The fact that the Negro brought with him from Africa so little tradition which he was able to transmit and perpetuate on American soil, makes that race unique among all peoples of our cosmopolitan population. Other peoples have lost, under the disintegrating influence of the American environment, much of their cultural heritage. None have been so utterly cut off and estranged from their ancestral land, traditions and people. It is just because of this that the history of the Negro offers exceptional materials for determining the relative influence of temperamental and historical conditions upon the process by which cultural materials from one racial group are transmitted to another; for, in spite of the fact that the Negro brought so little intellectual baggage with him, he has exhibited a rather marked ethnical individuality in the use and interpretation of the cultural materials to which he has had access. The first, and perhaps the only distinctive institution which the Negro has developed in this country is the Negro church, and it is in connection with his religion that we may expect to find, if anywhere, the indications of a distinctive Afro-American culture. The actual conditions under which the African slaves were converted to Christianity have never been adequately investigated. We know, in a general way, that there was at first considerable opposition to admitting the Negro into the church because it was feared that it would impair the master's title to his slaves. History records too that the house servants were very early admitted to churches and that in many cases masters went to considerable pains to instruct those servants who shared with them the intimacy of the household.[7] It was not, however, until the coming of the new, free and evangelistic types of Christianity, the Baptists and the Methodists, that the masses of the black people, that is, the plantation Negroes, found a form of Christianity that they could make their own.