Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

government they will then represent. The loyal whites will be cast back into the pit out of which the national arm has dragged them, unless they will lift their like loyal colored fellow-citizens to equal honor.

But not as a measure of necessity should this be urged. It is one of duty. In many states of the Union this cruel disability exists. With proud rebellious hearts' we say, "the foreigner may vote, the native shall not. The brutalized victim of papacy, whom priests and pope make hostile to our ideas and institutions, may oppose the government that protects him with ballot, almost with bullet, and yet lose no right of suffrage; while the most protestant of our protestants, the most godly of the godly, the most faithful of the faithful, shall not utter his voice at the ballot-box against these foreign foes." We should instantly annihilate every such barrier, and make suffrage and manhood identical. What Gladstone demands for England, Congress ought to bestow upon America.

"But," cries one timid of soul, "if this right is conferred so freely in states where the blacks have a majority, they will become its governors and representatives, and a black man may sit as a senator in our national capitol!" And why not? Ought not the larger fraction of the population of South Carolina, who are among the most loyal in the land, to have the administration of the affairs of that commonwealth? And if the most conservative citizens have for years contemplated with approval, and aided with their liberality, the rising glory of Liberia, can they object to a more truly named Liberia growing into majestic life on the ruins of Charleston, so long the seat of the beast? Will not Captain Robert Small be as good a governor of South Carolina as Michael Hahn, far less loyal, is of Louisiana? Is not his first office prophetic of his future, and is not the master of "The Planter " yet to be the master of the planters?

But not alone in the states where they are numerically superior, will they justly claim the position their merits shall secure for them. In every state the same privileges must be accorded. No more and no less in Carolina than New York should they rise higher than they merit. Here as there,

whoever deserves the highest seats should sit there. Frederick Douglass, one of the first orators and clearest headed statesmen

of America, should be the representative in Congress from his district. He has no equal in the national estimation within its boundaries. He would soon show that he was worthy to follow his great Auburn neighbor into the senate chamber and the cabinet. He might win what the other has lost, because to his ability is joined more popularity if not more principle-the highest honor the nation can bestow. "Palmam ferat qui meruit" is the only motto for a democratic people. If he deserves the palm he should carry it, by the votes and with the applause of all the nation.

3. This work should be carried forward in the Church. Sad is the fact, but most true, that those who call themselves the disciples and representatives of Jesus Christ are in their body the most tenacious of this iniquity. Whatever the name of the. Church, her spirit and act is the same. No professed Church of Jesus Christ here has reached the hights of fraternity which every other profession has allowed. The medical and the legal bodies have admitted them as equals; not so the clerical. They visit around the same couch, they act as attorneys for the same client, as their whiter fellows; they cannot belong to the same conference with us, travel the same circuit, or be settled over the same congregation. And yet the Church professes to represent and should represent the highest ideas that man can receive or entertain. It is the depository, the vehicle of God. His best truths he commits to her as a distributing reservoir to all the world. Her ministers he deigns to call his servants and embassadors; her members, his sons and daughters; and yet when his Son, the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, calls himself especially the Son of man-not of men, much less of a class of men, and that white men, but the Son of MAN-when his Spirit orders his servant to declare to the Churches that in Christ Jesus the middle wall of partition is broken down, that in him there is neither Greek nor Jew, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, male nor female; when he forbids the setting off one portion of the Church by itself for any outward distinctions; against the words of Christ, the teachings of the apostles, the lessons of history, the testimony of every conscience in the sight of God, the Church in America gives itself earnestly to the support of this heavenhated sin. She compels these her brethren and sisters to form.

Churches of their own. She separates God's ministers of the least tinged with this complexion into conferences by themselves. If any of these Christians come into her brahmin assemblies, she hastens to commit the very sin that James rebukes, and has "the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons," saying unto his brother, often of the very complexion of James and the Lord Jesus Christ, "stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool." How those holy words rebuke our haughty sin! "If ye fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well. But if you have respect of persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors." Then comes that dreadful imprecation, so awfully fulfilled upon the apostate Churches of the South, so fearfully experienced in our own griefs and calamities: "For he shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy."

O that the Church would arise and wash herself of this abomination! She should instantly invite her despised brethren to sit in her exalted seats. She should abolish the iniquity known only to Protestant America, the colored Church. She should invite all those whom God has called to serve at her altars, which are not hers, but his. She should throw her mighty influence against this cruel and false prejudice, and drive it from the land. She should proclaim the great doctrine of the Bible, the central doctrine of the cross, the unity, the fraternity of man, and should declare that what God hath put together man shall not put asunder. Then and then only will God's smile and benediction rest upon her. Then shall she go forth, not as now, to feeble victories and frequent defeats, but to constant, glorious, and increasing triumphs. Scriptural holiness will spread rapidly over all the land, and the coming of Christ speedily redden the divine horizon.

To this high and heavenly work the great election calls us. This grand future opens its celestial vistas to our waiting eyes. Union, emancipation, democracy, the triad of triumphant principles, will insure the unification, the liberation, the fraternization of America. Her sons of whatever hue, shall wear her honors of whatever height. Sella Martin will be the popular

pastor of a popular Church, having no taint in its composition of the present bitterness of Christians against their better brethren, but composed indiscriminately of those who, though of many complexions, are of one Lord, one faith, one baptism. John S. Rock will sit as judge where now not one of his race can sit as a juror even when those of their own color are on trial for their life; and the perfection of justice will be consummated, and God the judge of all be satisfied then, and then only, when one of this blood whom our late chief-justice declared had no rights, shall occupy his seat* as the administrator of equal rights to all the land. Such a one is the Queen's highest judicial representative in Jamaica to-day. Such will be America's in Washington to-morrow.

us.

Such are some of the results and obligations which spring from that national decree. The work is not yet accomplished. Our brothers yet pine in prison-houses, and suffer unto death on the bloody field. The foe is yet stiff-necked and rebellious. It may be long ere the high lands of perpetual peace are reached. We may see days as dark as any which have covered Yet the end is sure. The grand uprising assures its coming. Does it also that higher, that diviner end to which the whole creation moves? Will the nation, will the Church, will every Christian, every minister, every man gird himself for this greater task? If so, that higher glory will speedily dawn. The sun will rise that knows no setting. The kingdom of Christ will be established. The whole earth, one family, will dwell in him, knit together in love, in labor, in faith, in joy; while over it all will bend the cloud of witnesses, with celestial faces, the martyred and sainted dead of every age and clime, not the least in honor and happiness those of our own

* These particular results we presume our respected contributor hails, not as desirable in themselves, but as symbols of a great progress and a just reparation. We coincide with him so far as to hold that all legal disabilities precluding such results should cease to exist. Suffrage irrespective of complexion, but conditioned upon a degree of education, is both just in itself and essential to the well-being of our republic. A pariah caste in our free North will ever be a danger and a calamity; of which education and suffrage are the sole Christian, republican, and politic remedy. At the extreme south the ballot in the hands of the Afric-American is the best and most peaceful possible insurance of loyalty to the government. It is little less than practical treason to the perpetuity of the Union to place the disfranchised colored loyalty of the cotton states beneath an oppressive disloyal superstratum.-ED.

age and clime, reliving happiest lives in their more saintly children, the inheritors of their sacrifices, their grace, their

renown.

"For all they thought and loved and did,

And hoped and suffered is but seed

Of what in these is flower and fruit."

ART. VI.-FOREIGN RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE.

other means, coustitutes a supreme law and a true right, and that accomplished facts in political affairs are to be re

ROMAN CATHOLICISM. THE POPE'S BULL AGAINST MODERN CIVILIZATION-PARTIES WITHIN THE RO-garded as rightly in force; that religious

MAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.-The Encyclical or apostolic letter addressed under date of December 8, 1864, by Pope Pius IX. to all Roman Catholic bishops, is one of the most remarkable documents which in modern times has emanated from the Papal See. The pope reminds the prelates that his predecessors have 'never failed to state and condemn the errors against the fundamental principles of religion spread throughout society, and in particular against the Roman Catholic Church. He adds that from the commencement of his pontificate he has invariably rebuked these errors in his allocutions delivered at the Consistories, and in his frequent Encyclical letters to the bishops. Seeing, therefore, that errors and false opinions are constantly upon the increase in religious and lay society, the pope declares that he addressed himself to the bishops upon the present occasion to excite their zeal to confute error, and to arrest the evil which false ideas of religion, philosophy, and politics inflict upon the modern world.

The Eucyclical letter then proceeds to enunciate the gravest errors which must first be confuted. These are stated as the opinions of those who say, that civil progress requires society to be governed without reference to religion, or without any difference being made between the true faith and heresy; that liberty of conscience and of public wor ship are essential in a well-organized government; that the will of the people, as displayed by public opinion, or by

orders are not entitled to exist, and ought, consequently, to be suppressed; that family society is dependent solely upon civil law, so that the government has the exclusive right of regulating the relations between parents and children, and of directing instruction and education; that the clergy should not be permitted to take part in public instruction, because they are opposed to progress. The pope further condemns the opinions of those who hold that the laws of the Church cannot have binding force unless they are promulgated by the civil authority; that excommunications pronounced against usurpers of the rights and property of the Church are an abuse; that the Church has not the right of punishing those who violate her laws; that the ecclesiastical power is not by divine right distinct from or independent of the civil power; that obedience may be conscientiously refused to those decrees and decisions of the Holy See which do not affect points of faith. All these opinions and several others are rebuked, proscribed, and condemned in the Encyclical letter, and the pope prohibits their being in future entertained by true believers.

The Apostolical letter is accompanied by an appendix ("syllabus ") of eighty propositions, containing the principal modern errors inveighed against by the pope. Seven refer to Pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism; sever to moderate rationalism, four to religious indifference, twenty to errors against the Church and her rights, seventeen to

« ForrigeFortsæt »