e same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and
lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long
pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What
wonder that every tendency is to excess,--radical complaint, radical
remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise.
The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell
and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the
better classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white
and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose
bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They
despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but
offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist
side by side with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the
tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls
are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact
that this bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to
intensify it and make it more maddening.

Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus
sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North
and South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social
conflict within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating,--now
into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable
from similar white groups save in color of skin; now into large social
and business institutions catering to the desire for information and
amusement of their members, warily avoiding unpleasant questions both
within and without the black world, and preaching in effect if not in
word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.

But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of
the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human
souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great
night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when
the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward
the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that
makes life worth living--Liberty, Justice, and Right--is marked "For
White People Only."

XI

Of the Passing of the First-Born

O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's