The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 09, September, 1889

Q. Is this the position of the Roman Catholic Church in its Southern work?

A. It is: The Roman Catholic Church would not for a moment recognize any color-line in its assemblies or priesthood.

Q. Does the A.M.A. believe in the social equality of the races?

A. The A.M.A. has never seen any social equality anywhere, and believes and teaches nothing about it. It believes in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

Q. Is the A.M.A. agitating the color-line question?

A. It is not. It always has proclaimed its principles for the interests of the oppressed, and always has championed the cause of God's poor, pleading for the right because it is right.

Q. Why is the A.M.A. in the South doing its work in schools and churches among white and black?

A. Because the Lord has said; "Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."

THE CARS, THE CHURCH, THE COURTS

Our esteemed brother, Rev. G.C. Rowe, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church, Charleston, S.C., and his associates, on their return from the meeting of the Joint Committee on the union of the Georgia Association and the Georgia Conference, were forcibly transferred to an inferior car on the Georgia Railroad. They were not driven from the train, they were allowed to ride, and the car in which they rode was connected with the cars containing the white passengers. They were simply separated from the others and that only because they were colored persons.

The reception these honored ministers of Christ met in the Joint Committee was very much of the same sort. The white brethren did not deny them their place in the church—nay, the two bodies, white and colored, were to be connected together, but these colored brethren were to be kept separate and that only because they were colored persons.

An appeal will be made to the courts, but the interesting question is: which will be first to recognize the equal manhood of the colored man— the cars, the courts or the church? Would it not be a shame to the church and a dishonor to the Christian name if the church should be the last?

Speaking of the race problem, in his baccalaureate sermon at Vanderbilt University, recently, Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, of the Methodist Church, South, startled his hearers by the following vigorous declaration: "It is a travesty on religion, this disposition to canonize missionaries who go to the dark continent, while we have nothing but social ostracism for the white teacher who is doing a work no less noble at home. The solution to the race problem rests with the white people who live among the blacks, and who are willing to become their teachers in a missionary spirit."

THE WORK OF THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION AND FOREIGN MISSIONS

BY REV. FRANK B. JENKINS

The American Missionary Association has done both home and foreign missionary work. There is nothing in its constitution or traditions to prevent its doing the same again.

Providence, however, seems to indicate clearly that its work at present be within the United States. While in this sense it does home missionary work, the peculiar conditions of the people among whom it mostly labors require largely the methods of foreign missions. It must supply the school, as well as the church; industrial training as well as that which is intellectual and moral. It must create a native ministry and develop native workers of all kinds. In fact, it would be hard to find on foreign mission fields a single kind of activity which is not duplicated in the fields of the American Missionary Association.

Home missions aid foreign missions by creating the conditions of more income and more missionaries for foreign fields. The work of this Association has done this already to some extent; without doubt it is to do it to a far greater extent in the future.

In taking people from the ignorance and poverty of slavery and savagery, it could not be expected to form them at once into large givers or efficient workers for foreign fields; but who can say, after the marvels of the past twenty-four years, what the future shall show, when the coming millions shall arise and, out of gratitude for what they have received, give of their increasing means and send forth their sons and daughters to tell the glad story of freedom, truth and love.

It has been a favorite idea of many that the Negroes of America should evangelize Africa. Perhaps some have been disappointed that so few of them have gone to Africa as missionaries; but such, I am sure, have failed fully to consider the facts. A people who had received only the degrading tuition of slavery could not produce at once many who should have the reliable qualities and the intellectual and moral training needed for the responsible and, to a large extent, the unsuperintended work of a foreign missionary. Then, every capable preacher, teacher and leader has been needed in a hundred places at home. They could scarcely be justified in leaving their own brothers and sisters in heathenism and without the truth within their reach, to go to the heathen abroad.

Yet a few have gone forth and proved themselves capable, faithful and successful. A former slave of Jefferson Davis is not only a successful missionary in Africa, but has proved himself such a level-headed man that he has been chosen treasurer of one of the missions of the American Board. Such as he are an earnest of what shall be, when the colored people shall be more fully evangelized and the appeal for Africa can be made strong to their hearts and consciences. Then there will be such a going forth as will astonish the Christian Church.

The bearing of the work for the one hundred thousand Chinese in this country on foreign missions can be clearly seen. Christian work for them is missionary work for China—it sends them back to become missionaries to their native land. The fruitfulness of this work for foreign missions has been fully demonstrated.

The possibilities of the influence of the evangelization of the Indians on foreign missions is a topic which I do not remember having seen or heard mentioned. Yet it seems to me worth thinking about.

Mexico has four million Indians; Central America, one million five hundred thousand, and South America seven million. Here is a foreign mission field of twelve and a half million souls. How can it be otherwise than that, when once the Indians of our land shall come to have and appreciate the blessings of a Christian civilization, their hearts shall be stirred by the needs of their brethren according to the flesh, and that they will go to them with the gospel story?

There remains one other field—the whites of the South and especially the "Mountain Whites." As a class, they are poor, ignorant and needy in every way—materially, intellectually, morally and spiritually, but they are not the "poor, white trash" of the South. As good blood flows in their veins as in the veins of the Northern people. A wrong start and their surroundings have made them what they are. Give them schools and pure and enlightened churches and they will awake into new life as fast as any people ever did. They will show in years what missionary work can usually show only in decades. In Williamsburg Academy, Ky., nearly every boy in the higher classes is expecting to prepare for the ministry, and that school is only a little over half a dozen years old and is the first one opened in our mountain work.

Give these mountain boys and girls a chance, and the people who gave the nation a Lincoln will give it ministers and missionaries, not only for the seven mountain States, but also for other home mission fields and for foreign lands.

If the Congregational churches will listen to the call of Christ and appreciate the opportunity which he has placed before them, there may be in these mountains, filled with their marvellous mineral wealth, Congregational churches which shall be not only self-supporting, but give generously for the advancement of Christ's kingdom throughout the earth. The most generous giver I know, is a native of the mountains and a member of one of our missionary churches.

ROME AND THE NEGRO

One of our most interesting exchanges is an "Illustrated Roman Catholic Quarterly edited and published by the Fathers of St. Joseph's Missionary Society of the Sacred Heart," its "Record of Missions among the Colored People of the United States."

We need not say that we have no sympathy with Romanism and its errors, nor with the "Missionary Society of the Sacred Heart," and its efforts to plant Romanism among the colored people of the South.

We can, however, but admire the fidelity of the church to its doctrines, and the Christian example it gives to all missionary societies in its recognition of man as man. The quotations which we make from the Roman Catholic Quarterly will account for the strong hold that Romanism is beginning to secure upon the negro race.

The following, for example, is a Roman Catholic tribute to John Brown:

On the 2nd of December next, thirty years will have passed since John Brown, in his sixtieth winter, ascended the scaffold and gave his life for the colored race.

Connecticut gave the hero birth—from heroes; New York, in her Adirondack recesses, developed in him that spirit of liberty which Ohio had nurtured, and is forever honored by his grave; while Virginia, "building better than she knew," bestowed the martyr's crown. It was necessary that one man should die for the people (John xviii, 14), and God arranged that he who is likewise one of the great benefactors of the human race as well as of his native land should crimson and beautify with his blood the soil that gave a cradle and a tomb to the Father of his Country.

Grand indeed is the greatness of the rock-ribbed Adirondacks where John Brown lived, prayed, thought out his great life-thought, and made his first trials in the work of emancipation, but grander is the stone there that marks the grave of him whose mighty spirit is still "marching on;" for the greatness of that soul invests the tomb with moral grandeur, and calls "all the astonishing magnificence of unintelligent creation poor."

Fair indeed are the banks of the Shenandoah, and beautiful the landscape on which the dying eyes of the hero rested, but more lovely far the death of him and of his sons and comrades,—"even in death they were not divided" (2nd Kings i, 19), because the most beautiful thing in the world or out of it is love, and he and they died of love for their brethren, God's children. It is truly fitting, therefore, that they who were rescued by him from bondage should love and honor his glorious name, and that we all should chant the praises of the man who was the chosen instrument of Providence in destroying out of our country the inhuman custom of human slavery.

The Southern Congregationalist, published in Atlanta, does not have a high opinion of such men as John Brown. We quote:

There are men who never are mistaken. If your opinion or plan, no matter how well sustained, differs from theirs, they solemnly greet you: "Our conscience is our monitor: we can make no concessions of principle." The case is ended. You may as well make your humble bow and pass on, leaving them in their lofty and superior place. Such men are of little use in the world. They may have a few satellites, but that is all. It is noticeable how uniformly the conscience and principles of these men agree with their prejudices, salaries and other interests, and with changed circumstances how "concessions" distill from them gently as the dew.

We quote again from the St. Joseph's Advocate, as to the color line:

Man was created in God's own image and likeness. This image and likeness is, however, not a physical one, it is a spiritual or soul likeness. The likeness and image of the operation of the human soul—the mind—through the material, physical medium of the brain, is not only similar, but substantially and formally alike in every division of the human race. It thus follows that fundamentally there is an identity of mental or soul activity and action in all the human race. Neither color, nor form, nor feature, nor clime, operates a change on the formal and fundamental identity of human thought as evolved by the human mind....

It follows that the negro race, thinking the same thoughts, have the same apprehension of the perfect, good and true, and, thinking in the same lines as the Caucassian race, must needs be of the same order of creation, in the image and likeness of their Maker, although physically different in color, yet in mind and soul the same. This, too, removes the theory of the inferiority of races, and relegates it to the lumber room of the mere physicist or corporal anatomist, who, because he cannot find life in death any more than thought, would deny life as he would deny the soul, even as La Place would not admit a Creator—God— because he could not see him at the end of his telescope....

Naturally working for and under white men, their industry, versatility and submissiveness have made many people think they were an inferior race. This cannot be. Give them a fair chance in life's battle, train their minds, fill their immortal souls with worthy conceptions of the truth as only presented by the Roman Catholic Church, and you will make of the negro race a kind, charitable, intelligent, worthy Christian people, as full of love for the country of their former enslavement as the best patriot descendant of the Revolutionary fathers. Tried in peace and in war when they have received but half the training of the white race, they have not been found wanting, but have proven themselves worthy of offices of trust and honor in every sphere of life and as good Christians as God has ever granted His divine grace to. His promises are for all nations and for all times, and necessarily for the negro as for the white man, all of whom in their souls are created in His own image and likeness from the beginning.

Apropos of Romanism among the colored people, Archbishop Janssens, of New Orleans, writes:

Last year there were baptized 3,705 colored children and 297 colored adults, which I estimate forms a population of about 75,000 Catholics in this Diocese.

We have six convents of colored Sisters, of which four are schools, one an asylum for 74 girls, and the other an asylum, for 21 old women. There are, besides, nine schools conducted by white Sisters, and eleven schools conducted by lay teachers—in all, twenty-four schools with 1,330 scholars. It is not bad.

At Emmetsburg, Maryland, the Roman Catholics report the following:

The Sisters are putting up a large and fine edifice which will be ready for business in September, and will accommodate all the Catholic children, both white-colored and black-colored in the town and vicinity. I am curious to know if this is the first instance in which children of both the dominant races will be educated under one roof.

Says the editor: "How quickly the color-line disappears in the Catholic Church."

NOTES BY THE WAY

BY DISTRICT SECRETARY C.J. RYDER