The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream.
This passage describes how enslaved Black people, deprived of worldly joy, found solace and hope in the Christian promise of an afterlife and divine justice.
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Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.