M.E.  Strieby.

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The unconscious influence of our missionaries at the South.

In a recent number of The Nineteenth Century, Sir William W. Hunter, an eminent authority, reporting the influence of the missionaries in India, says that among the people to whom they have gone they have built up the most complete confidence and implicit faith in the purity and unselfishness of their motives.  He declares that he regards the missionary work of the English as an expiation for wrong-doing, and he believes that the missionary instinct forms the necessary spiritual complement of the aggressive genius of the English race.  Sir William also claims that the advance of missionaries in the good opinion of non-Christian peoples is a most striking evidence of their high character and intelligence, and that no class of Englishmen has done so much to make England respected in India as the missionaries, that no class has done so much to awaken the Indian’s intellect and to lessen the dangers of transition from the old state of things to the new.

After this much of condensation of that profound article by the Christian Union, we quote from the author: 

“The careless onlooker may have no particular convictions on the subject, and flippant persons may ridicule religious effort in India as elsewhere.  But I think that few Indian administrators have passed through high office, and had to deal with the ultimate problems of British government in that country, without feeling the value of the work done by missionaries.  Such men gradually realize, as I have realized, that the missionaries do really represent the spiritual side of the new civilization, and of the new life which we are introducing into India.”

Names and places being changed, it is coming to appear that the whole of this can be said of the Christian workers from the North among the colored people of the South.  Besides all of their work that can be told by statistics, and besides all of that in building up character among the Negroes and awakening their intellect and their aspiration for thrift in every sense, they have exerted a profound unconscious influence upon the white people of that Southland.  They, too, have built up among the whites a confidence in the purity and unselfishness of their motives.  At first they were suspected as emissaries of a political party.  By many even of the best people there they were held as necessarily persons of low-down condition and character to be willing to do that “low-down work.”  “With our views of the case, how could we believe anything else?” was the answer to the remonstrance against the current mode of treatment.  Gradually this feeling has been giving way to one of growing confidence, until for several years such men as Rev. Dr. A.G.  Haygood and Mr. G.W.  Cable, and such papers as the Memphis Appeal, and such a State Board of Examiners as that of the Atlanta University have been publicly declaring the high intellectual quality and moral standing of these once despised teachers, while many of the most respectable citizens are privately saying the same thing, and multitudes believe it, though making no announcement of the same.