Aid for Freedpeople's Exodus and Christian Duty

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 19, 1880.

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 8

Aid for Freedpeople's Exodus and Christian Duty

—The inspired word bidding us bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, was seldom more timely than now. The cry of help for Ireland comes to us across the sea with piercing emphasis. The response does honor to the heart of Americans. At the same time, another cry of distress and want, and a most pathetic appeal for instant help, comes to us from colored “refugees” in our own land. Be it wise, or otherwise, the exodus of colored people from their Southern homes is a fact, and one that is assuming large proportions. It is one of those profound and partly mysterious racial disturbances, which occasionally seize a people and stir in them like the resistless movings of a mighty instinct, and impel them to seek to better their condition by migrations. Judge of the correctness of the instinctive impulse as we may, the facts are as they are, and every impulse of Christian sympathy gives force to the appeals made for help. Nearly five million Afric-Americans, yesterday slaves, sold off the auction-block, ruled by the lash, whom it was a State-prison offense to teach the alphabet, to-day admitted to freedom and thrust into citizenship,—this suggests a tremendous fact to be dealt with. In the word of Christ himself, Do we know the time? Do we discern the significance of the case? Do we appreciate the “obligations of nobility,” in our relations to this people? Beyond question, there is a momentous Providence in all this movement and in this grave opportunity; and one, too, which relates itself to our own future welfare, not less, perhaps, than to theirs. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me,” is a word by no means grown out of date!—Advance.