Now, I say, in reference to the negro, let us see what we can do with him without reference to an ideal. Let us not only remove his restrictions, so that he can rise all that his upward force will impel him to rise, but put into him the mighty forces of a Christian education for forty or fifty years—several generations, in fact—and then see what we can make of the negro.
Especially do we need this higher education in order that we may train preachers. We do not want to send a man with an imperfect education as a missionary to Africa. Why should we send to their black brethren in this country men imperfectly educated as preachers to them? They, surrounded as they are by all the stimulating influences of our modern civilization, need all of this higher education which we can possibly induce them to take on. Doing this for a series of years, we may at last realize the triumph of Christianity among them. The greatest problem of Christianity which our generation sees is the question how these two races, so linked together, shall treat each other; but I believe that the time is to come when we shall see them living together in perfect harmony; when we shall see the blacks supplying their peculiar elements to a higher civilization, and we, the white race, shall have risen to a position exercising a true Christian spirit, which, without the negro linked with us, we never shall find; and then shall we see the triumph of Christianity dealing with this now dark problem, but then showing the glory of a grand success.
Great battles sometimes settle the fate of a country, and transfer in a day whole provinces from one dominion to another. There are no such decisive battles in the struggle for the intellectual and moral elevation of man. By no stroke of policy and by no combination of forces can you revolutionize the individual character of a whole people at once. It happens occasionally, however, in the contest between good and evil, that some convulsion occurs which in its influence on the mental and moral condition of a whole people is hardly less decisive than those political contests by which provinces are transferred from the control of one nation to that of another. Such a convulsion was our late civil war. It left the States where it found them, parts of the Union. It left all races morally and intellectually where it found them. But for the colored people of the South it had swept away in every direction, from zenith to horizon, the impenetrable clouds of more than Egyptian darkness which had brooded over them, and it had made it possible for the light of the sun to reach even these slaves. Then, indeed, the people which sat in darkness saw a great light, and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death, to them did light spring up.