are white and close them against the same class who are black? I do not
call such people good patriots, let alone clear-sighted Christians. Why,
they act as if God had done wrong in making a man black, and that they
have never forgiven him and had become reconciled to the workmanship of
his hands."

"Charley, you are excited just now, and I think that you are making the
same mistake that better educated men than you have done. You are
putting Christianity and its abuses together. I do think, notwithstanding
all its perversions, and all the rubbish which has gathered around its
simplicity and beauty, that Christianity is the world's best religion.
I know that Christ has been wounded in what should have been the house
of his friends; that the banner of his religion which is broad enough
to float over the wide world with all its sin and misery, has been
drenched with the blood of persecution, trampled in the mire of slavery
and stained by the dust of caste proscription; but I believe that men
are beginning more fully to comprehend the claims of the gospel of
Jesus Christ. I am not afraid of what men call infidelity. I hold the
faith which I profess, to be too true, too sacred and precious to be
disturbed by every wave of wind and doubt. Amid all the religious
upheavals of the Nineteenth Century, I believe God is at the helm, that
there are petrifactions of creed and dogma that are to [be] broken up,
not by mere intellectual speculations, but by the greater solvent of
the constraining love of Christ, and it is for this that I am praying,
longing and waiting. Let schoolmen dispute and contend, the faith for
which I most ardently long and earnestly contend, is a faith which works
by love and purifies the soul."

"Mr. Thomas, I believe that there is something real about your religion,
but some of these white Christians do puzzle me awfully. Oh, I think