The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1888-05-05
AN INCIDENT OF THE HENDERSON
DEBATE.
BY REV. J. W. HANSON, D. D.
(Chicago.)

A unique experience was enjoyed at
the Tennessee Debate in the conversion
of negro to our faith. Universalists
among the colored population of the
South are not common. Rev. d. B.
Clayton, who has had a large experience,
informs me that he has known but very
few, though he adds that these he has
known were men of marked intellectual
and moral development. The reason
is not far to seek. The African tenn
permanent is not intellectual, or ethical.
His religion does not deal with think
ing or morals so much as with effer-
vesence. 1t is the small beer kind that
has more Jiz than body; more foam than
weight. He does his thinking mainly
down between his ears, rather than in
the reflective coronal regions of the
brain. The social and animal rather
than the moral and intellectual organs
are employed in his religious exercises;
and he is not attracted toward those
phases of Christianity that deal with
mans higher faculties. He seeks,
therefore, the Methodist and Baptist
meetings, and enjoys religious
epidemic, and intoxication of the
nerves that sets a whole congregation
ablaze with excitement, and expends
itself in shout and song, but, unfOrtu-
nately does not always illustrate itself
in a proper regard for the law of meunl
et tualn. After the most fervent Of re-
vivals that sets a whole community on
fire, the neighb0ring chicken-roosts are
no safer, and the story is probably not
apocryphal of the colored brother who
said he never alluded to chicken steal
ing in his sermons, for it always made
"a kind o. coolness in the meetin'."
The fact is well-known that the prevail
ent idea of religion among the colOred
people does not so much deal with be-
havior as with feeling, with life aswith
emotion. 1t will require no little eleva-
tion of the average specimen of Goods
image in ebony" to render him suscep-
tible to our form of religion, which,
while it recognizes and gives its due
place to the emotional, remands it to
a position subordinate to the mental
and ethical, the intellectual and moral.
But there are thinking men among
them with force of character sufficient
to rise out of the general leval, men
who reflect, and there are multitudes no
doubt who only need to be brought in
contact with higher and better influ-
ences, to find congenial sympathy in
higher phases Of religion with their own
better natures, which remain latent for
each of these superior agencies. How
ever this may be the great mass regard
religion as an eXhilaration of the
nerves, and they flock to those places
where the lowest kinds of religious eX-
citement prevails, and finding their
ideal worship where the prophet did not
find God, in 1.-THE whirlwind, the fire,
and the earthquake, and not in listen
ing to the still, small voice of reason,
faith and communion. During my
meetings in Henderson, both before
and during the debate, l observed a
fringe of black countenances on the
outer edges of the faces that filled the
church, and knowing the tendency of
the colOred people, felt sure that the
vOciferations and gymnastics Of my
opponent would carry that portion of
the audience by storm, till one day 1
was informed that one of them had
come out on the Lord s side, and was
vigorously uphOlding our faith. And
those who gave me the information as
sured me that he was convert worthy
of acquisition, altogether the most in
tellectual and every way brightest man
of his race in the neighborhOOd, and
one who had not only the confidence of
his own, but in marked degree of the
white people. That morally and in
tellectually he was among his people
like Saul among his, head and
shoulders above them.
He was a slave before the war, but
by force Of character and natural en-
dOwment had become leader among