ey have called religion is
not really religion at all.

It must be remembered that every man or woman of these millions who has
reached middle life was born a slave. The great bulk of the population
have been brought up practically in the environment of a servile life.
While there was much that was tender and pathetic and strong in the mute
faith with which thousands of them lived through the dark trials of
slavery, looking unto Christ as their deliverer, still the superstitions
and degradations of slavery, its breaking of all home ties and life, could
but infect the current religion of the black people. At its best, in
multitudes of cases, it is but a form of physical and sensational
excitement. The deep work of regenerating the soul and the life, which is
the vital need of these people, is not done; it is not even attempted in
the vast majority of the negro churches of the Black Belt. "The problem of
the Kanaka in my native Hawaiian Islands," General Armstrong once said to
me, "is one with that of the Southern negro. The Sandwich Islander,
converted, was not yet rebuilt in the forces of his manhood." On the side
of his moral nature, where he is weakest, the black man of the South has
still to be girded and energized. In him are still the tendencies of his
hereditary paganism, the vices of his slavehood. These will sink him
unless his whole nature is regenerated by the ministration of a pure and
vital Christianity.

The black man needs what every human being needs, help from above. It is
futile to say, he is free, let him alone. Mere freedom never yet saved a
human soul. The gospel of Christ is not a mere declaration of freedom; it
is regeneration and help from above. The more deeply a race is sinking in
degradation and sin, the more imperative is its call for saving power from
on high.

From what element of our population is this cry of distress and need more
agonizing than from the poor black man of the South? He is sinking in a
quicksand of ignorance, poverty, and vice. There is nothing beneath to
support his feet. He must go down unless he can get help from above. Those
who are nearest to him, and can see and feel most deeply his desperate
condition, plead most strongly in his behalf. "The definition is very
clear, sharp, and simple," says an honored white minister of the South,
"that the negroes are making a tremendous struggle to get an education and
be religious; but despite this struggle, the bottom strata of