OUR COLORED BROTHERS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 180, 8 September 1876, Page 12

OUR COLORED BROTHERS.

<-+ ( From the ' New York World ') Mr Edward W. Bly. den, who is a full-blooded negro, a university graduate and the head of a prominent educational institution in Liberia, contributes to an English magazine a remarkable article on I " Christianity and the Negro Race," a companion piece to his " Maliometanism and the Negro Race," published last fall. In his introductory recital of facts connected with the history of American slavery, he recalls the slave-holding record of Perm, WhitefMd and Edwards, the careful training of generations of Puritan or Huguenot descent in the belief of the God given right of enslaving the negro, and the teaching of tlie negro himself by Christian divines of all shades of opinion, of the duty of submission. He received the Gospel travestied and diluted, and his morality grew all awry. Since the civil war and the abolition of slavery, social and moral progress has been made, though necessarily it has been slow, mainly because the negro is taught not to be himself, but to imitate some one else, to copy the white man. From the general introduction, Mr. Blyden passes on to discuss a question in which Ameicans will take a special interest — the relative claims of the Catholic and Protestant churches to the respect and allegiance of the negro. The text is the article published in the ' Independent ' by Bishop John M. Brown, of the African M. E. Church, warning the colored people against the aggressions upon their ranks of the Roman Catholics, and the reply of George T. Downing controverting the Bishop's position. Mr. Blyden's comments are marked by fr.mkness, acuteness and ampleness of informaton. He does not believe that the thoughtful and cultivated negro can read history without being compelled irresistibly to acknowledge the deep debt of gratitude his race owes to the Catholic Church The only Christian negroes that freed themselves and maintained their position as freemen — the Haytians — were Catholics, and, " the greatest negro the Christian world has yet produced — Toussaint L'Ouverture " — was also a Catholic. Rome has canonized many negroes, male and female, but Protestantism has no colored sa.nt. A negro in the sixteenth century rose to be Professor of Latin and Greek in the schools attached to the cathedral of Granada, and married a lady of that city, who erected a monument to his memory in the cathedral ; in what Protestant university has a negro been tolerated ? Benj imin Banneker, says Mr. Blyden, is the most distinguished ne«;ro produced by a Protestant country, and the only literary recognition he ever received was in an appreciative letter from Jefferson, a reputed infidel. All the historians of Brazil extol the name of Henry Diaz, the negro general. Borros, the Portuguese historian, i*ate3 the negroes as soldiers, as preferable to the Swiss. The blacks vied with the French in the defence of Guadaloupe and Martinique. When, on the other hand, has there ever been a negro general in a Protestant army, or have Protestant negro soldiers proved as efficient ? In 1872 Martinique sent as her delegate to the French National Assembly, a negro, JVI. Pory Papy ; if. the British colonies were represented in the House of Commons, would the people of Jamaica or Barbadoes do as much ? When in the Episcopal convention held in this city in 1874 it was decided to consecrate a negro Bishop of Hayti, the English Bishop of Jamaica, Dr Courtenay, dissented, alleging that after two hundred years of re- . sidence in Christian Jamaica and forty years of freedom, the island had not yet produced a priest of purely African race, that "no negro ' in holy orders could command that respect in Jamaica which a white '. priest could command." ! Under Protestant rule, Mr. Blyden concludes, the negro is kept ' in such a state of tutelage and irresponsibility that he cm scarcely \ fail to be constantly dependent, and therefore in an emergency, use- \ less. He had in his previous essay shown that, a3 compared with 313 1 Mahometanisin, which admitted the negro as equal, educated him and ' conferred responsibilities on him, the same thing was true of Chris1 tianitv. He finally notes that as a rule the truest friends of the negro 2 among Christians have been found outside of the orthodox denorainations." Charming, Parker, Garrison, Phillips, Emerson, Longfellow, all were Unitarians, and the most constant and uncompromising det fender of the cjlored man in England has been the godless Westminster ' Review.'