Part 2

—European statisticians are gradually reducing their estimates of the population of China. It used to be put at over 400,000,000. Behm and Wagner reduce their estimate for China and Corea from 434,500,000 to 379,500,000. Peterson reduces his estimate by 75,000,000, making the present total 350,000,000. Dr. Happer, missionary, believes this can safely be reduced another 50,000,000. Mr. Hippisley, Acting Commissioner of Customs, thinks 250,000,000 more nearly correct than 350,000,000. The losses by the Taeping and Mohammedan rebellions, and by the famine and pestilence which swept the provinces of Chili, Shantung, Shansi, Shensi and Houan, are variously estimated at from 61,000,000 to 81,000,000.

AFRICA.

—King Mtesa, of Uganda, is dead. He welcomed and co-operated with Capt. Speke, the discoverer of Victoria Nyanza, and has played a prominent part in all the events that have occurred in his kingdom, whether they were in the interest of exploration or mission work.

—The German Reichstag is said to have voted 1,000,000 marks, about £50,000, for the expense of a German exploring expedition into Central Africa.

—Mr. H. M. Stanley is said to have used more than a million yards of Manchester goods in paying the workmen employed in constructing the road to Stanley Pool.

—Drs. Bachmann and Wilms, of Munster, set out in May for a journey of several years in Africa, especially in the Transvaal, which they contemplate exploring with reference to botany and zoölogy. They hope also to develop commercial relations between Southern Africa and Germany.

—Since the overthrow of Arabi Pasha, the missions of the United Presbyterians of America have been more prosperous than ever. Their work, which is largely among the Copts, is approved by the Coptic Bishop, and one of the young men recently licensed by the mission has been engaged to expound the Scriptures. So great was the interest in his first sermon that he was obliged to repeat it three times. Women disguised themselves in male attire in order to get into the streets to hear the preaching. An effort will be made to establish a regular national evangelical church in Egypt.

—From reliable statistics it appears that the progress of Islamism in Africa, during the last hundred years, has been appalling. At the Mohammedan Missionary University, at Cairo, in Egypt, there are at this day 10,000 students under training, ready to go to any part of the world to teach the doctrines of Islam. Missionaries meet these Moslem priests not in Turkey alone, which is the centre of their power, but also in Persia, India and China, and in the heart of Africa. Very few have been led to renounce their faith for Christianity. This is owing to the fear of persecution, for the Moslem holds that it is not only proper, but a duty to kill any one who abjures his faith in their prophet.

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THE COLOR-LINE.

* * * * *

_Opinions Gathered from the Press._

CASTE PREJUDICE.

REV. W. H. WARD, D.D.—ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND.

Christianity in India has utterly succumbed to caste once. The missionaries of the last century, after beginning nobly, yielded and allowed caste to rule in the Christian church. “I have carefully avoided all coercive measures,” said Schwarz, in 1787. Bishop Heber allowed caste. Not till 1833 did the English Church missionaries decide, through the voice of the noble Bishop Wilson, in a peremptory pastorate letter of July 5, 1833, that no mercy should be shown to the accursed thing. “The distinctions of caste,” said he, “must be abandoned decidedly, immediately, finally. Birth condemns no class of men, from generation to generation, to inevitable contempt, debasement and servitude. The enforcement of this order broke up churches. A Sudra would sooner give up his Christianity than take the communion with a pariah. The war has been long, and is not yet fully concluded. An American Lutheran missionary lately felicitated himself that now the two castes have been prevailed upon to take the Lord’s Supper together. In a London missionary station some ten years ago a few pariahs were converted, whereupon the Shanars, at their own cost, built a chapel for their low caste brethren, lest they should have to worship with them. A few years ago a missionary led several low caste Christians into a chapel door, whereupon the high caste occupants hastily scrambled out of the window. * * *

Do I say that caste is broken down? Not quite. Even yet it lingers: and where it lingers chiefest is, it shames me to say, in education and Christianity. To the infinite disgrace of the church, the chief denominations of the South divide on the caste line. The white Christians and churches are put purposely into one denomination, and the colored into another. We have white Methodists and black Methodists; white Baptist associations and black Baptist associations. What denomination is there but the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian and the Congregational, in which whites and blacks can stand equally before God? In the South both whites and blacks accept this condition, for the most part, as right. It does not occur to them to protest against it. Even the negroes accept the humiliation to which they have become accustomed. No voice of protest is raised. Whites and blacks alike seem satisfied that God’s church united above should be divided below. Why lingers Jerubbaal amid the wheat-threshings of Manasseh? Why comes no Gideon forth, inspired with the zeal of the Lord, to cut down this horrible idol of his father’s house? * * * *

When the colored race were slaves, the color marked the social distinction of service. That is all past now. They may be servants still. Then the social distinction still holds. We cannot break up these right social distinctions. We cannot prevent the existence of classes in society. We choose those of our own sort, with whom we are intimate. But in the name of God, in the name of the hopes and rights of the poor, in the memory of the accursed experience of the ages of serfdom, in the East and in the West, we demand that neither law nor recognized custom shall impose on social conditions the Satanic burdens, the hopeless, crushing weight of impassable caste. It is accursed in the hall of legislation, accursed at the ballot-box, accursed in the court-room, accursed in the church-pews, accursed at the Lord’s table—most accursed when it sets an impassable gulf between high and low, white and black in the school-room.

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A QUESTION OF CASTE.

BY REV. HORACE BUMSTEAD, D.D.

It should be remembered that this prejudice in the South is more one of caste than it is one of race. It is in the former relation of master and slave that the distinction between the races has its strongest roots. The personal antipathy on the ground of feature and color—the race prejudice pure and simple—is not so great in the South as at the North, where fewer colored people are met with. I have heard a Congregational pastor, in one of the most enlightened communities of Massachusetts, declare that he did not think he could endure the presence of a colored cook in his kitchen. One of the best Northern teachers in the South confesses that when he first met with colored people in the horse-cars of Washington he would sit as far from them as possible. But Southern men and women who were nursed at the breasts of slave mammies in infancy, have played familiarly with colored children in childhood, and have been served all their lives by the darker-skinned race in a multitude of ways and in the closest personal proximity, can feel little, if any, of this personal antipathy. It is the distinction between a serving class and a ruling class which chiefly causes the separation here. But as the colored people acquire intelligence and property, and the white people learn more of the dignity of labor, this distinction will cease to coincide with the color line.

But it is said that white students will not _now_ attend school with the colored, and that we must take the facts as they are. But the facts are not all on one side. For years the students of Berea College, in Kentucky, have been about equally divided between the two races, and have studied harmoniously together. And why? Simply because, for a large surrounding region, Berea College has offered the best and cheapest opportunity for an education. Let all the institutions of the American Missionary Association be amply endowed and equipped, so that they can offer to the poor whites more and better than can be obtained anywhere else, and the wasteful and needless expedient of missionary color-line schools and colleges will no longer be thought of.

_The Congregationalist._

NOT ON ACCOUNT OF COLOR.

EDITORIAL IN INDEPENDENT.

Professor James M. Gregory, of the Howard University, made some capital remarks on the “color line” at the recent banquet in Washington, in honor of Frederick Douglass. “The color line,” as he justly said, “was drawn when the Negro was made a slave in this country,” and the prejudice existing against him is “not on account of color, but by reason of previous condition, his color serving to indicate his identity with a race held as bondmen.” “This prejudice,” he added, “is purely American. Colored men traveling in other countries have not found _color_ a mark of degradation. If they are reminded of their color at all, it is by Americans they meet, who are not magnanimous enough to treat the negro courteously even on foreign soil, where race prejudice is not tolerated.” * * *

Let the practice of the American people be as impartially just as is their Constitution; and our colored fellow-citizens will have no grievances of which to complain. We congratulate them upon the fact that the Constitution has taken them under its charge, and upon the further fact that the day-star of a bright and promising future is gradually shedding its light upon their horizon. The doctrine of equal privileges and equal responsibilities will in the end lift them to the level of an unquestioned and developed manhood; and then the “color line” will wholly disappear.

ONLY HALF TRUE.

A friend, who is familiar with the blacks at the South, writes us that the statement that “the colored people prefer to be in churches by themselves” is only half true. He adds that, so far as it is true, it is because they either shrink from the restraints of a pure and intelligent religion, such as that of the whites, or from the scorn or ill-concealed toleration of their white fellow-worshipers; and that, if sure of a cordial welcome by the whites, they do not prefer to worship by themselves. We are glad to give publicity to this statement, although it is contradicted by that of every one else whom we remember to have heard speak of the matter. Is there not another reason which tends to separate white and black Christians into distinct churches? Do not the latter, even when assured of a cordial welcome by the whites, usually prefer an emotional, hortatory style of preaching which is very dear to them, but which disturbs, if it do not even amuse, the whites? Certainly it is so here at the North.

_The Congregationalist._

ONE DESTINY.

BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

There is but one destiny, it seems to me, left for us, and that is to make ourselves and be made by others a part of the American people in every sense of the word. Assimilation, not isolation, is our true policy and natural destiny. Unification for us is life. Separation is death. We cannot afford to set up for ourselves a separate political party or adopt for ourselves a political creed apart from the rest of our fellow-citizens.

_The Independent._

CHRIST OR CASTE.

BY H. K. CARROLL.

Shall we go into the South to exalt Christ or to surrender to caste? Shall we go to the Negro as to a being made a little lower than man, and reach down to him, not to lift him up to our plane, but to help him live better and be content on his own lower plane? Or, shall we go to him as to a brother of our own blood, unfortunate, degraded, despised, and strive thus to save him and improve him on Christ’s plan? If we go for Christ, we go inevitably to bear reproach, to submit to ostracism; we go to contend against untold difficulties, to meet with discouragements, to fail, it may be, for many years, of at least great numerical success. * * * The secret of much wrong thinking and wrong practice concerning mixed churches is the idea which both Dr. Curry and Dr. Wheeler seem to regard as universal, that the Church is a social institution. If this be once admitted, Dr. Wheeler is right in contending that the lines of social distinction which are drawn in the drawing-room will inevitably be drawn in the Church. Here is a basis quite sufficient to build white and colored churches upon; but it is just as certainly broad enough for other social distinctions, which Methodism, of all branches of the Church Catholic, has been the least willing to admit. Seeing, as Dr. Wheeler sees, that the employer and the laborer, the rich and the poor, the learned and the unlearned form different and more or less distinct classes in society, we cannot only justify churches organized on the color line, but we must be prepared to justify churches organized exclusively for the rich; churches for the poor; churches for the educated and churches for the uneducated; churches for merchants and distinct churches for clerks. The idea that the Church is a social institution, if rigidly adhered to, would give us a system of class distinctions as intricate as that of India. There are two great facts which make the whole human race absolutely equal, absolutely without distinctive claims or advantages, before the altar. The first is the fact of universal sin; the second is the fact of universal need of salvation. Men of all degrees, from the prince to the peasant, from the millionaire to the pauper, from the most profound scholar to the most unlettered backwoodsman, from the whitest European to the blackest African, meet in church on a common platform. They leave their social distinctions, their rank, and their peculiar privileges outside the church door. Here is the one place where all the sons of God may meet and work together as one family. The Duke of Wellington knelt at the altar with a plain farmer and received the sacrament. “Here,” said he, “we are brothers.” The Church is associational rather than social. It exists in society, is formed from society, and exercises the most powerful influence on society; but its province is neither to break down nor build up distinctions in society. It may inculcate principles, which men and women will carry into their social relations, for the cure of such evils as may exist in society; but it is not its province as an organization to form and regulate society. Its distinct work is to draw all men to Christ and help them to live a righteous and useful life.

_The Independent._

THE CHRISTIAN LEAGUE.

BY REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D.

“This company must be a clean one, and there is no lack of sound and reputable men in our churches.”

“How about the colored brethren?” queried Mr. Strong.

“The colored brethren must be left out,” was the answer, “not for social, but for ecclesiastical reasons. One of the first duties of this league of ours, if it ever gets into operation, will be the suppression of these colored churches. When the colored people abandon their own organizations, and join the other churches, they may come in as representatives from them. We will have no color-line in the Christianity for which this club stands. I’ll go as far as any other man in fraternizing with colored men; but with colored churches, never. The sectarianism whose only basis is the color of the skin is the meanest kind of sectarianism.”

_The Century._

IT DECIDES NOTHING.

BY REV. D. M. WILSON.

We are told that the colored prefer to be by themselves. Were this true, it would decide nothing as to the proper method of church work. The several castes of India would have preferred to remain separate even after nominally embracing Christianity; but this could not be. Among Christians there is but one fold and one Shepherd. The very object of religion is to make men one in Christ and one in Christian fellowship. If this be not done, nothing is done to any good purpose. Our separate schools and separate churches have during the last eighteen years done more to separate and alienate the two races than two hundred and forty years of slavery had done. In the times of slavery both races were in the same churches. Why not now? One thing is too plain for an honest man to deny, and that is the fact that, had the whites treated the colored during these last years with the same courtesy that they extend to a Roman Catholic Irishman and his children, we would never have heard of a colored school or that ecclesiastical monstrosity, a _colored church_. The results are disastrous to both parties. The colored are left to themselves and the blind lead the blind. Nine-tenths of their preachers have no more fitness for preaching than they have for lecturing upon fluxions. Were one of their churches of average capacity for senseless noise and uproar within earshot of my residence, I would regard it a number one nuisance. But it is _not_ their fault that they are by themselves. A brute only moderately domesticated soon understands when he is not welcome, and acts accordingly. When slavery had disappeared, the colored saw but too plainly that they were _not_ welcome any longer in their old churches, and they went forth into a darkness deeper than they had before know.

_The Independent._

MORE AT HOME BY THEMSELVES.

REV. JAS. H. FAIRCHILD, D.D.

The colored church came into existence not because the colored people were not welcomed to all the other churches, nor because a separate organization was desired by those who had been most favored with education and culture, but because considerable numbers of them felt more at home with a style of service and instruction more like that with which they had been familiar.

_Oberlin, the Colony and the College._

WHITE AND COLORED CHURCHES.

BY C. L. GOODELL, D.D.

Having lived over ten years in a Southern State and been an interested observer of colored people and a sympathetic helper wherever I could be, I feel a deep interest in the settlement of this question concerning the mixing of the races in the churches.

Whenever there is a call for a church of Christ, let the brethren come together and organize it, and start it off with all the wisdom given them, as to location and other practical matters. It is a little republic ordering its own affairs, with whatever fact and counsel it may seek from sister churches. If it be a colored church, let it take in whatever white Christians may come to its door, in case it would take in a colored Christian applying under similar circumstances and of the same Christian character and fitness. Not many white Christians will come; some might, owing to their peculiar relations to the church, or to the neighborhood, and so on.

If a white church be organized, let it receive whatever colored Christians may knock at its door, in case it would receive white Christians applying under similar circumstances and of the same Christian character and fitness. Let that be the rule. There are always individual cases which must be settled each by itself. Not many colored people will come; some might, owing to their special relations to the church or some member of it, and so on. This law is fundamental in God’s order of society. It applies to Chinamen and Indians and all races in our communities. Take them as they come. Not many will come. They prefer to be together; and it is better they should be as a general thing. * * * Colored Christians ought to have free access and welcome to white churches. As soon as they find out that they are really loved and esteemed, and can come into white churches as brethren, they cease to desire it. They are happy and helped by this knowledge; but they would rather worship together, just as every other race would. They love to exchange fraternal salutations and have many interests in common; but in the regular work and worship of church life they choose to be one of the distinct branches of the great body of whom Christ is the head. I know this from years of practical experience.

_The Independent._

THE COLOR LINE IN CHURCHES.

There is no place in the country where the question of the color line can be so easily and so fairly tried as in Washington. Here is a population of 60,000 colored people, with sixty-five colored churches. There are also in the District 124 white churches, nearly or quite all of them having one or two colored members, generally the sexton and his wife. But every colored adult in Washington knows that the Congregational Church is the only one in which he stands on an equal footing with his white brethren and sisters, as their great leader, Frederick Douglass, told them, “only one church in the national capital over whose doors is the beautiful inscription, ‘Freedom to worship God without distinction of color.’” And the pastor of that church, Dr. Rankin, is as much beloved and as much trusted by the colored population of this city as a man can be. And the leaders of the colored people all come here. Hon. J. M. Langston, United States Minister to Hayti, Hon. B. K. Bruce, ex-senator and now Registrar of the Treasury, the professors of Howard University and a few others come; and yet I doubt if there are two dozen colored members in this church. There are two colored Congregational churches in Washington without a white man in them, and to them all the colored Congregationalists go. Nor is it to be wondered at. To the great majority of them the preaching would be over their heads. Their education and position in life deprive them of meeting their white brethren on an equality in parish or prayer meeting. They naturally go by themselves, not that they are forced to, but because they prefer it. The emotional demands of their nature are not met in the cooler atmosphere of the white man’s religion. And so it must be throughout the South. Each race will for the present prefer churches of its own color. If two churches are formed in one place at the same time the whites would not care to sit under the imperfect education and narrow compass of thought of the colored preacher, nor would the darker portion of the audience enjoy the more cultivated sermons or prayers of the whites. Until the average education of the black is more advanced let them keep separate. The mixing of the races is sure to come, but it will require generations to do it. All the present can do is to offer them open doors. If they decline to enter it is their own action. But with growing wealth, with education equal to that of their white neighbors, will come social intercourse, and not till then.

_W. R. H. in Congregationalist._

RESOLUTIONS OF A. M. A. AND A. H. M. S.

At the recent annual meeting of the American Missionary Association, held in Cleveland, O., a petition was presented requesting the appointment of a committee to report on the policy of the Association in regard to race or color prejudice in the support of schools and churches. As the Executive Committee, to whom that petition was referred, are entering upon enlarged church work in the South, they feel called upon to take early action on this petition, and make the following announcement: