views. The
moral binds us to our fellowmen, and the religious to our God; and a
man may in many respects be better than his fellowman but he can never
be better than his God. If a man has low and meagre ideas of God his
ideas of man will be low and meagre whatever may be his conceptions of
the law, government, and the character of his Creator will be his
ideas of duty to wife, children, neighbors and country.

The educational qualifications on moral and religious lines must
furnish some of the rules by which the standard can be gauged for the
man who has by liberal and extensive educational facilities gotten the
capacity to know his God and His moral government over His creatures
must rise in moral improvement and stand out as the towering mountain
above the plain that surrounds it. And on this line the upper class of
Negroes, by reason of religious and educational advantages, are an
improvement morally on their fathers, whose opportunities for moral
improvement were very meagre, indeed.

The middle class of Negroes are not equal to the upper class in
attainments. Their educational advantages have not been so great as
those of the upper class, and yet their moral development has been
correspondingly as great. The moral law of God has been heard as
distinctly by them as by the upper, but they have not that
discriminating judgment that enables them in every instance to
distinguish between the morally wrong and the morally right, and yet
there has been awakened in them a consciousness of certain things due
to their fellowman and to their God that has kept them in a way that
they could not be charged with wilful moral wrong, and their
conservatism has placed them in a manner nearer to the morally right
than to the morally wrong. And the young Negroes of this class are an
improvement morally on their fathers. Solomon hath said, "As a man
thinketh, so is he." Good character cannot arise out of low thoughts,
but it must emanate from pure, noble, God-fearing and elevating
thoughts and ideas. Correct ideas of life practically embodied in
conduct can lift man above the low, sensual, evil walks of life. Now
that there are many young Negroes with correct ideas of life cannot be
denied. Now the lower class of Negroes are those whose ideas are
distorted; who are conscience-seared, and who have no regard for God
nor man; and as the upper and middle classes have ascended in the
scale of moral civilization, so the bad class of Negroes