ck millions still in
bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught
new notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,--

"O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free."

For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified
itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad
in the white North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had
become a religion to the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally
came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His
fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies,
the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social
upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had
he to do with it? Was it not the Lord's doing, and marvellous in his
eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new
wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the nation and
brought the crisis of to-day.

It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in
close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although
imperfectly, the soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be
affected more or less directly by all the religious and ethical forces
that are to-day moving the United States. These questions and
movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them)
all-important question of their civil, political, and economic status.
They must perpetually discuss the "Negro Problem,"--must live, move,
and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its light or
darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of their inner
life,--of the status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training of
children, the accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime. All
this must mean a time of intense ethical ferment, of religious
heart-searching and intellectual unrest. From the double life every
American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by
the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the
fifteenth century,--from this must arise a painful self-consciousness,
an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is
fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of
Color are changin