iped, before the
war, in the same congregations with their negro slaves. They were
conscious of the plantation group, and of the economic unity with their
work-people. When emancipation came and the slaves were made free, they
must needs worship apart; and today, throughout the whole South, the
negro churches have been erected to express the consciousness of kind,
both on the part of the white and of the black.

If this argument has force, it goes to prove that religion is, in a
small community, the strongest organizing force. The seeking after God
requires as a vehicle the consciousness of likeness and difference. It
can only proceed along those lines.

The earnest desire of many common folk to know God is a working force,
which follows the cleavage of social classification. The churches become
expressions of social forms. In the country particularly, where life is
simpler and changes are slower, the church becomes an almost infallible
index of the social condition of the people.

The duty, then, of the religious worker, and the task of the prophet and
the seer, is to enlarge the consciousness of kind. Worship is to be
placed on a larger plane. Americans must be taught to see their unity
with immigrants. Owners of land must be made to recognize that they are
one with their tenants. The employer must be shown that his alliances
are with those who help him to get his living. At once, when this task
is put before us, we see the futility of the ideals of our time. Church
workers and other teachers have played up before the eyes of the people
those ideals which separate men into artificial classes. The
consciousness of kind has been a consciousness of money and
consciousness of belonging to old families, or a consciousness of the
ideals of higher education. A great many American families live in the
ideal of sending their boys and girls to college. This leads them to
feel a difference between themselves and the larger number of people who
do not care for higher education, and who discover no energies in
themselves that move on the path of learning. The result is that their
worship is narrow; churches become culture clubs: the preachers are
exponents of literature: the service of worship is a liturgy of esthetic
pleasure.

The true consciousness of kind must be economic and social. There is no
escape from this for religious people. They must go deep down to the
unities with men who co-operate with them in getting a livin