present, that there is an
intensity of race prejudice, and a bitterness of caste spirit, and an
increasing hostility to the rising colored population which registers
itself in outbreaks of violence and bloodshed, in the defiance of law,
and in crimes against the ballot-box. We may not be greatly surprised
that there should be intelligent men who regard the education of the
colored man as a calamity, and deny his rights, and call for his
disfranchisement. The white man of the South needs emancipation and
Christian elevation as well as the black. We are the debtors of Christ
to both races. Leave these two races to themselves without the gospel of
Christ, and the conflict between them is inevitable, and it can be but
terrific and protracted, and a dark blot upon the Christian name and
civilization. Dr. Beard has well said that the problem can not be solved
by historic precedents. All talk of slavery or peonage for the inferior
race, or migration, or extermination, or amalgamation, is idle and
morally repugnant and politically dangerous.

The problem set for our solution by Almighty God is just this--as stated
in this missionary view of it: How, being free, two races as dissimilar
as are the white and black races, now equal before the law, can live
side by side under the same government and live in prosperity and peace.
This problem must be solved, and it must be solved aright. And we may be
sure that the ultimate solution of blessing for both races does not, and
can not, lie in any retrograde movement toward the old darkness and
bondage, but forward in the direction of the larger light and truer
liberty of Christ. If the colored race, as a race, seems to have reached
a point when "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," its hope and
ours lie not in a return to ignorance and degradation, but in pressing
on to that larger knowledge and truer wisdom, the beginning of which is
the fear of God, and the fullness of which is a hearty recognition and
cordial acceptance and discharge of the obligations and trusts of a
Christian manhood and Christian citizenship. The condition of the
colored race, indeed, is but a necessary stage in its upward and onward
march. It is no other than we have always had reason to expect would be
reached. That the mile-stone of to-day marks so great progress is cause
for profound gratitude. The new features of the situation and the fresh
difficulties are those, and those only, which are incident to prog