Entertainments, suppers,
and lectures are held beside the five or six regular weekly
religious services. Considerable sums of money are collected
and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strang-
ers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distri-
buted. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic
centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin,
Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice
a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few indeed of the
community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back
of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real
conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the
final authority on what is Good and Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced
in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut
off by color-prejudice and social condition. In the great city
churches the same tendency is noticeable and in many re-
spects emphasized. A great church like the Bethel of Phila-
delphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice seating
fifteen hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand
dollars, an annual budget of five thousand dollars, and a
government consisting of a pastor with several assisting local
preachers, an executive and legislative board, financial boards
and tax collectors; general church meetings for making laws;
sub-divided groups led by class leaders, a company of militia,
and twenty-four auxiliary societies.
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