Читать книгу The American Missionary. Volume 44, No. 01, January, 1890 - Various - Страница 5

AT THE ANNUAL MEETING IN CHICAGO

God, who writes his thoughts in the development of a nation, not less than in the grouping of constellations or in the drama of the physical world, has spoken in the birth and history of our land with startling distinctness. In every people we may see an ideal of God embodied, however imperfectly realized by human achievement. Happy is that people who can see God's ideal for them, and those statesmen who have it in their hearts to lead the people along the line of God's thought. To get at something of God's thought for us, we must go back even into those dark Teutonic forests into which the Roman world peered with so much fear and awe, and out of which came those freemen who knew how to leap upon that Roman world in its pride and its weakness and re-assert human liberty.

Those old ancestors of ours knew what freedom was; but as they came against that Roman world, they themselves were in part conquered by it, and they lost something of that freedom. But God set apart one corner of the European world for them, and called over the English Channel in the fifth century those forefathers of ours, there to watch for a century and a half that tremendous conflict in which the very plow-share of the Teutons went through the roots of the Roman life in Britain and left nothing but Teutonic fields remaining. And then God brought into this Britain, thus set apart, the gospel of Christ, and our forefathers became Christians—not Christians such as there were in other parts of Europe, but having that free and independent Christian life that shone forth in men like Wyckliffe, denying the power of the keys to Rome except where Rome spoke with Christ's voice, and in men like Latimer, before whom the proud Henry trembled.

All over England were sown these seeds of a free Christian faith; so that when Luther came, it was in England as in our country when the forest fires have ceased, and suddenly there spring up from the sod a new forest because the seeds lie in the prairie from age to age. So in our English soil there were those seeds of Christian freedom that sprung forth and gave us a free and Protestant England. And then, in the reaction, when Mary was on the throne, and the fire at Smithfield was kindled, the Christian men of England went to Geneva and there met John Calvin, whose system of Christian thought set the soul of man forth, in his awful agony of sin, and in God's redemption for him—set him forth independent of kings and rulers, and in whose sight a king was but God's vassal. When Englishmen had to come in contact with John Calvin, the iron of his free spirit became steel, and then Puritanism was born, and at that time God raised the curtain that hung over a whole hemisphere, and gave that hemisphere to these free Teutonic English people. We know how they conquered the country for this free spirit, and how the Revolutionary War came on, and Samuel Adams, awakening to the sound of those cannon at Concord on that spring morning, said, in spite of all the forebodings of a long and deadly struggle, "How glorious is this morning," because he foresaw what God could work here in a free Christian land. And so on that following Fourth of July those men assembled in Philadelphia and put forth the Declaration of Independence. There is no better commentary on it than Lincoln's words when he said, in those dark days just before the war: "In their enlightened view nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on or degraded or imbruted by its fellows."

They set up a beacon for their children and their children's children. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when at some remote time some man, or faction, or interest should arise, and say that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their children's children should look back to the Declaration of Independence, and should take heart to begin again the battles their forefathers fought, that thus truth and liberty and righteousness and justice and all the Christian virtues might not be lost in the land; and none might dare limit and circumscribe the principles on which the temple of liberty was being built. Thus, by these centuries of growth and life God said to our people, "I have given you this key to your history, the union of liberty and an enlightened faith—faith and freedom. Be true to these. This do and thou shalt live." It seems plain enough. And yet, in this garden of liberty there were sown tares. In the bosom of this free land the deadly foe of freedom, slavery, was here. In slavery was the evident and necessary foe of all that God had foreplanned for our Nation, because slavery denies the rights of men. Men tried to deal with this problem; they tried to circumscribe it; they said it was a local question, and Webster stood in the Senate and boasted that he had never spoken of slavery on that floor. How the way of liberty was choked, how the tree of liberty withered! And then God spoke in the earthquake, and the fire, the war came on, and the slave was set free; and it seemed as if again we had come into sight of God's plan for the race, that liberty and Christian faith should be the watchword of our national life.

Now again, at last, it seems as if that which we are accomplishing and that which God has spoken in all these ages is again jeopardized, and as if this human right shall be denied in the South. Men doubt whether there is in the Negro more than the capacity of a subordinate race, and say that to educate him is to lift him out of his sphere. Brethren and friends, there is manhood in the Negro race. There was humanity in those slaves who toiled their way over mountains and through swamps before the war, with their eyes focussed upon the North star of freedom. And there was humanity in those mothers who clasped their babes to their breast and fled before the bloodhounds that they might escape the enslavers of men. There was manhood in those one hundred and seventy-eight thousand Negro soldiers who seized their muskets and went to the front and fought for us, and with us, in those dark days of 1864, when the draft was failing and when volunteering had failed, that there might be soldiers to stand in the front and to dig in the trenches, and of whom eighty thousand gave their lives for us. There was manhood in those cabins in which all over the South, our fleeing soldiers, escaping from prison, never failed to find support, help, and guidance. Oh! how disastrous a business it is that that manhood, which all those years of slavery could not extinguish, should now be extinguished by the priests of a proud, arrogant, and selfish aristocracy.

But, my friends, as we felt in those days, and feel to-night, there is still no help for us but in the Christian solution of this problem and in the Christian destiny God has given to us. Liberty and faith, the two elements, must be conjoined. For us to deny the rights of the Negro now is to say that God did not make man in his image. It is to say that liberty is not a sacred right, but a selfish acquisition; that government does not exist to establish rights, but to protect privileges, and that mankind are not brothers, but foes. It is to turn the shadow upon the dial of human progress backward toward the ages of oppression and chaos.

And just there is the problem that confronts us, South and North together. What shall be done in this dire extremity? I remember years ago hearing of a fire in Charleston in which that beautiful spire of St. Michael's took fire and some one had to be found to go up beyond the reach of the hose to put out the flame kindling and flickering there. No one was found until a Negro stepped forth and climbed that tower, taking his life in his hands, and put out that flame. And when he came down again, one man said, "Name your reward," and he replied, "Let me but be counted a man." And that we have got to do, or God will shake down our civilization and our Nation as he shook down that spire of St. Michael's in the earthquake three years ago. It is certain to come unless we follow the line of God's appointing that this must be a free Nation, absolutely free, free everywhere. As yet, emancipation is but an outward and formal thing. What we wait for now, is the emancipation of a true and an elevated will in the South, and Christian citizenship. Into that, this Association pours its strength, its money, and its life. It took half a million lives to emancipate the slaves outwardly, and it may yet take hundreds and thousands of lives—our lives—our children's lives—poured in upon this problem, that so we may lift the Negro to that point where he feels himself, and where we feel him to be, a man—taught to labor, protected in the enjoyment of the fruits of his labor, without which the strongest arm grows palsied, trained in a strong, self-reliant Christian manhood, holding the reins firmly on the neck of all passion—a man. And that we will do; and the very greatness of the problem, I believe, is our redemption. It was the greatness of the crisis that thrilled the Nation's heart when the war burst upon us. It is the very greatness of our present problem that calls in trumpet tones to men and women and children all over the land; "Come and help solve this problem for Christ."

A few weeks ago, in one of the beautiful towns of Northern Illinois, a young man, the only son of his father and mother, hearing at Sabbath evening the alarm of fire, sprung forth and took his place upon the burning building and there did the work of a fireman. In the attempt to put out the fire he was hurled headlong and in one moment his life had gone hence. A few weeks afterward, as a friend was talking with his mother about it, she said, "Our son was always so swift to heed any call of need or duty, it seems to me as if he heard suddenly some call from God from some farther clime and sprung forth and was gone from our sight." Blessed, heroic faith! But, brethren and friends, fathers and mothers, we need that same faith for our living sons and living daughters, to send them forth into this work of God. When the Christ child was on the back of the giant Christophorus crossing the stream, how heavy he grew as the giant plunged his way through the waters. God weighs heavily upon this Nation this greatest of all national problems, what to do with these despised ones. But bear the burden we must, and bear it through we must to the farther shore of a Christian solution, or we and it will go down the flood together. There is no help for us except in this solution which makes brothers of these men.

I see a possible issue in this large Christian faith of our land; and I see the time coming when the black and the white shall dwell together in a mutual helpfulness, with a more complete national feeling, a deeper dependence upon him from whom alone comes strength, less display of material resources, but more faith in God. That time must come. And then I see the army enlisting for the conquest of that dark continent of Africa, shrouded in gloom, so long robbed of her children, but now at last finding that, like Joseph, they were taken from her that they might come back to save life. So our Nation shall be not a mirage awakening the hopes and aspirations of mankind but to mock them, and leaving the sands of human experience still more arid and barren; but it shall be a mountain of God, its base resting on the eternal foundations of law and liberty; its summit drawing down from the willing heavens the streams of prosperity which shall enrich all the lands of the earth.