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 deeply a race is sinking in degradation and sin, the more imperative is its call for saving power from on high.
From what element of our population is this cry of distress and need more agonizing than from the poor black man of the South? He is sinking in a quicksand of ignorance, poverty, and vice. There is nothing beneath to support his feet. He must go down unless he can get help from above. Those who are nearest to him, and can see and feel most deeply his desperate condition, plead most strongly in his behalf. "The definition is very clear, sharp, and simple," says an honored white minister of the South, "that the negroes are making a tremendous struggle to get an education and be religious; but despite this struggle, the bottom strata of the race are being sucked into crime and ruin with unprecedented and increasing rapidity. But, wherever the efforts of white Christians to aid them are regular, steady, and strong, this destruction and debasement are stayed to a marvelous degree. Here, then, are conditions that seem to leave no room for either neglect or delay, so far as we are concerned. Delay is sin to us, and death to them."