Perhaps no people ever had more advantages to dedicate and prepare themselves for the ministry of Christ than the colored people of the South.  The religious “idea” has been so thoroughly worked that other branches of study, other callings than the ministry, have paled into insignificance.  The Cross of Christ has been held up before the colored youth as if the whole end and aim of life was to preach the Gospel, as if the philosophy of heaven superseded in practical importance the philosophy of life.  The persistence with which this one “idea” has been forced upon colored students has produced the reverse of what was anticipated in a large number of cases, and very naturally.  It is a false theory to suppose all the people of any one class to be specially fitted for only one branch of industry:  for I maintain that preaching has largely become a trade or profession, in which the churches with large salaries have become prizes to be contended for with almost as much zeal and partisanship as the prizes in politics.  This is true not only of colored ministers but white ones as well.  It is no disparagement of colored ministers to say that day by day they grow more and more in favor of serving churches with fair salaries than in carrying around the cross as itinerants, without any special place to lay their heads when the storms blow and the rains descend.  In this they do but pattern after white clergymen, who do not always set examples that angels would be justified in imitating.

Colored people are naturally sociable, and intensely religious in their disposition.  Their excellent social qualities make them the best of companions.  They are musical, humorous and generous to a fault.  Coupled with their strong religious bias, these attractive qualities will in time lift them to the highest possible grade in our dwarfed civilization, where the fittest does not always survive; the drossiest, flimsiest, most selfish and superficial often occupying the high places, social and political.  But I have still higher aspirations for my race.  There is hope for any people who are social in disposition, for this supposes the largest capacity for mutual friendships, therefore of co-operation, out of which the highest civilization is possible to be evolved; while a love of music and the possession of musical and humorous talent is, undeniably, indicative of genius and prospective culture and refinement of the most approved standard.

Indeed, the constant evolution of negro character is one of the most marked and encouraging social phenomena of the times; it constantly tends upwards, in moral, mental development and material betterment.  Those who contend that the negro is standing still, or “relapsing into barbarism,” are the falsest of false prophets.  They resolutely shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument—­imaginary pictures—­to the immorality, mental sterility