A Voice from the South

and texture of hair. If you object to imaginary lines⁠—don’t draw them! Leave only the real lines of nature and character. And so whatever the vision, the revelation, the idea, vouchsafed you,

Think it truly and thy thoughts shall the soul’s famine feed.
Speak it truly and each word of thine shall be a fruitful seed;
Live it truly and thy life shall be a grand and holy creed!

Macaulay has left us in his masterly description of Ignatius Loyola a vivid picture of the power of a belief and its independence of material surroundings.

“On the road from the Theatine convent in Venice might have been seen once a poor crippled Spaniard, wearily but as fast as his injured limbs can carry him making his way toward Rome. His face is pinched, his body shrunken, from long fast and vigil. He enters the City of the Caesars without money, without patrons, without influence! but there burns a light in his eye that recks not of despair. In a frequented portion of a busy street he stops and mounts a stone, and from this rude rostrum begins to address the passers by in barbarous Latin. Lo, there is contagion in the man! He has actually imparted of his spirit to that mottled audience! And now the same fire burns in a hundred eyes, that shone erewhile from his. Men become his willing slaves to do his bidding even unto the ends of the earth. With what courage, what zeal, what utter self-abnegation, with what blind devotion to their ends regardless of means do they preach, teach, write, act! Behind the thrones of kings, at the bedside of paupers, under every disguise in every land, mid pestilence and famine, in prisons oft, in perils by land and perils by sea, the Jesuit, undaunted, pursues his way.”

Do you seek to know the secret charm of Ignatius Loyola, the hidden spring of the Jesuit’s courage and unfaltering purpose? It is these magic words, “I believe.” That is power. That is the stamping attribute in every impressive personality, that is the fire to the engine and the motor force in every battery. That is the live coal from the altar which at once unseals the lips of the dumb⁠—and that alone which makes a man a positive and not a negative quantity in the world’s arithmetic. With this potent talisman man no longer “abideth alone.” He cannot stand apart, a cold spectator of earth’s pulsing struggles. The flame must burst forth. The idea, the doctrine, the device for betterment must be imparted. “I believe,”⁠—this was strength and power to Paul, to Mohammed, to the Saxon Monk and the Spanish Zealot⁠—and they must be our strength if our lives are to be worth the living. They mean as much today as they did in the breast of Luther or of Loyola. Who cheats me of this robs me of both shield and spear. Without them I have no inspiration to better myself, no inclination to help another.

It is small service to humanity, it seems to me, to open men’s eyes to the fact that the world rests on nothing. Better the turtle of the myths, than a perhaps. If “fooled they must be, though wisest of the wise,” let us help to make them the fools of virtue. You may have learned that the pole star is twelve degrees from the pole and forbear to direct your course by it⁠—preferring your needle taken from earth and fashioned by man’s device. The slave brother, however, from the land of oppression once saw the celestial beacon and dreamed not that it ever deviated from due North. He believed that somewhere under its beckoning light, lay a far away country where a man’s a man. He sets out with his heavenly guide before his face⁠—would you tell him he is pursuing a wandering light? Is he the poorer for his ignorant hope? Are you the richer for your enlightened suspicion?

Yes, I believe there is existence beyond our present experience; that that existence is conscious and culturable; and that there is a noble work here and now in helping men to live into it.

“Not in Utopia⁠—subterraneous fields⁠—
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in this very world, which is the world
Of all of us⁠—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!”

There are nations still in darkness to whom we owe a light. The world is to be moved one generation forward⁠—whether by us, by blind force, by fate, or by God! If thou believest, all things are possible; and as thou believest, so be it unto thee.

Endnotes

1. Read before the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Washington, DC, 1886. ↩

2. Bascom. ↩

3. Bascom’s Eng. Lit. p. 253. ↩

4. Pamphlet published by Dr. Alex. Crummell. ↩

5. The published report of ’91 shows 26 priests for the entire country, including one not engaged in work and one a professor in a nonsectarian school, since made Dean of an Episcopal Annex to Howard University known as King Hall. ↩

6. Five have been graduated since ’86, two in ’91, two in ’92. ↩

7. Graduated from Scientific Course, June, 1890, the first colored woman to graduate from Cornell. ↩

Colophon

A Voice from the South
was published in 1892 by
Anna Julia Cooper.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2020 by
Richard Tonsing, Mary Glenn Krause, amsibert, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Portrait of a Lady,
a painting completed in 1947 by
Laura Wheeler Waring.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League