Page:A defence of the negro race in America from the assaults and charges of Rev. J. L. Tucker.djvu/12

 see if anything else but demoralization could be the fruit thereof?

1st. They were left religiously to themselves. Their ministers were almost universally ignorant and unlettered men. As the ambition and cleverness of the race, under slavery, could find no other channel than the ministry, the piety of ministers was but an incident; and so men anxious for rule and authority, but withal ofttimes unscrupulous and godless as well as ignorant, became their preachers. Not all such indeed; but alas! in large proportions! Good but illiterate men numbers of the field preachers were. But large numbers of them were unscrupulous and lecherous scoundrels! This was a large characteristic of "plantation religion;" cropping out even to the present, in the extravagances and wildness of many of their religious practices!

2. Their religion, both of preachers and people, was a religion without the Bible—a crude medley of scraps of Scripture, fervid imaginations, dreams, and superstitions. So thorough was the legal interdict of letters and teaching, that the race, as a whole, knew nothing of the Scriptures nor of the Catechisms of the churches. I state it as a strong conviction, the result of wide inquiry, that at the close of the civil war not five hundred blacks among four and a half millions of my race could be found, in the entire South, who knew the ";" not five hundred who knew, in its entirety, the of the Episcopal Church. The Ten Commandments were as foreign from their minds and memories as the Vedas of India or the moral precepts of Confucius. Ignorance of the Moral Law was the main characteristic of "!"

3. Sad as are these facts in the history of the race, one further item is horrifying; and that is, that the prime