coming together and forming one body. There have been some
correspondence and conferences to consider the possibility of such a
union.

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