belt of our land is very touching and suggestive. It suggests the negro's greatest and most urgent needs, the Bible, the Bible school and the christian teacher.

It is the silent appeal of Joseph while passing through the pit and the prison in the land of Israel's enslavement. Beyond these dark and unpleasant experiences there awaited for Joseph a career of great usefulness in the land of his previous imprisonment.

Let us recognize the fact that God has a great use for the Freedman in this our native land, because he has providentially brought him here and increased his number so greatly.

A spirit of true patriotism, as well as the tie of christian brotherhood, prompts the lending of a helping hand and an encouraging word, while he solves the problem of his own destiny of great usefulness in the home, the school, the church, in the shop, on the farm and in the fields of professional opportunity and business activity.

It may be truly said of the Freedmen that they represent the poor of this world, of whom the Lord Jesus said, "Ye have the poor always with you, Me ye have not always. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto Me."