ut the most painful misgivings. The
Catholic and the Dissenting Churches which have done so much for the
temporal and spiritual advancement of the Negro, in spite of hindrance
and active persecution wherever these were possible, are, so far as is
visible, maintaining their hold on the adhesion of those who belong to
them.

[212] And it cannot be pretended that, among enlightened Africans as
compared with other enlightened people, there have been more grievous
failings off from the scriptural standard of deportment. Possible it
certainly is that considerations akin to, or even identical with, those
relied upon by Mr. Froude might, on the first reception of Christianity
in their exile, have operated effectually upon the minds of the
children of Africa. At that time the evangelizers whose converts they
so readily became possessed the recommendation of belonging to the
dominant caste. Therefore, with the humility proper to their forlorn
condition, the poor bondsmen requited with intense gratitude such
beneficent interest on their behalf, as a condescension to which people
in their hapless situation could have had no right. But for many long
years, the distinction whether of temporal or of spiritual superiority
has ceased to be the monopoly of any particular class. The master and
employer has for far more than a century and a half been often
represented in the West Indies by some born African or his descendant;
and so also has the teacher and preacher. It is not too much to say
that [213] the behaviour of the liberated slaves throughout the British
Antilles, as well as the deportment of the manumitted four million
slaves of the Southern United States later on, bore glorious testimony
to the humanizing effects which the religion of charity, clutched at
and grasped in fragments, and understood with childlike incompleteness,
had produced within those suffering bosoms.

Nothing has occurred to call for a remodelling of the ordinary moral
and spiritual machinery for the special behoof of Negroes. Religion,
as understood by the best of men, is purely a matter of feeling and
action between man and man--the doing unto others as we would they
should do unto us; and any creed or any doctrine which directly or
indirectly subverts or even weakens this basis is in itself a danger to
the highest welfare of mankind. The simple conventional faith in God,
in Jesus, and in a future state, however modified nowadays, has still a
vita