ch member. Some, to be sure,
are not regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend
services; but, practically, a proscribed people must have a social
centre, and that centre for this people is the Negro church. The
census of 1890 showed nearly twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the
country, with a total enrolled membership of over two and a half
millions, or ten actual church members to every twenty-eight persons,
and in some Southern States one in every two persons. Besides these
there is the large number who, while not enrolled as members, attend
and take part in many of the activities of the church. There is an
organized Negro church for every sixty black families in the nation,
and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an average, a
thousand dollars' worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six million
dollars in all.

Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive steps
of this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we
must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear
itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we
can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not
start in America. He was brought from a definite social
environment,--the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief
and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was
nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding
influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and
sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and
the West Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the
clan and tribe, and the white master replaced the chief with far
greater and more despotic powers. Forced and long-continued toil
became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship
disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and
polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity. It was a
terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the
former group life, and the chief remaining institution was the Priest
or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his
function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the
comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquel