Now again, at last, it seems as if that which we are accomplishing and that which God has spoken in all these ages is again jeopardized, and as if this human right shall be denied in the South.  Men doubt whether there is in the Negro more than the capacity of a subordinate race, and say that to educate him is to lift him out of his sphere.  Brethren and friends, there is manhood in the Negro race.  There was humanity in those slaves who toiled their way over mountains and through swamps before the war, with their eyes focussed upon the North star of freedom.  And there was humanity in those mothers who clasped their babes to their breast and fled before the bloodhounds that they might escape the enslavers of men.  There was manhood in those one hundred and seventy-eight thousand Negro soldiers who seized their muskets and went to the front and fought for us, and with us, in those dark days of 1864, when the draft was failing and when volunteering had failed, that there might be soldiers to stand in the front and to dig in the trenches, and of whom eighty thousand gave their lives for us.  There was manhood in those cabins in which all over the South, our fleeing soldiers, escaping from prison, never failed to find support, help, and guidance.  Oh! how disastrous a business it is that that manhood, which all those years of slavery could not extinguish, should now be extinguished by the priests of a proud, arrogant, and selfish aristocracy.

But, my friends, as we felt in those days, and feel to-night, there is still no help for us but in the Christian solution of this problem and in the Christian destiny God has given to us.  Liberty and faith, the two elements, must be conjoined.  For us to deny the rights of the Negro now is to say that God did not make man in his image.  It is to say that liberty is not a sacred right, but a selfish acquisition; that government does not exist to establish rights, but to protect privileges, and that mankind are not brothers, but foes.  It is to turn the shadow upon the dial of human progress backward toward the ages of oppression and chaos.

And just there is the problem that confronts us, South and North together.  What shall be done in this dire extremity?  I remember years ago hearing of a fire in Charleston in which that beautiful spire of St. Michael’s took fire and some one had to be found to go up beyond the reach of the hose to put out the flame kindling and flickering there.  No one was found until a Negro stepped forth and climbed that tower, taking his life in his hands, and put out that flame.  And when he came down again, one man said, “Name your reward,” and he replied, “Let me but be counted a man.”  And that we have got to do, or God will shake down our civilization and our Nation as he shook down that spire of St. Michael’s in the earthquake three years ago.  It is certain to come unless we follow the line of God’s appointing that this must be a free Nation, absolutely free, free everywhere.