people's mission, and are our best guides to God's purpose in creating us.
They constitute the material to be worked on in educating a race, and
suggest in every case where the stress of civilization or education should
be applied in order to follow the lines of least resistance.

But there are also certain manifestations, the result of training or
neglect, which are not inborn. As they are inculcable, so they are
eradicable; and it is only by a loose terminology that we apply the term
characteristics to them without distinction between them and the inherent
traits. In considering the characteristics of the Negro people, therefore,
we must not confuse the constitutional with the removable. Studied with
sympathy and at first hand, the black man of America will be seen to
possess certain predominant idiosyncrasies of which the following form a
fair catalogue:

_He is intensely religious._ True religion is based upon a belief in the
supernatural, upon faith and feeling. A people deeply superstitious are
apt to be deeply religious, for both rest upon a belief in a spiritual
world. Superstition differs from religion in being the untrained and
unenlightened gropings of the human soul after the mysteries of the higher
life; while the latter, more or less enlightened, "feels after God, if
haply," it may find Him. The Negro gives abundant evidence of both phases.
The absolute inability of the master, in the days of slavery, while
successfully vetoing all other kinds of convocation, to stop the Negro's
church meetings, as well as the almost phenomenal influence and growth of
his churches since; and his constant referring of every event, adverse or
favorable, to the personal ministrations of the Creator, are things unique
and persistent. And the master class reposed more faith in their slaves'
religion ofttimes than they did in their own. Doubtless much of the
reverential feeling that pervades the American home to-day, above that of