devoutly believed
in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt
countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical
fervor,--the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro
and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the
trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as
Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that
many generations firmly believed that without this visible
manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the
Invisible.

These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up
to the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar circumstances of
the black man's environment they were the one expression of his higher
life, they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both
socially and psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of
inquiry that here group themselves. What did slavery mean to the
African savage? What was his attitude toward the World and Life? What
seemed to him good and evil,--God and Devil? Whither went his longings
and strivings, and wherefore were his heart-burnings and
disappointments? Answers to such questions can come only from a study
of Negro religion as a development, through its gradual changes from
the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional Negro church of
Chicago.

Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be
slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries.
The Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to
the silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts.
Especially is this noticeable in the South, where theology and
religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North,
and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro
thought and methods. The mass of "gospel" hymns which has swept
through American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song
consists largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears
that caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of
the Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the study of Negro religion
is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no
uninteresting part of American history.

The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteris