nd of his own race; so, rightly
and naturally, were founded the normal school and the college. He needed
his own educated preachers, physicians, lawyers; for these, too, there
must be training. So, rightly and naturally, were planted
universities,--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard. It was an unquestioned creed that
the white man's training as preacher, lawyer, physician, teacher, must
begin with years of Latin and Greek; so what other way for the negro?
So, as almost inevitable, the early education of the race began as a
copy of the white man's methods. But sadly inadequate, alas, as we begin
to see, is a classical education for the typical white man of our time;
and immense was the gap between the teaching of which that was the core
and crown, and the wants of the black field-hands and their children.

Labor, education,--and what of religion? The slave had found in
Christianity, often in rude, half-barbaric forms, a consolation, a
refuge, a tenderness and hope, to which we can scarcely do justice.
Perhaps its most eloquent expression to our imagination is those
wonderful old-time melodies, the negro "spirituals," as they have been
made familiar by the singers of the negro colleges. Their words are
mystic, Scriptural, grotesque; the melodies have a pathos, a charm, a
moving power, born out of the heart's depths through centuries of sorrow
dimly lighted by glimmerings of a divine love and hope. The typical
African temperament, the tragedy of bondage, the tenderness and triumph
of religion, find voice in those psalms.

Religion is not to be despised because it is not altogether or even
largely ethical. The heart depressed by drudgery, hardship, forlornness,
craves not merely moral guidance but exhilaration and ecstacy. Small
wonder if it seeks it in whisky; better surely if it finds it in hymns
and prayers and transports partly of the flesh yet touched by the
spirit. Further, by faithful masters and mistresses there was given to
the slave's religion, in many cases, a clear and strong sense of moral
obligation. Uncle Tom in his saintliness may be an idealization, but the
elements were drawn from life.

Yet the slave's and so the freedman's religion was very one-sided and
out of all proportion emotional. Its habitual aim was occasional
transport on earth and rapture in heaven. Of the day's task, of homely
fidelities and services, of marriage and parenthood and neighborhood and
citizenship, it made almost no account.

Face to face