The biography of Charles Spurgeon was amazing and I hope to read another one about him. This time around I turned to another 19th century figure by the name of Fredrick Douglass. Reading biographies like this helps us to see so many things about our world that we just don't get from TV or movies. Biographies teach us about the past and yet give us an insight into our world today and about ourselves. We think that we are learning new things but some of these discoveries were learned by others long ago. I encourage everyone to read biographies of great people. You will find that great people started out where we are.
Douglass was born in the early 1800s, the child of a slave mother and rumored to be fathered by his master. His coloring was said to be golden as a result. If you want to have a good look at the life of slaves in early America you can read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or you can read this story about Douglass. It is not a pretty picture. What is most disturbing is that many so-called good Christians who were pious on Sunday were horrible masters, beating their slaves, selling them into greater hardships if they disobeyed, separating families and killing them, which was fully in their rights to do so.
One of the great ironies of the time was the hypocrisy of the church in the South. Blacks were not allowed to learn to read and therefore the Bible was kept from them. Punishment was dished out on those who taught slaves to read; it was said that teaching them to read would make them crave freedom and try to run away. Yet at the same time the Church supported missions and missionaries to go out into the foreign lands and bring the gospel to the heathens. They sent money to translate the Bible into the foreign languages of a variety of "colored" folks. But at home they preferred their slaves to live in sin and drunkeness, immorality and licentiousness. Douglass could not believe the utter irony and hypocrisy of this mentality.
Fredrick Douglass eventually escaped his masters' bondage and headed North to New York where he met people of the underground railroad. He was set up in Massachusets, taught a trade and eventually got married to his sweetheart from the slave state of Maryland. But his destiny was to become a powerful speaker on the abolitionist circuit. He told his slave story to thousands and inspired a nation to consider that God created all men equal, that anyone who followed Christ would not keep slaves but would give a man his liberty. It is fascinating stuff.
I still have some chapters to read but I am inspired by this man's tenacity and faithfulness to God.
1 comment:
Cool. I think one of the benefits of a biography is that it can very clearly show us that anything great accomplished through someone's life is most often not through any greatness of their own (shown in their weaknesses and flaws)but by God's incredible grace and power. Since it isn't fiction, I can't argue that it was "made up" or that it couldn't happen in real life.
Keep keeping us up to date on what you're reading. We'll get smarter through you!
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