What the negro needs more than books and college curriculum is a conscience. He needs religion of the genuine, transforming kind that will stop his petty thieving, his street corner loafing, and his tendencies toward the barbarism from which in the Old South religion wrested his fathers. I think the time has come when our Southern white churches should turn again toward the negro and help him as far as possible to a knowledge of pure and undefiled religion, after the example of such ministry as that of Capers and Andrew to the slaves. If I find any fault with ourselves in our relationships with the negro, it is that we too easily conceded that the negro’s moral and religious interests should be taken out of our hands since the war by sentimentalists, or by those whose labors among the negroes were inspired by political rather than by genuinely benevolent motives. Once politics is no longer an ally to the negro, and White House favors are not permitted to turn his head, I have some hope that the Southern white and the negro may come together in peace and mutual affection under the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and after an alienation of more than a generation may take up again the old order of religious instruction and training, which the white fathers of the Old South were so zealous to give and which the black servants were so eager to receive. When a young pastor came to me a few weeks ago asking an opinion upon the fact that, in response to a request from a score or more of families of negroes on his charge who were without church and other religious facilities, he and his wife had formed their children into a Sunday school and the teachers of his white school were giving them faithful and intelligent instruction every Sabbath, I saw in the incident an intimation of what the New South must do if it would restore the lost negro conscience of the Old South.