anything that is
African about the Negroes' Christianity, it is not African tradition
but the African temperament which has contributed it. I assume,
therefore, that what we find in the most primitive form of Negro
Christianity is not the revival of an older and more barbaric religion
but the inception of a new and original form of Christianity.

An interesting fact in regard to the religious practices of the
Negroes of the Sea Islands, which has not, so far as I know, been
recorded in any of the descriptions of that people, is the existence
among them of two distinct religious institutions; namely, the church
and the "praise house." The praise house is the earlier institution
and represents apparently a more primitive and more characteristically
Negro or African type. In slavery days, the church was the white man's
place of worship. Negroes were permitted to attend the services and
there was usually a gallery reserved for their use. Churches, however,
were relatively few and not all the slaves on the plantation could
attend at any one time. Those who did attend were usually the house
servants. On every large plantation, however, there was likely to be,
and this was characteristic of the Sea Island plantations, a "praise
house" where the slaves were permitted to worship in their own
peculiar way. It was here that the "shout" took place. After the Civil
War, churches were erected and regular congregations of the Negro
denominations were formed. The Negro churches, however, never wholly
displaced the praise houses on Port Royal and some of the other
islands. It is a singular fact that today, among the Negroes of Port
Royal, at any rate, no one is converted in church. It is only in the
praise houses that Negroes get religion. It is only through the praise
house that one enters the church. The whole process involves, as I
have been informed, not merely an "experience," the precise nature of
which is not clear, but also an examination by the elders to determine
whether the experience is genuine, before candidates are admitted in
good standing as members of the congregation.

On the whole the plantation Negro's religion was a faithful copy of
the white man's. It was content rather than the form which suffered
sea change in the process of transmission from the white man to the
black. What this content was, what new inflection and color the Negro
slave imparted to the religious forms which he borrowed from his
master we may,