Baptists and Methodists. The low educational standard of the ministry for these Churches, their easy methods of organization and their insistence on feeling rather than on conduct have appealed strongly to the great mass of the negroes.

Looking more closely at those in our Church, we find that out of nine million negroes in the South, we have about nine thousand communicants: one in a thousand. They vary from one in 381 in Virginia to one in 7961 in Mississippi. In my own State of North Carolina we have one negro communicant to every 480 of the negro population.

What was the religious condition and teaching of the negroes before the Civil War? In 1816 in Philadelphia

the African-Methodist Episcopal Church separated from the whites; and they have formed the strongest negro organization in the country. A large number of the negro Methodists remained, however, with the whites; and for some of these, churches were built, and a white preacher regularly set aside by the white Conference to minister to their black people. Others came to the same church with the whites, occupying the gallery or pews allotted to them in the rear of the Church. The colored Baptists and Presbyterians worshipped in the same way with the whites, and were ministered to by white preachers. In the Church we had no colored ministers; but the negroes worshipped with us in separate parts of the same Church building, and the white clergyman felt responsible for the black portion of his flock. In many Churches—I have one now particularly in mind—the white people sat in the front pews in the morning and the negroes in the back. In the afternoon, the same clergyman, in the same Church, preached to the negroes, sitting in front, and the white people, some of whom generally came, sitting behind. At the Holy Communion and at Confirmation whites and blacks came together, the blacks generally last. In South Carolina, when the Civil War began, there were very nearly as many black communicants in the Church as white. On every plantation and in nearly every Christian home throughout

the South, without regard to religious affiliations, the negroes were taught in Sunday-schools by the mistress and her older daughters. Many of the large planters employed a regular chaplain for their negroes. I knew intimately the Rev. George Patterson, who began his ministry in East Carolina as chaplain to the negroes belonging to Mr. Josiah Collins.

Just a word or two here about slavery, this suggestion coming to me from a Northern clergyman, who has for the past twenty years been doing noble work for the negroes in North Carolina. Slavery with all its horrors was over-ruled by God to be a great missionary institution. The savage black men were brought into the closest contact with the highest Anglo-Saxon civilization, the best negroes coming into personal touch with the best whites as servant and master. They were taught Christ by as fair representatives of his religion as the world has ever seen. The negroes were brought under law, and were forced to see the blessings of order and justice. As Booker Washington also admits, they were taught the value of work and its necessity. So, through slavery the negro in the United States to-day stands far above the wild and ignorant African who now inhabits the land from which he came. When you read Uncle Tom's Cabin, remember that Uncle Tom was a product of slavery and

that the fairer side as presented by Mrs. Stowe was the most common in the whole South. Do not misunderstand me; together with a large majority of the thinking white men of the South, I rejoice that slavery is a thing of the past; I would not have it again if I could; I see its frightful evils; but we must all acknowledge that slavery has been a potent factor for good in the evolution of the negro in the United States.