, the greatest Negro organization in the
world, to the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black
conferences and churches in this and other denominations.

The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this
communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But
especially it leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the
expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true
elsewhere. Let us turn, then, from the outer physical development of
the church to the more important inner ethical life of the people who
compose it. The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a
religious animal,--a being of that deep emotional nature which turns
instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical
imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the
transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils,
elves and witches; full of strange influences,--of Good to be implored,
of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph
of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were
striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his
heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,--exorcism
and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites,
spells, and blood-sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims.
Weird midnight orgies and mystic conjurations were invoked, the
witch-woman and the voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group
life, and that vein of vague superstition which characterizes the
unlettered Negro even to-day was deepened and strengthened.

In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the
Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away
under the untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with
hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system,
and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing
suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive
submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters
early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within
certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the
Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his