With this come, too, peculiar problems of
their inner life,--of the status of women, the maintenance of
Home, the training of children, the accumulation of wealth,
and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of
intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-searching and intel-
lectual unrest. From the double life every American Negro
must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the
current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of
the fifteenth century,--from this must arise a painful self-
consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a
moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds
within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and
changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same
way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul,
a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double
life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social
classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals,
and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or
radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps
most clearly picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the
Negro of to-day and is tingeing and changing his religious
life.
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