Page:The Atlantic Monthly vol. 69.djvu/731





, the president of the board of trustees of the Peabody fund, said in his address, October 1, 1890, at the twenty-ninth meeting of that board: "If there be a race problem anywhere, time and education can alone supply its solution. But time without education will only render it the more insoluble. Continued ignorance is a remedy for nothing. It is itself the disease to be cured and eradicated. Free common schools with industrial, agricultural, and mechanical departments attached to them, and with all the moral and religious influences which can be brought to bear on them, these seem to me the great need, if not the one and only thing needful, for the countless masses of colored children of the South at this moment."

The religious idea at the bottom of our civilization is the missionary idea. According to our most Christian theologies, the divine Being is conceived as possessed of the spirit of this idea from all eternity. The divine decrees broke up the eternal Sabbath of blessed perfection, and created finite, imperfect beings, in order, it would seem, that there should be occasion for the exercise of this missionary spirit, a spirit of divine charity. For those divine decrees ordained a supreme sacrifice, the descent into finitude on the part of the Divine, a descent to its bitterest depths. For the Eternal Word tasted of death and descended into Hades, the very nadir of the Divine, to make it possible for finite beings to ascend into participation with Him and to grow forever into His image.

That this is the deepest thought in our civilization, and to all appearances a permanent and final idea, we may be assured by a glance at all religious and other protests against the ecclesiastical forms in which this doctrine is stated and the institutions founded upon it. All religious protests that have obtained a following within Christendom have taken pains to ground their opposition on a more explicit assertion of this very doctrine of good will towards men of all conditions, the possibility of salvation for finite beings in their lowest debasement.

If we question, in the name of science or philosophy, the significance of this religious faith in the divine altruism, and endeavor to support our objections