largely taking the place with him,
which the secret and benevolent societies hold among the white people.
Very few are Roman Catholics. The Roman Church has not made the progress
among the negroes, which one would expect of the Church which has such a
hold on the common peoples of Southern Europe. Only about four thousand
are members of the Presbyterian Church; and to the Episcopal Church
belong only 9,000 communicants. The rest are divided between the
Baptists and Methodists. The low educational standard of the ministry
for these Churches, their easy methods of organization and their
insistence on feeling rather than on conduct have appealed strongly to
the great mass of the negroes.

Looking more closely at those in our Church, we find that out of nine
million negroes in the South, we have about nine thousand communicants:
one in a thousand. They vary from one in 381 in Virginia to one in 7961
in Mississippi. In my own State of North Carolina we have one negro
communicant to every 480 of the negro population.

What was the religious condition and teaching of the negroes before the
Civil War? In 1816 in Philadelphia the African-Methodist Episcopal
Church separated from the whites; and they have formed the strongest
negro organization in the country. A large number of the negro
Methodists remained, however, with the whites; and for some of these,
churches were built, and a white preacher regularly set aside by the
white Conference to minister to their black people. Others came to the
same church with the whites, occupying the gallery or pews allotted to
them in the rear of the Church. The colored Baptists and Presbyterians
worshipped in the same way with the whites, and were ministered to by
white preachers. In the Church we had no colored ministers; but the
negroes worshipped with us in separate parts of the same Church
building, and the white clergyman felt responsible for the black portion
of his flock. In many Churches--I have one now particularly in mind--the
white people sat in the front pews in the morning and the negroes in the
back. In the afternoon, the same clergyman, in the same Church, preached
to the negroes, sitting in front, and the white people, some of whom
generally came, sitting behind. At the Holy Communion and at
Confirmation whites and blacks came together, the blacks generally last.
In South Carolina, when the Civil War began, there were very nearly as
many black communicants in the Church as w