Those who thought to cripple Atlanta University because it could not yield its principles for the sake of a State appropriation of $8,000 made a mistake.  They have helped that which they meant to hinder.  The university will get the money.  Joseph’s brethren took counsel together and said, “We will see what will become of his dream,” and they thought they had a sure thing when they put him in a pit, but they discovered {89} some years after that this was but a way-station on the direct road to the Viceroyship of Egypt, and they saw what became of his dream.

When Napoleon the First wished to hinder the Huguenot Church, he gave it a small stipend in order to retain hold of it.  He appropriated just enough to keep it a cripple.  When the State of Georgia thought the education of the Negro was becoming too marked, it reversed the policy of the far-seeing Bonaparte and took its hands off.  We have never thought that Napoleon was a truly good man, but we do believe that he had a larger idea of the philosophy of control than the author of the Glenn Bill.  If the State had held on, it might have hindered, but it has lost its hold.

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Would it not sound well to the American people to have it said that in the United States of America, in the year 1888, our missionaries were imprisoned for reading the Bible to a heathen tribe of Indians who lived remote from civilization, the crime of it being that it was read in the only language which they could understand?

Yet “the orders are,” writes a missionary, “that we shall hold only two services on a Sunday and two during the week, and that we shall cease to read the Bible in the Indian homes.”  This is the Government authority of the great and free United States, but is there any authority greater than God?

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In an eloquent address at the Old South Church in Boston, on Sunday, March 4th, George W. Cable accentuated in strong words the work in which we are engaged.  “Here is the mightiest, the widest, the most fruitful, the most abundant, the most prolific, missionary field that was ever opened to any Christian people.”

We quote from his address: 

The benevolence of Northern men and women, yea, and even of Northern children, helped to establish in the South these missionary colleges, these educational missions, wherein not the black man alone, not the black woman alone, but every one who was qualified with orderly behavior and a rational intellect might come, and get, not only an education, but a Christian education, and not only a Christian education, but a Christian American education.  These institutions, standing out in the darkness when nothing else stood by them, when the land was racked and torn and bled afresh under the agonies of reconstruction, these institutions began and carried on the blessed work of raising up leaders, intellectual leaders, among the black