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Title: Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture
The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20

Author: William H. Ferris

Release Date: February 18, 2010 [EBook #31322]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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OCCASIONAL PAPERS NO. 20.

American Negro Academy

Alexander Crummell
An Apostle of Negro Culture

BY
WILLIAM H. FERRIS

WASHINGTON, D. C.:
PUBLISHED BY THE ACADEMY
1920

R. L.
Pendleton
Printer

ALEXANDER CRUMMELL AN APOSTLE OF NEGRO CULTURE.

A noted English lawyer-author has declared that the twelfth chapter of
Ecclesiastes is the final word of the world's philosophy; that no ancient
or modern thinker has uttered a profounder word. And in the seventh verse
of that chapter it reads, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it
was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."

Metaphysicians tell us that through his five senses, man is in touch with
and in relation to his physical environment and a physical world, and that
through his reason, imagination, conscience, aesthetic and religious
intuitions, man is in touch with and in relation to his spiritual
environment and a spiritual world. They also tell us that at death, the
soul and body merely part company and go their respective ways. The
oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and other chemical elements in the body mingle
with the material elements from which they came. And the soul of man, the
ego, the center of self-consciousness, recognitive memory and reflective
thought, which has maintained its identity amid the changes of the
physical organism, will survive the destruction of that organism and live
on and on in the spirit world, embodied in whatever form and clothed with
whatever garments its Maker so decreed.

Scientists tell us that when you throw a pebble in a stream, it sets up a
series of ever-widening circles