btful whether any other section of Alabama has
made more rapid progress along intellectual and moral lines the past
twenty-five years than the Black Belt. Here multiplied schools and
colleges and missionary efforts have been doing their utmost, and
great has been the result.

Just about twenty-seven years ago the writer came from New England
into this Black Belt, curious to see and to hear. One Sabbath
afternoon it was noised abroad that a famous colored preacher was to
speak in one of the large town churches. His text was, "And there was
war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and
the dragon fought and his angels." Rev. 12:7. A very difficult text.
The sermon, however, was almost wholly about John the "revelator," and
not on the text at all. The preacher began by informing his hearers
that John was a very wonderful man, and the Romans wanted to kill him,
so they put him into a kettle of oil and boiled him and boiled him,
but could not kill him. Hence they determined to banish him to Patmos,
so they put him on board a ship and sailed for three months over the
great ocean, and then they got out the telescope and looked for three
thousand miles further over the mighty waters, and there they saw the
tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great
serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides
into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so,
with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he
went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness,
and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the
wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ago
you might hear many similar sermons. But now, were you to go into the
churches in the cities and larger towns of the Black Belt, you would
find no place for the old-time preacher or the old-time sermon, but
instead you would find in the pulpit a man of considerable education
and refinement, preaching good gospel truth to an attentive audience.

Some of the causes and evidences of progress in the Black Belt, both
of preachers and people, may well pass in review at this point.

In the first place, at the close of the war there were no schools for
colored people; now you will find at least twelve hundred common
schools for them in the Black Belt alone, besides a goodly number of
select and higher schools of different denominations, w