at any cost.

At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it
was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of
the white race will be allowed to reassert itself, it must be through
their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses
that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be
influenced at all.

I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in
Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French
episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of
England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the
Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English
gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to
work on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted above,
that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on
the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves,
and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father
whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse
to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official
returns, nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come
into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more
popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father ----was doing what a good
many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances.
Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians
carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not
be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica;
of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above
all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical
power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them.
But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in
the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me
to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the
Catholics might become more numerous than they are. The priests in
Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on
independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.

The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises
before us at the close of this wani