RELIGION WITHOUT LETTERS Stung by the effective charge of the abolitionists that the reactionary legislation of the South consigned the Negroes to heathenism, slaveholders considering themselves Christians, felt that some semblance of the religious instruction of these degraded people should be devised.

It was difficult, however, to figure out exactly how the teaching of religion to slaves could be made successful and at the same time square with the prohibitory measures of the South.

For this reason many masters made no effort to find a way out of the predicament.

Others with a higher sense of duty brought forward a scheme of oral instruction in Christian truth or of religion without letters.

The word instruction thereafter signified among the southerners a procedure quite different from what the term meant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Negroes were taught to read and write that they might learn the truth for themselves.
Being aristocratic in its bearing, the Episcopal Church in the South early receded from the position of cultivating the minds of the colored people.