Part 69

Truth is stranger than fiction. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom" was more than a character of fiction. He was a real representative of the Christian slave. Recall that scene between Cassy and Uncle Tom. Unsuccessful in her attempts to urge him to kill their inhuman master, Cassy determines to do it herself. With flashing eyes, her blood boiling with indignation long suppressed, the much-abused Creole woman exclaims: "His time's come. I'll have his heart's blood!" "No, no, no," says Uncle Tom; "No, ye poor lost soul, that ye must not do! Our Lord never shed no blood but his own, and that he poured out for us when we was his enemies. The good Lord help us to follow his steps and love our enemies." Uncle Tom's words are not unworthy of immortality.

"Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good; Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."

Humility, fidelity, patience, large-heartedness, love--this is Africa's contribution to Christianity. If the contribution of the Saxon is Pauline, that of the African is Johanine. Paul, with his consuming energy, carrying the Gospel to the uttermost parts, stands for the white man; John, the man of love, leaning on his Master's bosom, is typical of the black. The white man and the black are contrasts, not contraries; complementary opposites, not irreconcilable opponents.

The Jew has given us ethics; the Greek, philosophy; the Roman, law; the Teuton, liberty. These the Saxon combines. But the African--"latest called of nations, called to the crown of thorns, the scourge, the bloody sweat, the cross of agony"--the African, I say, has the deep, gushing wealth of love which is yet to move the great heart of humanity.

FIFTH PAPER.

THE NEGRO AS A CHRISTIAN.

BY REV. S. KERR.

REV. S. KERR.

To give anything like a true sketch of Mr. Kerr's life and labors both in and out of the ministry would fill a good-sized volume rather than a page of this book, as his life has been replete with thrilling, romantic incidents. The Rev. Mr. Kerr graduated with honors, having received the degree of A. B. from Rawden College, Leeds, England. He returned at once to the West Indies, where he labored three years.

In 1859 he did extensive missionary work in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where, in 1860, he accepted the appointment of Registrar of Births and Deaths. In 1863 he accepted the appointment of Assistant Master of the Government Schools at Grand Turk, and was afterwards appointed Head Master. In 1864 he filled the dual role of Inspector of Schools and missionary, and he passed unscathed through the great hurricane of 1866 which devastated the whole colony, destroyed all the schools and public buildings, as well as 2,500 dwelling houses, including Mr. Kerr's personal property. In 1867 he was sent as missionary to Hayti, where, as everywhere, he did good work. In 1873 he was appointed professor in the National Lyceum College for boys and young ladies, where he did effective and extensive missionary work in Cape Hatien, Grande Riviere and Dondon, and maintained considerable influence with the Haytien officials and authorities.

In 1880 he was advanced to the Priesthood of the Episcopal Church of America, by the Rt. Rev. J. Th. Holly, D. D., LL. D., Bishop of Hayti. In 1882 he was delegated to represent the Episcopal Church in the United States, and to collect funds for the building of the same in Hayti. On landing in New York, his reception by Bishop Horatio Potter was cordial in the extreme--the same by Bishops Littlejohn, of Long Island; T. A. Starkey, of Northern New Jersey; T. M. Clark, of Warwick, R. I.; M. A. De Wolf Howe, Central Pennsylvania; William C. Doane, Albany; Alfred Lee, Primate, Delaware; W. B. Stevens, Pennsylvania; H. A. Neely, of Maine; A. C. Coxe, Western New York. He occupied the pulpits of the leading Episcopal Churches in New York--Old Trinity, Grace Church, St. Chrysostom's, St. Paul's, St. Philip's and others. The leading churches in Brooklyn, Yonkers, Newport, R. I., Newark, N. J., Orange, N. J., Syracuse, Saratoga Springs, Utica, Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Newburg, Poughkeepsie, Sing Sing, Barrytown, Tarrytown, Philadelphia, Germantown, Ashebourne, Reading, Cheltenham and many others.

In 1883 be was sent to Jamaica, W. I., and the following year he was appointed by the Provincial Synod (under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel--London. Eng.) Rector of the Panama Railroad Church and Arch-deacon of the Church of England Mission, and Chaplain to the Panama Canal Company. In 1889 he made an extensive missionary tour through Central America, where he performed religious services at the opening of the Nicaragua Canal, coming in touch with several Indian tribes, and gaining considerable knowledge of their manners and customs in their crude condition.

In 1890 he returned to the West Indies and was transferred to the Diocese of Florida and made Rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Key West, where he has a large parish and congregation and where he is highly esteemed by all classes, white and colored.

My purpose in writing upon this subject is to investigate God's disciplinary and retributive economy in races and nations, with a hope of arriving at some clear conclusion concerning the Negro as a Christian.

First, it may be just and proper to view the races of mankind in respect to growth and mastery. The principles of growth and mastery in a race, a nation, or a people, are the same all over the globe. The same great agencies needed for one quarter of the globe, and in one period of time, are needed for all quarters of the globe, for all people and for all time, and consequently needed for this American nation.

The children of Africa in America are in no way different from any other people in respect to Christianity. Many of the differences of races are accidental and oftentimes become obliterated by circumstances, position and religion.

Go back to a period in the history of England, when its rude inhabitants lived in caves and huts, when they fed on bark and roots, when their dress was the skins of animals. Then look at the eminent Englishman of the present day--cultivated, graceful, refined, Christianized. When we remember that his distant ancestors were wild and bloody savages, and that it took centuries to change his forefathers from rudeness and brutality into enlightened, civilized Christians, there is no room to doubt the susceptibility of the Negro to Christianity.

The same great general laws of growth continue unchangeable. The Almighty neither alters nor diminishes these laws for the convenience of a people, of whatever race they may be. The Negro race is equally susceptible of growth in Christianity as in civilization.

At once the question arises--Is the Negro race doomed to destruction? Or, does it possess those qualities which will enable it to reach a high degree of moral and Christian civilization? To the first of these questions I reply that the Negro race is by no means doomed to destruction. It is now over five hundred years since the breath of the civilized world touched powerfully, for the first time, the mighty masses of the pagan world in America, in Africa and the isles of the sea, and we see everywhere that the weak heathen tribes of the earth have gone down before the civilized world; tribe and nation have dispersed before its presence. The Iroquois, the Pequods, the brave Mohawks, the once refined Aztecs and others have gone, nevermore to be ranked among the tribes of men. In the scattered islands of the Pacific seas, like the stars of the heavens, the sad fact remains that from many of them their populations have departed like the morning cloud. They did not retain God in their knowledge. Just the reverse with the Negro. Destructive elements, wave after wave, have swept over his head, yet he has stood unimpaired.

Even this falls short of the full reality of the Negro as a Christian, for civilization at numerous places has displaced ancestral heathenism, and the standard of the cross, uplifted on the banks of its great river, showing that the heralds of the cross have begun the glorious conquests of their glorious King. Vital Christian power has become the property of the Negro. Does God despise the weak? No, the Providence of God intervenes for the training and preservation of such people.

But has the Negro race any of those qualities which emanate from Christianity? Let us see. The flexibility of the Negro character is universally admitted. The race is possessed of a nature more easily moulded than that of any other class of men. Unlike the Indian, the Negro yields to circumstances and flows with the current of events, hence afflictions, however terrible, have failed to crush him; his facile nature wards them off, or else through the inspiration of hope their influence is neutralized. These peculiarities of the Negro character render him susceptible to imitation. Burke tells us that "imitation is the second passion belonging to society, and this passion arises from much the same cause as sympathy." This is one of the strongest links of society. It forms our manners, our opinions, our lives. Indeed, civilization is carried down from generation to generation, or handed over from a superior to an inferior, by means of imitation. A people devoid of imitation is incapable of progress or advancement, and must retrograde. If it remains stagnant, it must of necessity bring its own decay. The quality of imitation has been the grand preservative of the Negro in all lands. Indeed, the Negro is a superior man to-day to what he was three centuries ago.

I feel fortified in the principles I have advanced by the opinions of great, scrutinizing thinkers. In his treatise on Emancipation, written in 1880, Dr. Channing says: "The Negro is one of the best races of the human family; he is among the mildest and gentlest of men; he is singularly susceptible to improvement." Kinmont declares in his "Lecture on Man" that "The sweet graces of the Christian religion appears almost too tropical and tender plants to grow in the soil of the Caucasian mind; they require a character of the human nature of which you can see the rude lineaments in the Ethiopian, to be implanted in and grow naturally and beautifully withal." Adamson, the traveler who visited Senegal in 1754, said: "The Negroes are sociable, humane, obliging and hospitable, and they have generally preserved an estimable simplicity of domestic manners. They are distinguished by their tenderness for their parents, and great respect for the aged--a patriarchal virtue which, in our day, is too little known." Dr. Raleigh, also, at a great meeting in London, said: "There is in these people a hitherto undiscovered mine of love, the development of which will be for the amazing welfare of the world. * * * Greece gave us beauty; Rome gave us power; the Anglo-Saxon unites and mingles these, but in the African people there is the great gushing wealth of love, which will develop wonders for the world."

I feel that the Almighty, who is interested in all the great problems of civilization, is interested in the Negro problem. He has carried the Negro through the wilderness of disasters, and at last put him in a large open place of liberty. There is not the shadow of a doubt that this work which God has begun, and is carrying on, is for the mental and spiritual elevation of the Negro.

TOPIC XXI.

DOES THE NORTH AFFORD TO THE NEGRO BETTER OPPORTUNITIES OF MAKING A LIVING THAN THE SOUTH?

BY REV. J. H. ANDERSON.

REV. J. H. ANDERSON, D. D.

Rev. J. H. Anderson was born June 30, 1848, in Frederick, Md. Dr. Anderson is what is called a self-made man, he having attended school only six months in his life and studied a short time under a private tutor. By hard, persistent efforts and close application to books, Dr. Anderson has risen to a point in scholarship and prominence that only a few college Negroes have reached. He is noted as a pulpit orator and platform speaker. He has attained to some prominence as a writer and takes front rank as a preacher in his denomination. For his scholarly attainments and usefulness as a minister of the gospel, Livingstone College conferred upon him, in 1896, the degree of doctor of divinity. Dr. Anderson was one of those heroic liberty-loving souls who went to the battlefield in the Civil War to fight for their and their race's freedom.