the conflict of the
church with the Titan of immorality, the church needs as helpers, men
with a hundred hands like Briareus to hold down this elusive monster.
The term immorality may include all kinds of conduct which the custom of
our times supported by enlightened sentiment disapproves. But the object
of the writer is not to charge the Negro ministry with all kinds of
misdemeanors. There is only one kind of conduct which is so far-reaching
in its results because it is fundamentally subversive of and destructive
to the best interests of society, that the writer wishes to bring up as
a defect of our ministry. It is sexual unchastity. There are causes for
this depravity among a certain class of Negro ministers. It is not a
constitutional disease in the Negro as many of the detractors of the
race have affirmed. Acquaintance with the ancestral life of the African
shows without the shadow of a doubt that the morality of the heathen as
relates to sexes is part of the religion of most African tribes before
they are brought into contact with a foreign civilization. Plantation
life in American society where illicit sexual intercourse was the rule
and not the exception, fostered and encouraged by white masters of the
past, and still practised though less extensively by white men, is a
product of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The environments of country life
encourage illicit living, and to men already reared among them are a
snare. Some of these environments are found in the log-cabin in which
families are crowded together like cattle, and sexual privacy and
decorum are impossible. The plantation log-cabin finds its counterpart
in the slums of cities with their crowded alleys. The landlord in both
cases is at the bottom of these evils. It is but fair to state that
these environments when found in the cities or among the peasantry of
Europe, as in France and Russia, reveal social evils even worse than
those found among Negroes in the United States. But the point we wish to
emphasize is this, that environments help to make the man, and the man
helps to make his environments. There is a class of men among Negro
preachers whose environments have not been other than those in the
plantations, these are the men who are unfit to be the leaders of the
people. When on account of their natural ability and gift of speech they
are set aside as preachers, it only gives them a larger opportunity to
demoralize themselves and those with whom they com