church finances not kept in a confused state. Pastor’s salaries and other church obligations are not raised and met in a systematic way, but are left to appeals to the feelings of the people whose ethical sense has not been cultivated. We have thus enumerated among the defects of the laity, worldliness, untrained Christian consciousness, restricted meaning of the gospel, the non-concreteness of the Christian virtues, and the lack of a missionary spirit and of business methods.

V. EXCESSIVE EMOTIONALISM IN WORSHIP.

Paradoxical as it may seem, in religion the Negro’s emotions constitute his strongest as well as his weakest point. The fact that he is largely developed in the emotional side of his nature would, other things being equal, give him a vantage ground in matters of religion. His defect is not that he is emotional, but that he is excessively so. Like other races in their childhood, he is a bundle of feelings. He does not think after God, he does not will after God, but he feels after God. He is not driven to action because he is impelled by a moral imperative, the law of duty, but he is controlled by his nerves which are his thermometer. With the nerves as his guide it is impossible to tell where he stands on many moral questions. Neurotic environments appeal quickly to him, and are fostered by the church in sermons which appeal largely to the imagination, in weird pictures of the unseen, in apocalyptic sermons, and by mystic preachers known as mourners, shouters and visioners. As a subject of experimentation in physco-physics, the most fitting time is in seasons of revival in religion when his emotion is keyed to the highest point.

The following stages may be noticed:

(1) Violent physical commotion followed by physical exhaustion.

(2) Loss of physical control.

(3) Loss of moral control. At this stage there is a feeling of abandon leading often to unchaste exposure of the person, wild cries as if demented, and all kinds of extravagances.

(4) Mental infection as well as emotional panic. At this stage there is pandemonium. Many obtain religion by the process of infection.

(5) A lowered physical as well as moral vitality. At the last meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a thoughtful paper by Dr. Graham of Ireland showed that there was less insanity among Roman Catholics than Protestants in Ireland, due to difference in type of religion, Protestants of Ireland being intensely morbid and ascetic in their Calvinism. (Congregationalist, Nov. 29, 1902, p. 781.) I should not be surprised, if investigation was made, that similar results would be seen in America not only between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but among Protestants themselves. I should not be surprised that there were fewer maniacs among Presbyterians and Congregationalists than among Baptists and Methodists. May not students of physco-physics make this a study for the benefit of religion? To the use of emotions in religion the writer has no objections, he is heartily in favor, but he seriously objects to excessive emotionalism for the following reasons:

(1) It fails to recognize the moral and ethical judgment.

(2) It fails to recognize the volitional side of human nature. “With a man’s will-power dormant, undeveloped, unknown, all attempt at really training and moulding the character is foolish because impossible. Man sometimes attempts it; God never does. He calls into activity first of all a man’s will. He seeks to know what a man’s own free choice is. Then he knows what course to follow in his schooling of the soul.”[1]

(3) It fails to recognize the rational side of human nature.

(4) It is at variance