I CHAPTER XVII. THE AFRICAN CHURCHES IN AMERICA. HAVE said that there are nearly one million people of African blood communicants in the different Churches in this country.* The whole negro population has been brought largely under the influence of religious principle and sentiment. I have had good opportunity to know the religious characteristics of these people. My old nurse, "Aunt Esther," was a Christian, if ever there was one in this world. She lived and died in the enjoyment and practice of religion. Her plaintive melodies linger in my grateful memory to this hour. My mother has with her now the same cook she had in 1851. "Aunt Mary" is a "stalwart Methodist;" the pictures of all her Bishops, Bishop Allen's in the center, hang in her room. She shouted mightily the first time she listened to my boy *I might have said more than a million, as follows-those "estimated" expressing the judgment of the best informed: African Methodist Episcopal Church...... Meth. Episcopal Church (col'd members estim'd) 214,808 190,000 112,300 300,000 500,000 preaching, in 1858, while yet a student in Emory College. I have seen the negroes in all their religious moods, in their most death-like trances and in their wildest outbreaks of excitement. I have preached to them in town and city and on the plantations. I have been their pastor, have led their class and prayer meetings, conducted their love-feasts, taught them the Catechism. I have married them, baptized their children, and buried their dead. In the reality of religion among them I have the most entire confidence, nor can I ever doubt it while religion is a reality to me. Their notions may be in some things crude, their conceptions of truth realistic, sometimes to a painful, sometimes to a grotesque, degree. They may be more emotional than ethical. They may show many imperfections in their religious development; nevertheless their religion is their most striking and important, their strongest and most formative, characteristic. They are more remarkable here than anywhere else; their religion has had more to do in shaping their better character in this country than any other influence; it will most determine what they are to become in their future development. No man, whatever his personal relations to the subject, who seeks to understand these people, can afford to overlook or undervalue their religious history and character. Whatever the student of their history may believe on the subject of religion in general and of their religion in particular, this is certain-it is most real to them. To them God is a reality. So are heaven, hell, and the judgment-day. Their Churches are the centers of their social and religious life. No man has more influence with his following than has the negro pastor. Some of their "shepherds" may be far from being "patterns and ensamples to the flock," but they have power with their people. Many of them are men who, in zeal, devotion, and Christlikeness of spirit, are worthy to take rank with the confessors and saints of any age or Church. There is an old man in this village from whom the wisest may learn and the holiest may receive new inspiration in their religious life. Many times he has done me good. David Cureton will claim many stars in his crown of rejoicing. In the old days many of the slave preachers were men of marked character and religious power. Many will be their trophies when "the day" reveals the secrets of all men. Their skill in "exegesis" and "dialectics was limited, but their power in exhortation and application was notable.* Now that education is doing its blessed work in them more perfectly, many of them are men of real intellectual *The following incident is historic. I suppress his name, for I truly respect him, and somebody might tease my old colored brother. He was preaching on the "Fiery Furnace and the Three Hebrew Children." His history and geography were confused, and by some chance he got his biblical history mixed up with some mythologic non power. Some names could be given that are known and honored on both sides of the Atlantic. The hope of the African race in this country is largely in its pulpit. The school-house and the newspaper have not substituted the pulpit, as a throne of spiritual power, in any Christian nation. I do not believe that they ever will. But for this race the pulpit is pre-eminently its teacher. Here they must receive their best counsels and their divinest inspiration. I say its pulpit; I mean this. White preachers have done much and ought to have done more; they can now do much and ought to do a hundred-fold more than they do; but the great work must be done by preachers of the negro race. Tongues and ears were made for each other; in each race both its tongues and its ears have characteristics of their own. No other tongue can speak to the negro's ear like a negro's tongue. All races are so; some missionaries have found this sense he had heard from the " college boys." He gave a most dramatic account of the scene and occasion-they excel in this sort of thing—and managed himself and his theme tolerably well till he came to speak of the "fourth" man whom Nebuchadnezzar saw "walking in the midst of the fire." Whereupon he delivered himself in this wise: "My brutherin, commontators differ as to who this fourth one wus. Some say it wus Moses, some say it wus Isaiah; but my opinion is he ware Jupiter." Yet this same man had power with men in exhortation and power with God in prayer. On questions of sin, repentance, faith in Christ, and religious experience he could touch the conscience till it quivered in agony, and move the heart till it melted with contrition or burst forth into songs of gladness. Moreover, he lived his religion. out. In every mission field the "native ministry does a work that no other can do. How urgent the need and how sacred the duty. of preparing those of this race whom God calls to preach to their people! Heaven bless the men and women who have given money and personal service for their education! Heaven bless their "schools of the prophets!" May they ever be under the wisest guidance and the holiest influences! Mistakes were inevitable; some unwholesome influences have, in some cases, marred the good work. This should not surprise us. But, after all, never was money better spent than in founding trainingschools for a native African ministry. Would God that some Southern men and women counted themselves worthy to take part in this ministry of consecrated gold and holy teaching! I am as sure as I am that it is January, 1881, that the negro preachers are, as a class, improving, and that they are capable of large culture, both intellectual and spiritual. But I do not wish to theorize about their intellectual capacity-overestimated by enthusiasts, on one side, underestimated, on the other, by those who think that consistency means sticking to an expressed opinion, facts or no facts. The measure of their capacity I do not know; perhaps no man knows. How should any one know? The experiment is only in process; it may take a century to complete it. But nothing is |