The American Missionary | Page 6

obtain among the millions of the plantation negroes of the South, are but little understood. By one who knows it, the Black Belt has been called the great Dismal Swamp, the vast black malarial slough of the American republic.
Gladstone has frequently emphasized an ancient saying, "The corruption of the best thing is the very worst thing." This is emphatically true of much which has been called Christianity in the plantation churches of the South. The testimony which comes to us of the moral and religious condition of many communities in the Black Belt, is startling. One negro witness who has been in direct association for many years with ministers in this part of the South, says, "three-fourths of those who are now acting as preachers in all this region, are absolutely unfit to preach the gospel. It is rare that one can find in the country districts where the masses of the people dwell, a minister who is both intelligent and morally upright."
It is not long since the "Wilderness-Worshiper" excitement swept through a region of the South like a prairie fire. The excitement of expectancy for the immediate coming of Christ added fire to the hearts of the people. Hugh pyres of pine logs were rolled together and lit into flame as the darkness of night came on. These great fires were to light the way for the Saviour when He should come. Men rolled their bodies through the forests in a kind of pagan ecstasy of self-sacrifice to meet Him. So credulous are the negroes of the Black Belt, says a resident white lawyer, that if a fellow with a wig of long hair and a glib tongue should appear among them and say he is the Christ, inside of a week the turmoil of the Wilderness-Worship would be outdone.
Now, a great awakening is beginning among these dark masses of people. Dr. Curry has well said: "Freedom itself is educatory. The energy of representative institutions is a valuable school-master. To control one's labor, to enjoy the earnings of it, to make contracts freely, to have the right of locomotion, and change of residence and business, have a helpful influence on mankind." Many of these people are calling for better preachers; preachers who are earnest and virtuous men and know their Bibles. "We used to listen," said a negro man at a recent meeting, "to these whooping and hollering preachers who snort so you could hear them over three hundred yards, and we would come home and say, 'That's the greatest sermon I ever heard.' But now we want men who can teach us something." "Our preachers are not what they ought to be," said one woman. "We have got too many gripsack preachers--men who go around from church to church with a gripsack, not full of sermons, but of bottles of whisky, which they sell to the members of their congregation." Great masses of negro people are beginning to feel that what they 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