I was told, while I was in that city, that Catania has two hundred and fifty churches, and though I do not know that this statement is correct, I could easily believe it from the interminable clanging church bells that smote upon my ears the first Sunday morning I was in the city. At any rate, no one can go through the city and look at the public buildings, or study the people in their homes, without meeting abundant evidence of the all-pervading influence of the Church. Everywhere, built into the buildings, on the street corners, and in every possible public place, one sees little images of the Virgin, with perhaps a burning lamp before them. Once I ran across one such image, with a lamp before it, planted in a field. I was told it was there to protect the crops from the influence of evil spirits. It did not seem to have occurred to any one that the image of the Virgin and the blessing of the Church, which were intended to protect the fields from evil spirits, might protect them also from thieves, or banish from the community the evil spirits that inspired men to rob and steal. If this opinion had been very widely held among the masses of the people it would hardly have been necessary to guard the fields night and day during the harvest season, by men armed with shotguns. This brings me to another point in which I should like to compare the masses of the Sicilian people with the masses of the Negroes in the Southern States--namely, in respect to their religious life. Naturally, the first thing that strikes one, in attempting to make such a comparison, is the wide difference in the situation of the average black man in the Southern States and the corresponding class in Sicily. In all the externals of religious life, at least, the Sicilian is far ahead of the Negro. Sicily was one of the first countries in the world in which Christianity was planted. St. Paul stopped three days in Syracuse on his way to Rome, and there is still standing a building in Catania in which St. Peter is said to have preached. Sicily has inherited the traditions, the organization and the splendid churches and buildings which have grown up and accumulated through a thousand years and more. The black man, on the contrary, gained his first knowledge of Christianity in slavery and in a very imperfect and unsatisfactory form. It is only since freedom came that the Negro church has had an opportunity to extend and establish its influence among the masses of the people, while out of their poverty Negroes, who are even yet struggling to build and own their own homes, and so establish family life, have had to build churches and training schools for their ministers, to establish a religious press, to support missionary societies and all the other aids and accessories of organized religion.