We find ourselves on this subject occupying a position midway between the radicals on the one side and the conservatives on the other.  In some parts of the South, the whites and Negroes must for many years to come be educated in separate schools and worship in separate churches.  They need, to some extent, a different education; they desire, to a large extent, a different kind of religious worship and instruction.  The preaching which appeals to the Anglo-Saxon race appears cold and unmeaning to the warm-blooded Negro; the preaching which arouses in him a real religious fervor appears to his cold-blooded neighbor imaginative, passionate, unintelligent.  To attempt to force the two races into a fellowship distasteful to both, to attempt to require the two to listen to the same type of sermon and join in the same forms of worship, is a “reform against nature.”  Even if the erection and maintenance of two churches where one would suffice for the worshipers of both classes involves some additional expense, the expense may not be greater than the resultant spiritual advantage.

But to close the doors of any church on any Christian is in so far to make it an unchristian church.  To go into the South to establish white churches from which, whether by a formal law or by an unwritten but self-enforcing edict, men are excluded because God made them black, is to deny one of the fundamental tenets of Christ:  All ye are brethren.  It is to introduce into a church already divided by sectarian strifes a new division.  It is to rend afresh the seamless robe.  To say to any man asking for Christian fellowship on the simple ground of faith in Christ, “Stand back:  for I am whiter than thou,” is simply a new and indefensible form of Pharisaism.  The church exists to proclaim certain truths, among which the brotherhood of man stands pre-eminent.  It is difficult to see with what consistency a Christian minister can preach on the parable of the Good Samaritan if his church refuses to recognize a Christian brother in one of another race because he belongs to another race.  There is no reason for an attempt to corral all men of all races in one inclosure; but for any church, especially for a church of the Puritans, to enter upon missionary work in the South, and initiate it by refusing to admit to its fellowship a black man because he is black, is to apostatize from the faith in order to get a chance to preach the faith.  To assert equality and brotherhood at the polls, to reaffirm it in a public school system, to reassert it by courts of law in the hotel and the railroad train, and then deny it in the church, would be indeed a singular incongruity, and would make the Nation more Christian than the church.