Christianity and the Negro Race
MR. GLADSTONE, in the exordium of his celebrated article on the Church of England, in the Contemporary Review (July, 1875), says:--
To uphold the integrity of the Christian dogma, to trace its working, and to exhibit its adaptation to human thought and human welfare, in all the varying experience of the ages, is, in my view, perhaps the noblest of all tasks which it is given to the human mind to pursue. This is the guardianship of the great fountain of human hope, happiness and virtue. But with respect to the clothing which the Gospel may take to itself, my mind has a large margin of indulgence, if not of laxity, both ways. Much is to be allowed—I can hardly say how much—to national, sectional, and personal divergencies.
This is a view to which the very highest minds in the world— the best cultivated and the most enlightened—would at once readily subscribe. By the word “dogma” Mr. Gladstone evidently means, not the petrified formula of any particular seet or race, deduced according to their view from the Word of God, but the whole system of Christianity itself, as a living organism, in esse and in posse, in its essence as well as in its capabilities and potentialities; for in the same paragraph he uses the word “Gospel” as synonymous with “dogma.” Looking at the Gospel system as a whole, it may be called, with no inconsiderable propriety, the “Christian dogma,” or that system of belief which distinguishes the Christian world from all others.
We have said that the very highest minds would readily subscribe to the view of Mr. Gladstone, for only the highest minds would cordially agree with the whole paragraph. A very large number—perhaps the whole Christian Church—would give their sanction to the first two sentences; but the number is comparatively small who would read the last two sentences without feeling disposed to brand the author as a latitudinarian and unsafe guide. And yet those sentences contain the lessons which all practical experience teaches must be learned by the aggressive portion of the Church before the Gospel can take root in “all the world,” and become the spiritual life of “every creature.”
There is, we doubt not, one and only one Prophet for all times and for all nations—the immaculate Son of God; and the teachings which He inculcated contain the only principles that will regenerate humanity of all races, climes, and countries. But the Gospel, though it has been promulgated for eighteen hundred years, has, as yet, taken extensive root only among one race—the Indo-European. It is established in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and on all the islands of the sea, but, for the most part, in regions and localities occupied by different branches of the same Aryan family.
When Dean Church wishing to illustrate the ‘Influences of Christianity on National Character,’ had passed in review the Greek, Latin, and Teutonic races, he evidently felt that his subject was exhausted. Dean Merivale went as far afield as the facts would allow him to go, when after concluding his lectures on the ‘Conversion of the Roman Empire,’ he proceeded to discuss the ‘Conversion of the Northern Nations.’ Indeed, so convinced was the learned author that his two courses of lectures embraced all he could say on the subject of the spread of Christianity in the conversion of nations, that, in his preface to the second course, he remarks, that if, at some future time, he should print them together, he will probably give them the general title of the “Conversion of the Ancient Heathens.” But would such a title be strictly accurate in view of the “Ancient” Semitic, Mongolian, and Negro “Heathens” who have been left out of the lecturer’s calculations? The omission of the little word “the” from the proposed new title would probably meet the wish to have a comprehensive title, without transcending the bounds of strict accuracy.
It could not have escaped the distinguished lecturer, that only comparatively small portions of the Semitic, Mongolian, and Negro families of man have as yet embraced the religion of Jesus. And we are disposed to think that one chief reason why the progress of the Gospel among races foreign to the European has been so limited, lies in the fact that the last two sentences of Mr. Gladstone’s paragraph quoted above are not yet understood and heeded by those who may be called the missionary nations of the earth, and who, having the vigorous and dominant instincts of the Aryan race, have become providentially the instruments through which the Semitic conceptions of Deity and the Semitic inspirations of Christianity are to be spread through all nations.
The object of this paper is to trace the influence of Christianity upon the Negro Race, and to enquire how far the method of its dissemination has affected their reception of it. And our illustrations will be drawn principally from the Western world, as containing the largest portion of the Negro race who have been brought under the influence of Christianity, and especially from the United States, where the largest number of Negroes live together under the same Christian Government.
To uphold the integrity of the Christian dogma, to trace its working, and to exhibit its adaptation to human thought and human welfare, in all the varying experience of the ages, is, in my view, perhaps the noblest of all tasks which it is given to the human mind to pursue. This is the guardianship of the great fountain of human hope, happiness and virtue. But with respect to the clothing which the Gospel may take to itself, my mind has a large margin of indulgence, if not of laxity, both ways. Much is to be allowed—I can hardly say how much—to national, sectional, and personal divergencies.
This is a view to which the very highest minds in the world— the best cultivated and the most enlightened—would at once readily subscribe. By the word “dogma” Mr. Gladstone evidently means, not the petrified formula of any particular seet or race, deduced according to their view from the Word of God, but the whole system of Christianity itself, as a living organism, in esse and in posse, in its essence as well as in its capabilities and potentialities; for in the same paragraph he uses the word “Gospel” as synonymous with “dogma.” Looking at the Gospel system as a whole, it may be called, with no inconsiderable propriety, the “Christian dogma,” or that system of belief which distinguishes the Christian world from all others.
We have said that the very highest minds would readily subscribe to the view of Mr. Gladstone, for only the highest minds would cordially agree with the whole paragraph. A very large number—perhaps the whole Christian Church—would give their sanction to the first two sentences; but the number is comparatively small who would read the last two sentences without feeling disposed to brand the author as a latitudinarian and unsafe guide. And yet those sentences contain the lessons which all practical experience teaches must be learned by the aggressive portion of the Church before the Gospel can take root in “all the world,” and become the spiritual life of “every creature.”
There is, we doubt not, one and only one Prophet for all times and for all nations—the immaculate Son of God; and the teachings which He inculcated contain the only principles that will regenerate humanity of all races, climes, and countries. But the Gospel, though it has been promulgated for eighteen hundred years, has, as yet, taken extensive root only among one race—the Indo-European. It is established in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and on all the islands of the sea, but, for the most part, in regions and localities occupied by different branches of the same Aryan family.
When Dean Church wishing to illustrate the ‘Influences of Christianity on National Character,’ had passed in review the Greek, Latin, and Teutonic races, he evidently felt that his subject was exhausted. Dean Merivale went as far afield as the facts would allow him to go, when after concluding his lectures on the ‘Conversion of the Roman Empire,’ he proceeded to discuss the ‘Conversion of the Northern Nations.’ Indeed, so convinced was the learned author that his two courses of lectures embraced all he could say on the subject of the spread of Christianity in the conversion of nations, that, in his preface to the second course, he remarks, that if, at some future time, he should print them together, he will probably give them the general title of the “Conversion of the Ancient Heathens.” But would such a title be strictly accurate in view of the “Ancient” Semitic, Mongolian, and Negro “Heathens” who have been left out of the lecturer’s calculations? The omission of the little word “the” from the proposed new title would probably meet the wish to have a comprehensive title, without transcending the bounds of strict accuracy.
It could not have escaped the distinguished lecturer, that only comparatively small portions of the Semitic, Mongolian, and Negro families of man have as yet embraced the religion of Jesus. And we are disposed to think that one chief reason why the progress of the Gospel among races foreign to the European has been so limited, lies in the fact that the last two sentences of Mr. Gladstone’s paragraph quoted above are not yet understood and heeded by those who may be called the missionary nations of the earth, and who, having the vigorous and dominant instincts of the Aryan race, have become providentially the instruments through which the Semitic conceptions of Deity and the Semitic inspirations of Christianity are to be spread through all nations.
The object of this paper is to trace the influence of Christianity upon the Negro Race, and to enquire how far the method of its dissemination has affected their reception of it. And our illustrations will be drawn principally from the Western world, as containing the largest portion of the Negro race who have been brought under the influence of Christianity, and especially from the United States, where the largest number of Negroes live together under the same Christian Government.
Everybody knows how it happened that the Africans were carried in such large numbers from Africa to America; how one continent was made to furnish the labourers to build up another; how the humanity of a Romish priest, while anxious to dry up tears in America, was indifferent to unsealing their fountains in Africa. It was out of deep pity for the delicate Caribs, whom he saw groaning under the arduous physical toil of the Western hemisphere that Las Casas strove to replace them by robust and indefatigable Africans. Hence the innumerable woes which have attended the African race for the last three hundred years in Christian lands. In justice, however, to the memory of Bartolomé de las Casas, it should be stated that, before he died, he changed his mind on the subject, and declared that the captivity of the Negroes was as unjust as that of the Indians,[1] and even expressed a fear that, though he had fallen into the error of favouring the importation of black slaves into America from ignorance and goodwill, he might, after all, fail to stand excused for it before the Divine Justice.
But the tardy, though commendable, repentance of Las Casas did not arrest the flow of that blood-red stream which, from the fountain opened by his mistaken philanthropy, poured incessantly, for three hundred years, from East to West. It was not long before the transference of Negroes from Africa to the Western hemisphere assumed the importance of a national policy. Even England, under a contract with Spain, enjoyed the monopoly of the traffic in slaves for thirty years.[2]
The first slaves were landed in North America in 1620, and men whose characters were otherwise irreproachable, were induced by the habits of thought then prevailing, and by the supposed necessity and convenience of slave labour, to purchase the African captives brought to their shores. Some even of the most eminent divines were so far implicated in the error, that, with perfect ease of conscience, they held Negroes in bondage. The distinguished William Penn, the Rev. George Whitefield, of world-wide celebrity, and President Edwards, author of several standard works in theology, were slare-holders. Good and conscientious men were led away by the plausible arguments of those who, while they were busy turning to pecuniary account the benighted Africans, alleged, that they were thus being brought under the influence of the Gospel, But, according to Mr. Bancroft, there were among the colonists some far-seeing men who foresaw the mischiefs that would ultimately result from the introduction of slavery into the colonies. Virginia and South Carolina did place some restrictions upon the importation of Negroes. But the British Goverment, listening to her African, slave merchants rather than to her American colonists, not only neutralised those restrictions, but obliged the noble-hearted Oglethorpe to relax his determination that in Georgia, the colony which he founded, there should be neither slavery nor slave trade.[3]
Thus, for nearly two hundred years, Negroes were poured into North America without restriction. During six generations, large interests grew up out of the system, giving it in the eyes of those upon whom it had been entailed, a sanction and a sanctity which it was regarded as sacrilegious to question.
Of course, the slaves who were introduced during the first hundred years, we may presume, died Heathens, or with only imperfect glimpses of Christian teaching. For the Christianisation of their descendants, a system was invented which so shocked the feelings of John Wesley that, in view of its resulting enormities, he denounced American slavery as the “sum of all villanies.”
That which the early colonists of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia had opposed, having now grown into gigantic proportions, was not only apologised for by their descendants, but eulogised as eminently necessary and useful to the proper development of society; and all the religious, political, and scientific teachings of the time were not only tinged, but deeply steeped, in pro-slavery sentiments. Generations descending from Huguenot and Puritan ancestry were trained to believe that God had endowed them with the right to enslave the African for ever. And upon those Africans who became members of the Christian Church, the idea was impressed that it was their duty to submit, in everything, to their masters. Christian divines of all shades of opinion, in the South, taught this doctrine, and embodied it in books prepared specially for the instruction of the slaves—their “oral instruction,” for they were not allowed to learn to read.
For example, the Right Rev. William Meade, Bishop of the diocese of Virginia, published a book of sermons, tracts, and dialogues, for masters and slaves, and recommended them to all masters and mistresses to be used in their families. In the preface of the book, the Bishop remarks:--
The editor of this column offers it to all masters and mistresses in our Southern States, with the anxious wish and devout prayer that it may prove a blessing to themselves and their households.
But the tardy, though commendable, repentance of Las Casas did not arrest the flow of that blood-red stream which, from the fountain opened by his mistaken philanthropy, poured incessantly, for three hundred years, from East to West. It was not long before the transference of Negroes from Africa to the Western hemisphere assumed the importance of a national policy. Even England, under a contract with Spain, enjoyed the monopoly of the traffic in slaves for thirty years.[2]
The first slaves were landed in North America in 1620, and men whose characters were otherwise irreproachable, were induced by the habits of thought then prevailing, and by the supposed necessity and convenience of slave labour, to purchase the African captives brought to their shores. Some even of the most eminent divines were so far implicated in the error, that, with perfect ease of conscience, they held Negroes in bondage. The distinguished William Penn, the Rev. George Whitefield, of world-wide celebrity, and President Edwards, author of several standard works in theology, were slare-holders. Good and conscientious men were led away by the plausible arguments of those who, while they were busy turning to pecuniary account the benighted Africans, alleged, that they were thus being brought under the influence of the Gospel, But, according to Mr. Bancroft, there were among the colonists some far-seeing men who foresaw the mischiefs that would ultimately result from the introduction of slavery into the colonies. Virginia and South Carolina did place some restrictions upon the importation of Negroes. But the British Goverment, listening to her African, slave merchants rather than to her American colonists, not only neutralised those restrictions, but obliged the noble-hearted Oglethorpe to relax his determination that in Georgia, the colony which he founded, there should be neither slavery nor slave trade.[3]
Thus, for nearly two hundred years, Negroes were poured into North America without restriction. During six generations, large interests grew up out of the system, giving it in the eyes of those upon whom it had been entailed, a sanction and a sanctity which it was regarded as sacrilegious to question.
Of course, the slaves who were introduced during the first hundred years, we may presume, died Heathens, or with only imperfect glimpses of Christian teaching. For the Christianisation of their descendants, a system was invented which so shocked the feelings of John Wesley that, in view of its resulting enormities, he denounced American slavery as the “sum of all villanies.”
That which the early colonists of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia had opposed, having now grown into gigantic proportions, was not only apologised for by their descendants, but eulogised as eminently necessary and useful to the proper development of society; and all the religious, political, and scientific teachings of the time were not only tinged, but deeply steeped, in pro-slavery sentiments. Generations descending from Huguenot and Puritan ancestry were trained to believe that God had endowed them with the right to enslave the African for ever. And upon those Africans who became members of the Christian Church, the idea was impressed that it was their duty to submit, in everything, to their masters. Christian divines of all shades of opinion, in the South, taught this doctrine, and embodied it in books prepared specially for the instruction of the slaves—their “oral instruction,” for they were not allowed to learn to read.
For example, the Right Rev. William Meade, Bishop of the diocese of Virginia, published a book of sermons, tracts, and dialogues, for masters and slaves, and recommended them to all masters and mistresses to be used in their families. In the preface of the book, the Bishop remarks:--
The editor of this column offers it to all masters and mistresses in our Southern States, with the anxious wish and devout prayer that it may prove a blessing to themselves and their households.
Footnotes
1 Ser tan injusto el cautiverio de los Negros como él de los Indios,—Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature; vol. ii, chap. vi.
2 The Assiento contract stipulated that, from the first day of May, 1718, to the first day of May, 1743, the English should have the Exclusive privilege of transporting Negroes into the Spanish West Indies at the rate of four thousand eight hundred a year.
3 Bancroft’s History of the United States, chap. xxiv.
1 Ser tan injusto el cautiverio de los Negros como él de los Indios,—Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature; vol. ii, chap. vi.
2 The Assiento contract stipulated that, from the first day of May, 1718, to the first day of May, 1743, the English should have the Exclusive privilege of transporting Negroes into the Spanish West Indies at the rate of four thousand eight hundred a year.
3 Bancroft’s History of the United States, chap. xxiv.
On page 93 he says:--
Some He hath made masters and mistresses for taking care of their children and others that belong to them. . . . Some He hath made servants and slaves, to assist and work for their masters and mistresses, that provide for them; and others He hath made ministers and teachers to instruct the rest, to show them what they ought to do, and to put them in mind of their several duties.
On pages 94 and 95 he says, addressing the slaves:--
Almighty God hath been pleased to make you slaves here, and to give you nothing but labour and poverty in this world, which you are obliged to submit to, as it is His will that it should be so. Your bodies, you know, are not your own; they are at the disposal of those you belong to, &c.
Again, on page 132:--
When correction is given you, you either deserve it or you do not deserve it. But whether you really deserve it or not, it is your duty, and Almighty God requires that you bear it patiently. You may, perhaps, think that this is hard doctrine, but if you consider right you must needs think otherwise of it. Suppose, then, that you deserve correction, you cannot but say that it is just and right you should meet with it. Suppose you do not, or at least you do not deserve so much, or so severe a correction for the fault you have committed, you perhaps have escaped a great many more, and are at last paid-for it all. Or, suppose you are quite innocent of what is laid to your charge, and suffer wrongfully in that particular thing, is it not possible you may have done some other bad thing which was never discovered, and that Almighty God, who saw you doing it, would not let you escape without punishment one time or another?
A clergyman of another denomination wrote a catechism for the use of slaves, in which we find the following:--
Q. Is it right for the servant to run away, or is it right to harbour a run away?--
A. No.
Q. What did the Apostle Paul to Onesimus, who was a runaway? Did he harbour him, or send him back to his master?--
A. He sent him back to his master with a letter.[4]
A right reverend prelate tells the slave, in another work written for his “oral instruction,” that “to disobey his master is to yield to the temptation of the devil.” [5]
It will be noticed that both these works, though written for slaves, carefully conceal on the title-page the unfortunate class for whom they were intended under the softening euphemism, in the one case, of “coloured persons,” and in the other of “those who cannot read.” That Christian divines should publish books drawn from the Scripture for “slaves,” no doubt seemed to clerical, educators an incongruity which, even in those days of ardent pro-slavery views, they hesitated to perpetrate.
But the politicians were not so scrupulous. In order to uphold the system, they did not hesitate to brand with folly the founders of the Republic, and to pour contempt upon the judgment of the wisest of their statesmen.
Chancellor Harper, in his Memoir on Slavery, takes up the sentence of Jefferson, that “All men are born free and equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights” &c.; and proceeds in a most elaborate, but false and sophistical discussion, to demonstrate: that Jefferson was wrong.
The most audacious utterances we have read on this subject are those by General Hammond in his notorious Letters to Clarkson. That gallant and chivalrous gentleman says, under date of January 28th, 1845, writing from Silver Bluff, South Carolina:--
I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God himself through Moses, and approved by Christ through His Apostles. . . . . I endorse without reserve the much-abused sentiment of Governor McDuffie, that “slavery is the corner-stone of our Republican edifice;” while I repudiate as ridiculously absurd that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that “all men are born equal.” . . . Slavery is truly the “corner-stone” and foundation of every well-designed and durable Republican edifice.
Again:--
If the slave is not allowed to read the Bible, the sin rests upon the abolitionists; for they stand prepared to furnish him with a key to it, which would make it, not a book of hope, and love, and peace, but of despair, hatred, and blood; which would convert the reader, not into a Christian, but a demon.
We wonder what key would be required when such wide doors into the temple of liberty as the following stand so constantly open —Jeremiah xxxiv, 17; Matt. vii, 12; Luke iv, 18 and 19?
Nor was such teaching confined to divines and politicians. Philologists and scientific men, brought contributions from their peculiar fields to strengthen and adorn the infamous fabric whose corner-stone was slavery. John Fletcher, of Louisiana, in Studies on Slavery in Easy Lessons, published at Natchez in 1852, brings the resources of the Hebrew language to the support of his idol. He gives the public a paradigm of the Hebrew verb עֶבֶד abad, to slave, in kal, niphal, piel, pual, hiphil, hophal, hithpael; and a declension of the “factitious, euphonic segholate” noun עָ֫בֶד ebed, a slave. Messrs. Nott and Gliddon contributed to the same honourable worship the results of their scientific researches.
But these reasoners have, one and all, been easily beaten on their own fields. Not one of these writers for slavery, whether political, theological, or scientific, ever produced anything with the mark on it of original observation or genius. None of their effusions ever passed the limits of the time or place at which they were produced. Entirely local and temporary, they have added nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
Some He hath made masters and mistresses for taking care of their children and others that belong to them. . . . Some He hath made servants and slaves, to assist and work for their masters and mistresses, that provide for them; and others He hath made ministers and teachers to instruct the rest, to show them what they ought to do, and to put them in mind of their several duties.
On pages 94 and 95 he says, addressing the slaves:--
Almighty God hath been pleased to make you slaves here, and to give you nothing but labour and poverty in this world, which you are obliged to submit to, as it is His will that it should be so. Your bodies, you know, are not your own; they are at the disposal of those you belong to, &c.
Again, on page 132:--
When correction is given you, you either deserve it or you do not deserve it. But whether you really deserve it or not, it is your duty, and Almighty God requires that you bear it patiently. You may, perhaps, think that this is hard doctrine, but if you consider right you must needs think otherwise of it. Suppose, then, that you deserve correction, you cannot but say that it is just and right you should meet with it. Suppose you do not, or at least you do not deserve so much, or so severe a correction for the fault you have committed, you perhaps have escaped a great many more, and are at last paid-for it all. Or, suppose you are quite innocent of what is laid to your charge, and suffer wrongfully in that particular thing, is it not possible you may have done some other bad thing which was never discovered, and that Almighty God, who saw you doing it, would not let you escape without punishment one time or another?
A clergyman of another denomination wrote a catechism for the use of slaves, in which we find the following:--
Q. Is it right for the servant to run away, or is it right to harbour a run away?--
A. No.
Q. What did the Apostle Paul to Onesimus, who was a runaway? Did he harbour him, or send him back to his master?--
A. He sent him back to his master with a letter.[4]
A right reverend prelate tells the slave, in another work written for his “oral instruction,” that “to disobey his master is to yield to the temptation of the devil.” [5]
It will be noticed that both these works, though written for slaves, carefully conceal on the title-page the unfortunate class for whom they were intended under the softening euphemism, in the one case, of “coloured persons,” and in the other of “those who cannot read.” That Christian divines should publish books drawn from the Scripture for “slaves,” no doubt seemed to clerical, educators an incongruity which, even in those days of ardent pro-slavery views, they hesitated to perpetrate.
But the politicians were not so scrupulous. In order to uphold the system, they did not hesitate to brand with folly the founders of the Republic, and to pour contempt upon the judgment of the wisest of their statesmen.
Chancellor Harper, in his Memoir on Slavery, takes up the sentence of Jefferson, that “All men are born free and equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights” &c.; and proceeds in a most elaborate, but false and sophistical discussion, to demonstrate: that Jefferson was wrong.
The most audacious utterances we have read on this subject are those by General Hammond in his notorious Letters to Clarkson. That gallant and chivalrous gentleman says, under date of January 28th, 1845, writing from Silver Bluff, South Carolina:--
I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God himself through Moses, and approved by Christ through His Apostles. . . . . I endorse without reserve the much-abused sentiment of Governor McDuffie, that “slavery is the corner-stone of our Republican edifice;” while I repudiate as ridiculously absurd that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that “all men are born equal.” . . . Slavery is truly the “corner-stone” and foundation of every well-designed and durable Republican edifice.
Again:--
If the slave is not allowed to read the Bible, the sin rests upon the abolitionists; for they stand prepared to furnish him with a key to it, which would make it, not a book of hope, and love, and peace, but of despair, hatred, and blood; which would convert the reader, not into a Christian, but a demon.
We wonder what key would be required when such wide doors into the temple of liberty as the following stand so constantly open —Jeremiah xxxiv, 17; Matt. vii, 12; Luke iv, 18 and 19?
Nor was such teaching confined to divines and politicians. Philologists and scientific men, brought contributions from their peculiar fields to strengthen and adorn the infamous fabric whose corner-stone was slavery. John Fletcher, of Louisiana, in Studies on Slavery in Easy Lessons, published at Natchez in 1852, brings the resources of the Hebrew language to the support of his idol. He gives the public a paradigm of the Hebrew verb עֶבֶד abad, to slave, in kal, niphal, piel, pual, hiphil, hophal, hithpael; and a declension of the “factitious, euphonic segholate” noun עָ֫בֶד ebed, a slave. Messrs. Nott and Gliddon contributed to the same honourable worship the results of their scientific researches.
But these reasoners have, one and all, been easily beaten on their own fields. Not one of these writers for slavery, whether political, theological, or scientific, ever produced anything with the mark on it of original observation or genius. None of their effusions ever passed the limits of the time or place at which they were produced. Entirely local and temporary, they have added nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
Footnotes
4 Catechism of Scripture, Doctrine, and for the Oral Instruction of Coloured Persons; by C. C. Jones.—Charleston, 1845; p. 120.
5 A Catechism to be taught Orally to those who cannot Read; by Bishop Ives— New York, 1848; p.
30.
4 Catechism of Scripture, Doctrine, and for the Oral Instruction of Coloured Persons; by C. C. Jones.—Charleston, 1845; p. 120.
5 A Catechism to be taught Orally to those who cannot Read; by Bishop Ives— New York, 1848; p.
30.
At last, when Charles Sumner was hurling those thunderbolts against the system which made it tremble from its base to its apex —when he was exposing the degenerate departure of the South from every noble American tradition, and when Calhoun, the great “nullifier,” was no more, and the voice of Hayne, the brilliant and accomplished orator and politician, was silent— there came on the floor of the Senate a warrior from the South, not to hurl back in impassioned oratory, as Calhoun would have done, the charges of Sumner; not to neutralise their immediate effect by a gorgeous rhetoric, as Hayne would have done; but to appeal to brute force, and by one blow to exile the great Senator from his seat for four years.[6] Non opus est verbis, sed fustibus.
Such were the circumstances under which the Negro throughout the United States received Christianity. The Gospel of Christ was travestied and diluted before it came to him to suit the “peculiar institution” by which millions of human beings were converted into “chattels” The highest men in the South, magistrates, legislators, professors of religion, preachers of the Gospel, governors of states, gentlemen of property and standing, all united in upholding a system which every Negro felt was wrong. Yet these were the men from whom he got his religion, and whom he was obliged to regard as guides. Under such teaching and discipline, is it to be wondered at that his morality is awry—that his sense of the “dignity of human nature” is superficial—that his standard of family and social life is low and defective?
Not so much by what Christianity said as by the way in which, through their teachers, it said it, were the Negroes influenced. The teachings they received conveyed for them no clear idea or definite impression of the religion of Christ. As regards their religion, they were left less to their intellectual apprehension of the truth than to their emotional impulses. The emotions were their guide on Sunday and on Monday, in the conventicle and in the cornfield. No change was wrought upon their moral nature, for there was nothing to act upon it. Nothing was imparted from without, and nothing was checked and stifled within. The influence of the Church was exerted continually to repress—to produce absolute outward submission. Such influence, even if it had been wholesome, could not penetrate deep or mould with much force the inner working of the soul. It produced an outward conformity to the views and will of their masters, while it left the heart untouched. Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that their whole nature was taken possession of, and all its capacities for thought and feeling, for love and hope, for joy and grief, were completely under the control of their taskmasters.
Nevertheless, by that mysterious influence which is imparted to man independently of outward circumstances, to not a few of them the preaching of the Gospel, defective as was its practical exemplification, opened a new world of truth and goodness. There streamed into the darkness of their surroundings a light from the Cross of Christ, and they saw that, through suffering and affliction, there is a path to perfect rest above this world; and, in the hours of the most degrading and exhausting toil, they sang of the eternal and the unseen; so that while the scrupulous among their masters often with Jefferson “trembled for their country,” the slaves who had gained a new language and new faculties were enjoying themselves in rapturous music— often labouring and suffering all day, and singing, all night, sacred songs, which, in rude but impressive language, set forth their sad fortunes and their hopes for the future. No traveller in the South, who passed by the plantations thronged with dusky labourers, and listened to their cheerful music, could ever dream that they beheld in that suffering but joyous race the destroyers of the Southern whites. The captive Jews could not sing by the waters of Babylon, but the Negroes in the dark dungeon of American slavery made themselves harps and swept them to some of the most thrilling melodies.
From a people who were so full of music no mischief could have been apprehended, excepting by the delinquent of the drama, who “fears each bush an officer.” It is the man “who hath no music in his soul” who is fit for stratagems and treasons and all dark deeds. We do not wonder that the Westminster Review, some years ago, made the following remark: “Were we forced at this moment to search for the saints of America, we should not be surprised to find them amongst the despised bondsmen.”[7]
Saints, no doubt, there were among the bondsmen, but they became so not in consequence, but in default, and often, we may say, in defiance of, instruction. And it cannot be expected that a people brought out of savagery into contact with a new, if a higher life, would, under such circumstances, produce, as a rule, such characters as “Uncle Tom.” There have been “Uncle Toms” in the South, but they were the exceptions. As a rule, the Christianity of the Negroes is just such a grotesque and misshapen thing as the system under which they were trained is calculated to produce.
Such were the circumstances under which the Negro throughout the United States received Christianity. The Gospel of Christ was travestied and diluted before it came to him to suit the “peculiar institution” by which millions of human beings were converted into “chattels” The highest men in the South, magistrates, legislators, professors of religion, preachers of the Gospel, governors of states, gentlemen of property and standing, all united in upholding a system which every Negro felt was wrong. Yet these were the men from whom he got his religion, and whom he was obliged to regard as guides. Under such teaching and discipline, is it to be wondered at that his morality is awry—that his sense of the “dignity of human nature” is superficial—that his standard of family and social life is low and defective?
Not so much by what Christianity said as by the way in which, through their teachers, it said it, were the Negroes influenced. The teachings they received conveyed for them no clear idea or definite impression of the religion of Christ. As regards their religion, they were left less to their intellectual apprehension of the truth than to their emotional impulses. The emotions were their guide on Sunday and on Monday, in the conventicle and in the cornfield. No change was wrought upon their moral nature, for there was nothing to act upon it. Nothing was imparted from without, and nothing was checked and stifled within. The influence of the Church was exerted continually to repress—to produce absolute outward submission. Such influence, even if it had been wholesome, could not penetrate deep or mould with much force the inner working of the soul. It produced an outward conformity to the views and will of their masters, while it left the heart untouched. Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that their whole nature was taken possession of, and all its capacities for thought and feeling, for love and hope, for joy and grief, were completely under the control of their taskmasters.
Nevertheless, by that mysterious influence which is imparted to man independently of outward circumstances, to not a few of them the preaching of the Gospel, defective as was its practical exemplification, opened a new world of truth and goodness. There streamed into the darkness of their surroundings a light from the Cross of Christ, and they saw that, through suffering and affliction, there is a path to perfect rest above this world; and, in the hours of the most degrading and exhausting toil, they sang of the eternal and the unseen; so that while the scrupulous among their masters often with Jefferson “trembled for their country,” the slaves who had gained a new language and new faculties were enjoying themselves in rapturous music— often labouring and suffering all day, and singing, all night, sacred songs, which, in rude but impressive language, set forth their sad fortunes and their hopes for the future. No traveller in the South, who passed by the plantations thronged with dusky labourers, and listened to their cheerful music, could ever dream that they beheld in that suffering but joyous race the destroyers of the Southern whites. The captive Jews could not sing by the waters of Babylon, but the Negroes in the dark dungeon of American slavery made themselves harps and swept them to some of the most thrilling melodies.
From a people who were so full of music no mischief could have been apprehended, excepting by the delinquent of the drama, who “fears each bush an officer.” It is the man “who hath no music in his soul” who is fit for stratagems and treasons and all dark deeds. We do not wonder that the Westminster Review, some years ago, made the following remark: “Were we forced at this moment to search for the saints of America, we should not be surprised to find them amongst the despised bondsmen.”[7]
Saints, no doubt, there were among the bondsmen, but they became so not in consequence, but in default, and often, we may say, in defiance of, instruction. And it cannot be expected that a people brought out of savagery into contact with a new, if a higher life, would, under such circumstances, produce, as a rule, such characters as “Uncle Tom.” There have been “Uncle Toms” in the South, but they were the exceptions. As a rule, the Christianity of the Negroes is just such a grotesque and misshapen thing as the system under which they were trained is calculated to produce.
Footnotes
6 Preston S. Brooks.
7 January, 1853.
6 Preston S. Brooks.
7 January, 1853.
The Africans who were carried to the Western world were, as a general rule, of the lowest of the people in their own country. They did not fairly represent the qualities and endowments of the race. Even the traditions of their country they carried away in the most distorted form. And in the midst of their sorrows in a strange country, they constructed out of their dim recollections of what they had seen at home, a system of religion and government for themselves, which they curiously combined with what they received from their new masters; and so the elements of civilisation and barbarism—of Christianity and Heathenism—not only subsisted side by side, but, so far as the Negro was concerned, were inlaid, so to say, into each other, in a sort of inharmonious mosaic all over the Western hemisphere.
This accounts for the singular fact that a system of Heathenish worship— now rare among the tribes of West Africa—is found among the Negroes, especially in the West Indies, where, the climate being more congenial and the flora similar to the African, they could produce with greater facility the rites and practices of their native land. Canon Kingsley, in the record of his travels in the West Indies,[8] gives an account of the horrible Obeah system prevalent in some of those islands, which, allowing for the necessary exaggerations into which a writer must fall who gathers his information during a flying trip, conveys a pretty fair idea of a state of things which still lingers among the more ignorant of the Negro population of those islands, and which the Christianity they have thus far received, seems powerless to eradicate.
Since the emancipation in the United States, the defective Christian character of the Negroes of the Southern States is constantly made the theme of essay, lecture, and newspaper article. In the report of Dr. W. H. Ruffner, Superintendent of the Public Schools of Virginia, for 1874, we find the following:--
Much of the glamour with which the Negro has been covered by philanthropic zeal, acting at a distance, has passed away as knowledge has increased; but the real character of this people can be learned only from those who have long lived among them. The Southern Negroes are polite, amiable, quiet, orderly, and religious; and hence it is hard to believe that as a class they are without moral character. And yet such is the unhappy fact. . . . Occasionally a high type is manifested by individuals; and while there is a great deal of religious sincerity and earnestness among them, and whilst the style of piety is modified by the character of the religious instruction they have received, and whilst families and congregations which have enjoyed special privileges exhibit better results, yet with the masses of those who claim to be Christians, their piety is of an unintelligent, sometimes superstitious, and always spasmodic type, and it covers a multitude of sins.
The American Missionary newspaper publishes the following from a Northern teacher who is at work among the Negroes in Louisiana:--
Good teachers and preachers are very much needed in this State. I heard a preacher telling his hearers that they must go to hell, and leave their sins on the mud-sills of hell before they can say that they are born again. To prove this, he said that he would quote the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Now, what do you think he quoted? Why, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in relation to Christian’s leaving the City of Destruction, and the falling-off of his burden at the foot of the cross. The mischief of the thing was that the people appeared to believe that what he was saying was really in the Bible. What it is to be a pure Christian very few of these people understand. They profess to be religious, yet the Ten Commandments are a dead letter to them.
In the Spirit of Missions for June, 1875, the organ of the Episcopal Church in the United States, we find the following:--
It is quite time that Christian people at the North should be brought face to face with the fact that the salvation of the nation depends not only upon giving the Negro a secular education, but also upon radically reforming his notions of what religion is . . . The absence from his religion of the ethical element is a radical defect, and one that will bring the Negro and the nation to ruin together, if it be not speedily supplied.
We are less surprised at the existence of such a state of things among a people of savage ancestry who have lived two hundred years as “chattels” in a Christian land, than we are at the apparent surprise of the writers quoted above, when everybody knows the sort of school into which the Negroes were, introduced when, wild and untamed, they were brought from Africa. It will not be possible in a generation to correct the results of the radically defective teachings of such popular and influential periodicals as De Bow’s Review, the Richmond Examiner, et id genus omne. They established a system of political and social morality in which the “ethical element,” if not “absent,” was wholly distorted and caricatured—and to this system the Negro, having no other guide, endeavoured at a humble distance to conform. It will be a long time before the intelligent Negro will be able to forget the injustice done to the moral instincts of his race, while he has access to the thrilling “narratives” of such heroic and eloquent fugitives from slavery as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, Roper &c.; and he will be able to understand, if his quondam oppressors will not, why it is that, with his less favoured brother, plunder and prayer are not supposed to be incompatible; why, like the Italian brigand, he can be pious without leaving a disreputable profession.
But, even now, while white Christians in the North are shocked at the moral character of Southern Christian Negroes, they do not cease, by their practical teaching, to impress upon the minds of the blacks that there is one standard of morality for white and another for black men. The shadow of the slave system still throws such a gloom over the land, that, where the Negro is concerned, right and wrong are only indistinctly seen.
This accounts for the singular fact that a system of Heathenish worship— now rare among the tribes of West Africa—is found among the Negroes, especially in the West Indies, where, the climate being more congenial and the flora similar to the African, they could produce with greater facility the rites and practices of their native land. Canon Kingsley, in the record of his travels in the West Indies,[8] gives an account of the horrible Obeah system prevalent in some of those islands, which, allowing for the necessary exaggerations into which a writer must fall who gathers his information during a flying trip, conveys a pretty fair idea of a state of things which still lingers among the more ignorant of the Negro population of those islands, and which the Christianity they have thus far received, seems powerless to eradicate.
Since the emancipation in the United States, the defective Christian character of the Negroes of the Southern States is constantly made the theme of essay, lecture, and newspaper article. In the report of Dr. W. H. Ruffner, Superintendent of the Public Schools of Virginia, for 1874, we find the following:--
Much of the glamour with which the Negro has been covered by philanthropic zeal, acting at a distance, has passed away as knowledge has increased; but the real character of this people can be learned only from those who have long lived among them. The Southern Negroes are polite, amiable, quiet, orderly, and religious; and hence it is hard to believe that as a class they are without moral character. And yet such is the unhappy fact. . . . Occasionally a high type is manifested by individuals; and while there is a great deal of religious sincerity and earnestness among them, and whilst the style of piety is modified by the character of the religious instruction they have received, and whilst families and congregations which have enjoyed special privileges exhibit better results, yet with the masses of those who claim to be Christians, their piety is of an unintelligent, sometimes superstitious, and always spasmodic type, and it covers a multitude of sins.
The American Missionary newspaper publishes the following from a Northern teacher who is at work among the Negroes in Louisiana:--
Good teachers and preachers are very much needed in this State. I heard a preacher telling his hearers that they must go to hell, and leave their sins on the mud-sills of hell before they can say that they are born again. To prove this, he said that he would quote the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Now, what do you think he quoted? Why, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in relation to Christian’s leaving the City of Destruction, and the falling-off of his burden at the foot of the cross. The mischief of the thing was that the people appeared to believe that what he was saying was really in the Bible. What it is to be a pure Christian very few of these people understand. They profess to be religious, yet the Ten Commandments are a dead letter to them.
In the Spirit of Missions for June, 1875, the organ of the Episcopal Church in the United States, we find the following:--
It is quite time that Christian people at the North should be brought face to face with the fact that the salvation of the nation depends not only upon giving the Negro a secular education, but also upon radically reforming his notions of what religion is . . . The absence from his religion of the ethical element is a radical defect, and one that will bring the Negro and the nation to ruin together, if it be not speedily supplied.
We are less surprised at the existence of such a state of things among a people of savage ancestry who have lived two hundred years as “chattels” in a Christian land, than we are at the apparent surprise of the writers quoted above, when everybody knows the sort of school into which the Negroes were, introduced when, wild and untamed, they were brought from Africa. It will not be possible in a generation to correct the results of the radically defective teachings of such popular and influential periodicals as De Bow’s Review, the Richmond Examiner, et id genus omne. They established a system of political and social morality in which the “ethical element,” if not “absent,” was wholly distorted and caricatured—and to this system the Negro, having no other guide, endeavoured at a humble distance to conform. It will be a long time before the intelligent Negro will be able to forget the injustice done to the moral instincts of his race, while he has access to the thrilling “narratives” of such heroic and eloquent fugitives from slavery as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, Roper &c.; and he will be able to understand, if his quondam oppressors will not, why it is that, with his less favoured brother, plunder and prayer are not supposed to be incompatible; why, like the Italian brigand, he can be pious without leaving a disreputable profession.
But, even now, while white Christians in the North are shocked at the moral character of Southern Christian Negroes, they do not cease, by their practical teaching, to impress upon the minds of the blacks that there is one standard of morality for white and another for black men. The shadow of the slave system still throws such a gloom over the land, that, where the Negro is concerned, right and wrong are only indistinctly seen.
Footnotes
8 A Christmas in the West Indies.
8 A Christmas in the West Indies.
Many prominent Christians in the South still hold to the opinion that it is right to enslave the African,[9] and these exert a degree of influence upon the North which, if it does not lead them to desire a renewal of the slave system, perpetuates among them the old feeling of contempt for the Negro. All the Christianity in the country seems helpless to remedy a state of things in which the following occurrence is possible.
Professor C. H. Thompson, D.D., of Straight University, a graduate of a theological seminary, for several years a beloved pastor in Newark, New Jersey, chosen moderator of the Presbytery, of which he was the only coloured member, and whenever his turn comes appointed to examine candidates for licence in Greek and Hebrew, finds himself excluded from hotel accommodations in travelling to and from a National Congregational Church, which he has been appointed to address, because he is a Negro.
We have before us the American Citizen, a Negro newspaper, published at Lexington, Kentucky, dated February 27, 1875, containing a most touching Appeal, addressed “to the American People,” by the Bishops of the African Methodist Church, craving protection against the impositions and oppressions which they and their people suffer. They open their pathetic Address as follows:--
As Bishops of the oldest and most numerous organisation of coloured persons in the country, we beg permission to lay the distress of our people before you. Never were Christian pastors doomed to witness the despoiling of their flocks as we have been. Before freedom, we were the hapless victims of wrong, well characterised by the great Wesley as the “sum of villanies.” Since freedom, while we expected our liberty to cost us much, yet did we console ourselves with the belief that the strong arm that had shivered the chains which did fetter us would secure protection throughout the trying ordeal. But, alas, we have been doomed to miserable disappointment.
Now, as long as the sad and practical lessons suggested by the above are still impressed upon the Negro, as long as the Christianity he sees stands in such striking contrast to the Christianity of Christ, how can the “ethical element” be prominent in his religion? How can he be trained to any sense of the “dignity of human nature,” to any feeling of human brotherhood? How can he acquire unshaken faith in those great truths about God and man which his teachers would impress upon him? How can he ever rise to the recognition of a high moral ideal? How can he ever conceive a pure and lofty standard of family and social life? How can his general character be strengthened, elevated, expanded, or refined?
The advantages enjoyed by the Negro in the Western world, now that he is free, are hardly greater for the attainment of true manhood than when he was in bondage. And a far more serious difficulty lies in the way of his genuine progress than the mere physical inconveniences which his colour entails, and that is, the impossibility, in the countries of his exile, of securing a proper individual or race development. The Negro in Christian lands, however learned in books, cannot be said to have such a thing as self-education. His knowledge, when brought to the test, often fails him. And why? Because he is taught from the beginning to the end of his book-training—from the illustrated primer to the illustrated scientific treatise—not to be himself, but somebody else. We might illustrate what we mean by some of the most ludicrous and painful incidents—but this is not the place to record them— of the efforts of Christian Negroes of intelligence to force their outward appearance into, as near as possible, a resemblance to Europeans. From the lessons he every day receives, the Negro unconsciously imbibes the conviction that to be a great man he must be like the white man. He is not brought up —however he may desire it—to be the companion, the equal, the comrade of the white man, but his imitator, his ape, his parasite. To be himself in a country where everything ridicules him, is to be nothing—less, worse than nothing. To be as like the white man as possible—to copy his outward appearance, his peculiarities, his manners, the arrangement of his toilet, that is the aim of the Christian Negro—this is his aspiration. The only virtues which under such circumstances he develops are, of course, the parasitical ones. Every intelligent Negro, in the lands of his exile, must feel that he walks upon the face of God’s earth a physical and moral incongruity, and as legitimate a subject of laughter as Horace’s famous heterogeneous picture, the creation of “a sick man’s dream”:--
Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam Jungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas Undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne.
Imitation is not discipleship. The Mohammedan Negro is a much better Mohammedan than the Christian Negro is a Christian, because the Muslim Negro, as a learner, is a disciple, not an imitator. A disciple, when freed from leading-strings, may become a producer; an imitator never rises above a mere copyist. With the disciple progress is from within; the imitator grows by accretion from without. The learning acquired by a disciple gives him capacity; that gained by an imitator terminates in itself. The one becomes a capable man; the other is a mere sciolist. This explains the difference between the Mohammedan and the Christian Negro.
Professor C. H. Thompson, D.D., of Straight University, a graduate of a theological seminary, for several years a beloved pastor in Newark, New Jersey, chosen moderator of the Presbytery, of which he was the only coloured member, and whenever his turn comes appointed to examine candidates for licence in Greek and Hebrew, finds himself excluded from hotel accommodations in travelling to and from a National Congregational Church, which he has been appointed to address, because he is a Negro.
We have before us the American Citizen, a Negro newspaper, published at Lexington, Kentucky, dated February 27, 1875, containing a most touching Appeal, addressed “to the American People,” by the Bishops of the African Methodist Church, craving protection against the impositions and oppressions which they and their people suffer. They open their pathetic Address as follows:--
As Bishops of the oldest and most numerous organisation of coloured persons in the country, we beg permission to lay the distress of our people before you. Never were Christian pastors doomed to witness the despoiling of their flocks as we have been. Before freedom, we were the hapless victims of wrong, well characterised by the great Wesley as the “sum of villanies.” Since freedom, while we expected our liberty to cost us much, yet did we console ourselves with the belief that the strong arm that had shivered the chains which did fetter us would secure protection throughout the trying ordeal. But, alas, we have been doomed to miserable disappointment.
Now, as long as the sad and practical lessons suggested by the above are still impressed upon the Negro, as long as the Christianity he sees stands in such striking contrast to the Christianity of Christ, how can the “ethical element” be prominent in his religion? How can he be trained to any sense of the “dignity of human nature,” to any feeling of human brotherhood? How can he acquire unshaken faith in those great truths about God and man which his teachers would impress upon him? How can he ever rise to the recognition of a high moral ideal? How can he ever conceive a pure and lofty standard of family and social life? How can his general character be strengthened, elevated, expanded, or refined?
The advantages enjoyed by the Negro in the Western world, now that he is free, are hardly greater for the attainment of true manhood than when he was in bondage. And a far more serious difficulty lies in the way of his genuine progress than the mere physical inconveniences which his colour entails, and that is, the impossibility, in the countries of his exile, of securing a proper individual or race development. The Negro in Christian lands, however learned in books, cannot be said to have such a thing as self-education. His knowledge, when brought to the test, often fails him. And why? Because he is taught from the beginning to the end of his book-training—from the illustrated primer to the illustrated scientific treatise—not to be himself, but somebody else. We might illustrate what we mean by some of the most ludicrous and painful incidents—but this is not the place to record them— of the efforts of Christian Negroes of intelligence to force their outward appearance into, as near as possible, a resemblance to Europeans. From the lessons he every day receives, the Negro unconsciously imbibes the conviction that to be a great man he must be like the white man. He is not brought up —however he may desire it—to be the companion, the equal, the comrade of the white man, but his imitator, his ape, his parasite. To be himself in a country where everything ridicules him, is to be nothing—less, worse than nothing. To be as like the white man as possible—to copy his outward appearance, his peculiarities, his manners, the arrangement of his toilet, that is the aim of the Christian Negro—this is his aspiration. The only virtues which under such circumstances he develops are, of course, the parasitical ones. Every intelligent Negro, in the lands of his exile, must feel that he walks upon the face of God’s earth a physical and moral incongruity, and as legitimate a subject of laughter as Horace’s famous heterogeneous picture, the creation of “a sick man’s dream”:--
Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam Jungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas Undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne.
Imitation is not discipleship. The Mohammedan Negro is a much better Mohammedan than the Christian Negro is a Christian, because the Muslim Negro, as a learner, is a disciple, not an imitator. A disciple, when freed from leading-strings, may become a producer; an imitator never rises above a mere copyist. With the disciple progress is from within; the imitator grows by accretion from without. The learning acquired by a disciple gives him capacity; that gained by an imitator terminates in itself. The one becomes a capable man; the other is a mere sciolist. This explains the difference between the Mohammedan and the Christian Negro.
Footnotes
9 In the Narrative of the State of Religion issued by the Southern General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the year 1864, is a sentence which declared that it was the mission of the Southern Church to “conserve the system of African slavery,” Against this, however, the Northern Presbyterian Church earnestly protested, and still protests. Dr. Charles Hodge, the veteran professor at Princeton, celebrated for his sententious and epigrammatic utterances, embodied the indignant feeling of the North in one memorable sentence: “That since the death of Christ no such dogma stains the record of an ecclesiastical body.” Chief Justice Taney’s celebrated deoision in the Dred Scott case in 1856, that “the Negro has no rights which white men are bound to respect,” is the political counterpart of the dogma of the Southern Assembly.
9 In the Narrative of the State of Religion issued by the Southern General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the year 1864, is a sentence which declared that it was the mission of the Southern Church to “conserve the system of African slavery,” Against this, however, the Northern Presbyterian Church earnestly protested, and still protests. Dr. Charles Hodge, the veteran professor at Princeton, celebrated for his sententious and epigrammatic utterances, embodied the indignant feeling of the North in one memorable sentence: “That since the death of Christ no such dogma stains the record of an ecclesiastical body.” Chief Justice Taney’s celebrated deoision in the Dred Scott case in 1856, that “the Negro has no rights which white men are bound to respect,” is the political counterpart of the dogma of the Southern Assembly.
Since the proclamation of freedom in the United States, however, the effect of the schools which have been thrown open to the Negro is becoming more and more palpable. We observe in the discussions in American newspapers published by Negroes, an incipient movement towards mental emancipation. But the effect of their educational training must, for some time yet, be chiefly negative or preparatory—in removing the pressure of external evils. in dissipating the superstitions and prejudices of both races, and so opening a wider sphere for the free play and development of the moral and spiritual nature of the Negro. But as his mind is strengthened and expanded by the wide and inviting prospects which continually open before him, he will feel the need of increasing measures of freedom, social and ecclesiastical as well as political. By the nature of things, he can never enjoy this complete emancipation in the United States. When this period arrives, when the Negro begins to feel the need of wider scope for the full expansion of the inherent energies of his mind, he will seek refuge in his Fatherland, for entrance into which Liberia is the most promising door.
We have followed with deep interest a discussion, which has been going on recently in the leading coloured journals in the United States, on the relative claims of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches to the respect and allegiance of the Negro. The Rev. John M. Brown, a Negro of high culture, and a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, wrote an article, which appeared in the Independent newspaper, warning the coloured people against the aggressions upon their ranks of the Roman Catholics. To this article George T. Downing of Washington, said to be “a coloured gentleman of education, property, and influence among his people, and a special friend of the late Senator Sumner,” wrote an able and vigorous reply, in which, in the course of a long argument, he says:--
For one, I, as a coloured man, would ask the Independent what there is in the Catholic Church to repel me from its communion? I would like to ask also, what there is in monarchy more hideous, more to be dreaded, than this cruel spirit of caste, which thus finds sympathy and protection under a Protestant Republic? . . . The Protestant Church proclaims the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, and then tramples upon that which it professes to revere . . . . If I were a Russian subject to-day, I should enjoy more liberty under the Empire of the Czar than I do as a coloured man in Republican America. I should possess more real equality, more justice, more protection for all that constitutes “life,” than I now possess as an American citizen. . . . I remember when my own State slammed the door of its schools in the face of my little ones (schools that my taxes helped to support), that the Catholic Church opened wide its school doors to those little ones. I remember gratefully that my children, thus excluded from Protestant schools, partook freely, on terms of equality, of the blessings of education and kindly sympathy thus extended . . . The Catholic Church has to-day in its schools over 300,000 coloured children. It is educating coloured youth at Rome for its missionary work in America and Africa. In the West Indies, Central America, and South America, nearly 9,000,000 of Africans acknowledge its faith.[10]
Whatever may be the ecclesiastical connection of the thoughtful and cultivated Protestant Negro—though he may ex animo subscribe to the tenets of the particular denomination to which he belongs, as approaching nearest to the teachings of God’s Word— yet he cannot read History without feeling that the Negro race owes a deep debt of gratitude to the Roman Catholic Church. The only Christian Negroes who have had the power successfully to throw off oppression, and maintain their position as freemen, were Roman Catholic Negroes—the Haïtians; and the greatest Negro the Christian world has yet produced was a Roman Catholic— Toussaint Louverture.
In the ecclesiastical system of modern, as was the case in the military system of ancient Rome, there seems to be a place for all races and colours--
Colchus an Assyrius, Thebis nutritus an Argis.
At Rome, the names of Negroes, males and females, who have been distinguished for piety and good works are found in the calendar under the designation of “saints.” Protestantism has no Negro saints. Mr. Ticknor tells us of a Negro at Granada, in the sixteenth century, who, brought as an infant from Africa, rose by his learning to be Professor of Latin and Greek in the school attached to the Cathedral of Granada. He is the same person noticed by Cervantes as “el Negro Juan Latino,” in a poem prefixed to Don Quixote. He wrote a Latin poem in two books. He was married to a lady of Granada, who fell in love with him, as Eloisa did with Abelard, while he was teaching her; and after his death his wife and children erected a monument to his memory in the church of Sta. Ana, in that city, inscribing it with an epitaph, in which he is styled “Filius Ethiopium, prolesque nigerrima patrum.”[11] No such record occurs in the annals of Protestantism. In what Protestant university would a Negro professor be tolerated? The most distinguished Negro produced by a Protestant country, of whom we have read, was Benjamin Banneker; and the only literary recognition he ever received was in an appreciative letter from Thomas Jefferson, the reputed infidel.
We have followed with deep interest a discussion, which has been going on recently in the leading coloured journals in the United States, on the relative claims of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches to the respect and allegiance of the Negro. The Rev. John M. Brown, a Negro of high culture, and a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, wrote an article, which appeared in the Independent newspaper, warning the coloured people against the aggressions upon their ranks of the Roman Catholics. To this article George T. Downing of Washington, said to be “a coloured gentleman of education, property, and influence among his people, and a special friend of the late Senator Sumner,” wrote an able and vigorous reply, in which, in the course of a long argument, he says:--
For one, I, as a coloured man, would ask the Independent what there is in the Catholic Church to repel me from its communion? I would like to ask also, what there is in monarchy more hideous, more to be dreaded, than this cruel spirit of caste, which thus finds sympathy and protection under a Protestant Republic? . . . The Protestant Church proclaims the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, and then tramples upon that which it professes to revere . . . . If I were a Russian subject to-day, I should enjoy more liberty under the Empire of the Czar than I do as a coloured man in Republican America. I should possess more real equality, more justice, more protection for all that constitutes “life,” than I now possess as an American citizen. . . . I remember when my own State slammed the door of its schools in the face of my little ones (schools that my taxes helped to support), that the Catholic Church opened wide its school doors to those little ones. I remember gratefully that my children, thus excluded from Protestant schools, partook freely, on terms of equality, of the blessings of education and kindly sympathy thus extended . . . The Catholic Church has to-day in its schools over 300,000 coloured children. It is educating coloured youth at Rome for its missionary work in America and Africa. In the West Indies, Central America, and South America, nearly 9,000,000 of Africans acknowledge its faith.[10]
Whatever may be the ecclesiastical connection of the thoughtful and cultivated Protestant Negro—though he may ex animo subscribe to the tenets of the particular denomination to which he belongs, as approaching nearest to the teachings of God’s Word— yet he cannot read History without feeling that the Negro race owes a deep debt of gratitude to the Roman Catholic Church. The only Christian Negroes who have had the power successfully to throw off oppression, and maintain their position as freemen, were Roman Catholic Negroes—the Haïtians; and the greatest Negro the Christian world has yet produced was a Roman Catholic— Toussaint Louverture.
In the ecclesiastical system of modern, as was the case in the military system of ancient Rome, there seems to be a place for all races and colours--
Colchus an Assyrius, Thebis nutritus an Argis.
At Rome, the names of Negroes, males and females, who have been distinguished for piety and good works are found in the calendar under the designation of “saints.” Protestantism has no Negro saints. Mr. Ticknor tells us of a Negro at Granada, in the sixteenth century, who, brought as an infant from Africa, rose by his learning to be Professor of Latin and Greek in the school attached to the Cathedral of Granada. He is the same person noticed by Cervantes as “el Negro Juan Latino,” in a poem prefixed to Don Quixote. He wrote a Latin poem in two books. He was married to a lady of Granada, who fell in love with him, as Eloisa did with Abelard, while he was teaching her; and after his death his wife and children erected a monument to his memory in the church of Sta. Ana, in that city, inscribing it with an epitaph, in which he is styled “Filius Ethiopium, prolesque nigerrima patrum.”[11] No such record occurs in the annals of Protestantism. In what Protestant university would a Negro professor be tolerated? The most distinguished Negro produced by a Protestant country, of whom we have read, was Benjamin Banneker; and the only literary recognition he ever received was in an appreciative letter from Thomas Jefferson, the reputed infidel.
Footnotes
10 Several adverse criticisms have appeared from influential quarters upon Mr, Downing's position, but we find him, in his latest utterances, reaffirming his views as follows:—“I am fully persuaded that a general alliance, on the part of the coloured people of America, with the Catholic Church of America, would be the most speedy and effective agency to break down American caste, based on colour.”
11 Tioknor’s History of Spanish Literature, vol. ii, p. 582.
10 Several adverse criticisms have appeared from influential quarters upon Mr, Downing's position, but we find him, in his latest utterances, reaffirming his views as follows:—“I am fully persuaded that a general alliance, on the part of the coloured people of America, with the Catholic Church of America, would be the most speedy and effective agency to break down American caste, based on colour.”
11 Tioknor’s History of Spanish Literature, vol. ii, p. 582.
It is said that in all the histories of Brazil the name of Henry Diaz, the distinguished Negro general, is extolled. The Portuguese historian, Borros, says that Negroes are, in his opinion, preferable to Swiss soldiers, whose reputation for bravery has generally stood high. In 1703 the blacks took arms for the defence of Guadaloupe, and were more useful than all the rest of the French troops. At the same time they bravely defended Martinique against the English. When and where has there ever been a Negro general in a Protestant army? If it is asked why Protestant Negro soldiers are not equally efficient—why the West India troops did not distinguish themselves in the recent Ashantee war—we have no other reply than the query of the poet:
Quis enim virtutem amplectitur ipsam Præmia si tollas?
The Negro, under Protestant rule, is kept in a state of such tutelage and irresponsibility as can scarcely fail to make him constantly dependent and useless whenever, thrown upon himself, he has to meet an emergency.
The Deputy for the colony of Martinique in the French National Assembly in 1872 was M. Pory-Papy, a Negro. The idea of representing the British colonies in the House of Commons is often discussed. If it should ever be realised, would the people of Jamaica and Barbadoes be as liberal and enlightened as those of Martinique? For the present, we fear not.
We saw published some years ago the “Bill of Sale of an American Clergyman.” This clergyman was a Negro, who on account of his learning had received from a German university the degree of D.D. He was a minister of one of the leading Protestant denominations in the United States; but he was a “chattel”—a fugitive from slavery. South of Mason and Dixon’s line he would have had neither name nor character. His German diploma would have been no more than so much waste paper. His liberty had to be paid for in gold before he could become a man. We question whether such a thing has ever occurred, or could ever occur, under the administration of the Roman Catholic Church.[12]
The American nation, by the force of its peculiar circumstances and the genius of its political institutions, and, perhaps, also from its composite character, is far more advanced in its dealing with the Negro than is the mother country. In Church and State, laws are being passed giving him larger measures of freedom.
The American Episcopal Church has recently consecrated a pure Negro as Bishop of Haïti. A curious but significant circumstance occurred in the Episcopal Convention held in New York in October, 1874, at which it was decided to consecrate this Negro Bishop. The only Episcopal voice raised during the discussion of the subject, in a tone at all dissentient, was that of Dr. Courtenay, the English Bishop of Jamaica, who, in the course of his remarks, among other things said:--
We have not, as yet, in Jamaica, one priest of purely African race. . . . . At the present moment no Negro in Holy Orders could command that respect in Jamaica which a white priest could command. Whether this condition of affairs in Jamaica is to control the position in Hayti is another question.[13]
Now, the question that must arise is: Why is it that, after two hundred years’ residence in Christian Jamaica, and after forty years of freedom, the Negro population, so largely outnumbering the whites, have not been able to produce one priest? Why is it that, “at the present moment, no Negro in Holy Orders could command that respect in Jamaica which a white priest could command?” Is this a creditable state of things, after so many years of Christianising effort? Is not this state of things owing to that peculiar defect in the machinery and administration of the Anglican Church noticed by Lord Macaulay in his review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, and which he says gives her less-elasticity and less assimilating power than her Roman ancestor?
An able writer on Jamaica, in the Quarterly Review for July, 1875, reveals the cause of the backwardness of the Negro in that island—it lies in the strong Anglo-Saxon prejudice against his elevation. Though the Reviewer writes with a degree of candour, sobriety, and generosity which it is refreshing to see in these days-of sensationalism, yet he could not repress his instinctive Saxon aversion to the full manhood and equality, intellectual and social, of the Negro. He says (p. 72) with remarkable naïveté, as if he were writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, or in defence of the Assiento Contract: “The cane-field, the plantation, the provision ground, and the pasture-land, not [even] the work-shop or the engine-room, are the African’s heritage.”
On page 44 the writer had remarked with justice that “the Negroes have given unmistakable evidence of a notable and constantly increasing amelioration in every respect, moral and intellectual, no less than physical.”
Now, we ask, if the Negro is “constantly” improving in those respects, why relegate him to the “cane-field?” Why wish to confine him to menial occupations if he has the ability to perform higher work? Is his colour to be the excuse for always keeping him in a state of degradation? If such be the case—if such is the teaching which is sought to be impressed by able reviewers and by Colonial Bishops upon the British public at home and in Jamaica— then two hundred years more will roll round and the Bishop Courtenay of that day will have again to announce that “there is not, as yet, one priest of purely African race in Jamaica.”
Quis enim virtutem amplectitur ipsam Præmia si tollas?
The Negro, under Protestant rule, is kept in a state of such tutelage and irresponsibility as can scarcely fail to make him constantly dependent and useless whenever, thrown upon himself, he has to meet an emergency.
The Deputy for the colony of Martinique in the French National Assembly in 1872 was M. Pory-Papy, a Negro. The idea of representing the British colonies in the House of Commons is often discussed. If it should ever be realised, would the people of Jamaica and Barbadoes be as liberal and enlightened as those of Martinique? For the present, we fear not.
We saw published some years ago the “Bill of Sale of an American Clergyman.” This clergyman was a Negro, who on account of his learning had received from a German university the degree of D.D. He was a minister of one of the leading Protestant denominations in the United States; but he was a “chattel”—a fugitive from slavery. South of Mason and Dixon’s line he would have had neither name nor character. His German diploma would have been no more than so much waste paper. His liberty had to be paid for in gold before he could become a man. We question whether such a thing has ever occurred, or could ever occur, under the administration of the Roman Catholic Church.[12]
The American nation, by the force of its peculiar circumstances and the genius of its political institutions, and, perhaps, also from its composite character, is far more advanced in its dealing with the Negro than is the mother country. In Church and State, laws are being passed giving him larger measures of freedom.
The American Episcopal Church has recently consecrated a pure Negro as Bishop of Haïti. A curious but significant circumstance occurred in the Episcopal Convention held in New York in October, 1874, at which it was decided to consecrate this Negro Bishop. The only Episcopal voice raised during the discussion of the subject, in a tone at all dissentient, was that of Dr. Courtenay, the English Bishop of Jamaica, who, in the course of his remarks, among other things said:--
We have not, as yet, in Jamaica, one priest of purely African race. . . . . At the present moment no Negro in Holy Orders could command that respect in Jamaica which a white priest could command. Whether this condition of affairs in Jamaica is to control the position in Hayti is another question.[13]
Now, the question that must arise is: Why is it that, after two hundred years’ residence in Christian Jamaica, and after forty years of freedom, the Negro population, so largely outnumbering the whites, have not been able to produce one priest? Why is it that, “at the present moment, no Negro in Holy Orders could command that respect in Jamaica which a white priest could command?” Is this a creditable state of things, after so many years of Christianising effort? Is not this state of things owing to that peculiar defect in the machinery and administration of the Anglican Church noticed by Lord Macaulay in his review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, and which he says gives her less-elasticity and less assimilating power than her Roman ancestor?
An able writer on Jamaica, in the Quarterly Review for July, 1875, reveals the cause of the backwardness of the Negro in that island—it lies in the strong Anglo-Saxon prejudice against his elevation. Though the Reviewer writes with a degree of candour, sobriety, and generosity which it is refreshing to see in these days-of sensationalism, yet he could not repress his instinctive Saxon aversion to the full manhood and equality, intellectual and social, of the Negro. He says (p. 72) with remarkable naïveté, as if he were writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, or in defence of the Assiento Contract: “The cane-field, the plantation, the provision ground, and the pasture-land, not [even] the work-shop or the engine-room, are the African’s heritage.”
On page 44 the writer had remarked with justice that “the Negroes have given unmistakable evidence of a notable and constantly increasing amelioration in every respect, moral and intellectual, no less than physical.”
Now, we ask, if the Negro is “constantly” improving in those respects, why relegate him to the “cane-field?” Why wish to confine him to menial occupations if he has the ability to perform higher work? Is his colour to be the excuse for always keeping him in a state of degradation? If such be the case—if such is the teaching which is sought to be impressed by able reviewers and by Colonial Bishops upon the British public at home and in Jamaica— then two hundred years more will roll round and the Bishop Courtenay of that day will have again to announce that “there is not, as yet, one priest of purely African race in Jamaica.”
Footnotes
12 The documents connected with the sale and manumission of Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, D.D., are published in an appendix to Theodore Parker’s Additional Speeches, vol, xi.
13 The Church Journal, New York, Oct. 29, 1874.
12 The documents connected with the sale and manumission of Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, D.D., are published in an appendix to Theodore Parker’s Additional Speeches, vol, xi.
13 The Church Journal, New York, Oct. 29, 1874.
But does it not occur to the learned reviewer that the destiny of man, though he be a Negro, may include higher spheres of labour than the “cane- field,” and higher purposes than to produce sugars, raise potatoes and rear stock? And may it not be worthwhile to consider, if only briefly, whether the Negro may not lend something to the intellectual as well as moral resources of an island where, for generations, he has been confined to the labour of the beasts that perish?
This leads us to call attention to another remarkable fact which has struck us in our researches—viz., that the defenders of the Negro during the days of his bondage, and the advocates of his full manhood and equality now that he is free, are, as a rule, found among those who are not regarded as orthodox in the Christian Church. Not the Evangelical churches in the United States, but the Unitarian, have furnished the ablest and most prominent defenders of the slave. The Channings, Theodore Parkers, Garrisons, Wendell Phillipses, Emersons, Longfellows, have preached the most celebrated sermons, written the most-brilliant essays, delivered the most stirring lectures, and composed the most touching poems on behalf of the oppressed Negro. American Evangelicalism cannot show such an array of first-class literature in his favour.
In England, not the Edinburgh—at least, since the days of Jeffrey, Brougham and Macaulay; not the Quarterly, but the Westminster Review, has been the constant and uncompromising defender of the Negro. It has never joined in the general merriment of Christian civilisation at his expense. When certain portions of the literary world were in a buzz of gleeful amusement at the attacks made by Mr. Carlyle on the Negro, in 1849,[14] the Westminster Review did not participate in the roar of laughter, but, on the contrary, administered the following timely and touching rebuke:--
For the first time in the sad history of his race, the good name of the Negro, his character as a man, had become of value to him—for the “chattel” has neither name nor character. Was it generous, then, of the greatest master of sarcasm of his age—of the first portrait painter of any age—to welcome into civilisation this—its long-excluded guest, with nicknames and caricatures? to brand him with the opprobrium of idleness, to give him a bad character as a servant because his master was wanting in the faculty of mastership—was wanting in wisdom and justice—was himself wanting in industry, in the energy needed to work out the difficulties, and supply the demands of his changed position?[15]
Who would say that this able review is not entitled to bear on its title-page that noble sentiment of Goëthe—“Wahrheitsliebe zeigt sich darin, dass man überall das Gute zu finden und zu schätzen weiss” (Love of truth shows itself in this, that one always knows how to find and cherish that which is good)— which the Anglo-Saxon, from his peculiar temperament, perhaps, does not, as a rule, exemplify in his dealings with foreign races—a defect which unfits him, in a great degree, as an instrument in the work of reconstructing fallen humanity in distant lands?
On the other hand, professors of orthodox Christianity do not hesitate occasionally to indulge in a chuckle at the expense of “Quashee.”
Lord Macaulay has noticed this divorce between precept and practice— however it is to be accounted for—in professing Christians, as contrasted with the proceedings of men who paraded their dislike and opposition to the Christian faith. Speaking of the sect of philosophers which arose in Paris in the last century, Lord Macaulay says:--
While they assailed Christianity with a rancour and unfairness disgraceful to men who called themselves philosophers, they yet had, in far greater measure than their opponents, that charity towards men of all classes and races which Christianity enjoins. Religious persecution, judicial torture, arbitrary imprisonment, the unnecessary multiplication of capital punishments, the delay and chicanery of tribunals, the exactions of farmers of the revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant subjects of their lively satire and eloquent disquisitions. . . . . The ethical and dogmatical parts of the Gospel were unhappily turned against each other. On one side, was a Church boasting of the purity of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but disgraced by the massacre of St. Bartholomew, by the murder of the best of kings, by the war of Cevennes, by the destruction of Port Royal. On the other side, was a sect laughing at the Scriptures, shooting out the tongue at the sacrament, but ready to encounter principalities and powers in the cause of justice, mercy and toleration.[16]
Such are the curious facts which history unfolds. And what do they teach? Only that the best and holiest of men are notinfallible—not perfect—only what the Apostle Paul announced eighteen hundred years ago—“We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”
Nevertheless, because the “treasure” does exist, notwithstanding the base and humble material of the “vessel,” the Negro race is largely indebted to instruments who, in spite of themselves, have been the means of conveying to thousands of Africans a knowledge of the true God. The annals of orthodox Christianity are graced with innumerable names of champions of the Negro.
The names and brilliant efforts of the Wilberforces, Buxtons, Venns, Gurneys, in England; of the Beechers, Cheevers, Finneys, Whittiers, Stowes, in America, can never be forgotten. And if they could have infused into their adherents and followers the lofty philanthropic spirit which actuated them—if they could have imparted more of their elevated and generous enthusiasm — the condition of the Christian Negro would be far different from what it now is. But notwithstanding all disadvantages, the influences of direct Christian doctrine were silently infiltrating themselves into the Negro minds; and though, in their suffering, comparisons at times glanced through their minds; though they could not help often making contrasts which were not always favourable to their own church; still they understood that the conduct pursued by their teachers towards them was not only not dictated by the religion they professed, but was in opposition to its teachings; hence the singular fact is patent, that, wherever Negroes exist in large numbers, in Protestant countries, they are, for the most part, members of the orthodox denominations. The only ecclesiastical organisation developed among the Negroes in the United States, which nearly copes in numbers, wealth and aggressive power with the most favoured religious sects of the land, is the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[17] And we are persuaded that the form of Christianity which will be introduced into Africa by Christian Negroes from abroad will be Protestantism of the orthodox stamp.
“Whatever, then, the shortcomings of our teachers, they have been the instruments of introducing large numbers of us into the Kingdom of God. The lessons they have taught us, from their uplifting effect upon thousands of the race, we have no doubt contain the elements of imperishable truth, and make their appeal to some deep and inextinguishable consciousness of the soul.
While, therefore, we recognise defects—a discrepancy, at times, on their part between precept and practice—we cannot withhold from them the tribute of our respect and gratitude. In no case would we apply the harsh sentence of the great Italian poet towards his teacher, but we may address to them these magnificent and touching words of that great master of song:--
Chè in la mente m’ è fitta, ed or m’ accuora La cara e buona imagine paterna Di voi, quando . . . .
M’ insegnavate come 1’ uo m s’ eterna: E quant’ io 1’ abbo in grado, mentre io vivo Convien che nella mia lingua si scerna.[18]
This leads us to call attention to another remarkable fact which has struck us in our researches—viz., that the defenders of the Negro during the days of his bondage, and the advocates of his full manhood and equality now that he is free, are, as a rule, found among those who are not regarded as orthodox in the Christian Church. Not the Evangelical churches in the United States, but the Unitarian, have furnished the ablest and most prominent defenders of the slave. The Channings, Theodore Parkers, Garrisons, Wendell Phillipses, Emersons, Longfellows, have preached the most celebrated sermons, written the most-brilliant essays, delivered the most stirring lectures, and composed the most touching poems on behalf of the oppressed Negro. American Evangelicalism cannot show such an array of first-class literature in his favour.
In England, not the Edinburgh—at least, since the days of Jeffrey, Brougham and Macaulay; not the Quarterly, but the Westminster Review, has been the constant and uncompromising defender of the Negro. It has never joined in the general merriment of Christian civilisation at his expense. When certain portions of the literary world were in a buzz of gleeful amusement at the attacks made by Mr. Carlyle on the Negro, in 1849,[14] the Westminster Review did not participate in the roar of laughter, but, on the contrary, administered the following timely and touching rebuke:--
For the first time in the sad history of his race, the good name of the Negro, his character as a man, had become of value to him—for the “chattel” has neither name nor character. Was it generous, then, of the greatest master of sarcasm of his age—of the first portrait painter of any age—to welcome into civilisation this—its long-excluded guest, with nicknames and caricatures? to brand him with the opprobrium of idleness, to give him a bad character as a servant because his master was wanting in the faculty of mastership—was wanting in wisdom and justice—was himself wanting in industry, in the energy needed to work out the difficulties, and supply the demands of his changed position?[15]
Who would say that this able review is not entitled to bear on its title-page that noble sentiment of Goëthe—“Wahrheitsliebe zeigt sich darin, dass man überall das Gute zu finden und zu schätzen weiss” (Love of truth shows itself in this, that one always knows how to find and cherish that which is good)— which the Anglo-Saxon, from his peculiar temperament, perhaps, does not, as a rule, exemplify in his dealings with foreign races—a defect which unfits him, in a great degree, as an instrument in the work of reconstructing fallen humanity in distant lands?
On the other hand, professors of orthodox Christianity do not hesitate occasionally to indulge in a chuckle at the expense of “Quashee.”
Lord Macaulay has noticed this divorce between precept and practice— however it is to be accounted for—in professing Christians, as contrasted with the proceedings of men who paraded their dislike and opposition to the Christian faith. Speaking of the sect of philosophers which arose in Paris in the last century, Lord Macaulay says:--
While they assailed Christianity with a rancour and unfairness disgraceful to men who called themselves philosophers, they yet had, in far greater measure than their opponents, that charity towards men of all classes and races which Christianity enjoins. Religious persecution, judicial torture, arbitrary imprisonment, the unnecessary multiplication of capital punishments, the delay and chicanery of tribunals, the exactions of farmers of the revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant subjects of their lively satire and eloquent disquisitions. . . . . The ethical and dogmatical parts of the Gospel were unhappily turned against each other. On one side, was a Church boasting of the purity of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but disgraced by the massacre of St. Bartholomew, by the murder of the best of kings, by the war of Cevennes, by the destruction of Port Royal. On the other side, was a sect laughing at the Scriptures, shooting out the tongue at the sacrament, but ready to encounter principalities and powers in the cause of justice, mercy and toleration.[16]
Such are the curious facts which history unfolds. And what do they teach? Only that the best and holiest of men are notinfallible—not perfect—only what the Apostle Paul announced eighteen hundred years ago—“We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”
Nevertheless, because the “treasure” does exist, notwithstanding the base and humble material of the “vessel,” the Negro race is largely indebted to instruments who, in spite of themselves, have been the means of conveying to thousands of Africans a knowledge of the true God. The annals of orthodox Christianity are graced with innumerable names of champions of the Negro.
The names and brilliant efforts of the Wilberforces, Buxtons, Venns, Gurneys, in England; of the Beechers, Cheevers, Finneys, Whittiers, Stowes, in America, can never be forgotten. And if they could have infused into their adherents and followers the lofty philanthropic spirit which actuated them—if they could have imparted more of their elevated and generous enthusiasm — the condition of the Christian Negro would be far different from what it now is. But notwithstanding all disadvantages, the influences of direct Christian doctrine were silently infiltrating themselves into the Negro minds; and though, in their suffering, comparisons at times glanced through their minds; though they could not help often making contrasts which were not always favourable to their own church; still they understood that the conduct pursued by their teachers towards them was not only not dictated by the religion they professed, but was in opposition to its teachings; hence the singular fact is patent, that, wherever Negroes exist in large numbers, in Protestant countries, they are, for the most part, members of the orthodox denominations. The only ecclesiastical organisation developed among the Negroes in the United States, which nearly copes in numbers, wealth and aggressive power with the most favoured religious sects of the land, is the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[17] And we are persuaded that the form of Christianity which will be introduced into Africa by Christian Negroes from abroad will be Protestantism of the orthodox stamp.
“Whatever, then, the shortcomings of our teachers, they have been the instruments of introducing large numbers of us into the Kingdom of God. The lessons they have taught us, from their uplifting effect upon thousands of the race, we have no doubt contain the elements of imperishable truth, and make their appeal to some deep and inextinguishable consciousness of the soul.
While, therefore, we recognise defects—a discrepancy, at times, on their part between precept and practice—we cannot withhold from them the tribute of our respect and gratitude. In no case would we apply the harsh sentence of the great Italian poet towards his teacher, but we may address to them these magnificent and touching words of that great master of song:--
Chè in la mente m’ è fitta, ed or m’ accuora La cara e buona imagine paterna Di voi, quando . . . .
M’ insegnavate come 1’ uo m s’ eterna: E quant’ io 1’ abbo in grado, mentre io vivo Convien che nella mia lingua si scerna.[18]
Footnotes
14 ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,’ Fraser’s Magazine, December, 1849.
15 Westminster Review, April, 1853.
16 Review of Ranke's History of the Popes.
17 See Tanner’s Apology for African Methodism in the United States.
18 Inferno, xv. In my memory is fixed, and now goes to my heart, the dear, kind, paternal image of you, when you taught me how man may become immortal. And, while I live, it becomes my tongue to show what gratitude I have for it.
14 ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,’ Fraser’s Magazine, December, 1849.
15 Westminster Review, April, 1853.
16 Review of Ranke's History of the Popes.
17 See Tanner’s Apology for African Methodism in the United States.
18 Inferno, xv. In my memory is fixed, and now goes to my heart, the dear, kind, paternal image of you, when you taught me how man may become immortal. And, while I live, it becomes my tongue to show what gratitude I have for it.
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