RIGHT THINKING.                    573

ers and made old ocean yield to him the most sacred arcana
of the deep. He has chained the lightning to his chariot
wheels and riding in advance proclaims the advent of the storm.
He has climbed the heights of knowledge by slow and painful
steps and, standing on the Himalaya of human achievement,
exclaims:
                 "I am monarch of all I survey;
                 My right there is none to dispute."
  Well may Shakespeare exclaim, "What a piece of work is
man!" But deprive Man of thought and you make him a
brute. Thought is an Aladdin's Lamp--a magic wand that
will make the wilderness and solitary place glad and the des-
ert rejoice and blossom as the rose. I do not mean words,
but thoughts. Words are intellectual coins with which to pur-
chase the nutritious loaves of thought. But words are not
thoughts any more than money is bread. A man may have
hoards of gold and be starving or a multitude of words and an
empty head. Thought is often too deep for speech-actions
alone can express them. That is the kind of thought I mean,
and that is the kind of thought the race needs to-day.
  Every intelligent Negro in this country sees that the salva-
tion of the Negro race is in the hands of the Negroes themselves,
and the question on every lip is "What must we do to be
saved?" The answer has been and is now--educate. But how?
"A temple to attract and teach, lifts its spire on every hill"
and yet the Negro as a race is still lingering in the valley of
ignorance. Young men leave the schools to seek a job as
teacher or preacher--failing in that, they become table waiters
and barbers or go to the dogs. This has led to a distrust of
the schools and a general cry for manual training. The en-
thusiastic advocates of this doctrine seem to believe that if
every school for boys is made a workshop and each academy for
girls a cook kitchen, the lion of capital will lie down with the
lamb of labor, poverty will disappear, laziness become a for-
gotten disease and tramping a lost art, oppression will cease and
the Millennium dawn. But they are wrong. The trouble
is deeper than that. Every human being has an ideal-a goal




			

OHS/National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center Serial Collection

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 2

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  02
Date:  10/1911