I have watched the disposessed and the starving laborlized. I have watched the dispossed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transitor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along wiht equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilised world, forbids to the civilsed that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civlised have created the wrestched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status qou, are responsible for thier sluaghter and enslavement; rain down bomba on children whereever and whenver they decide that their vital interests are menaced, and think of nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the sanctity of "human life" or the "concience" of the cilivized world.  (16)

Even if what I was preaching was gospel, I had no right to preach it if I no longer believed it. To stay in the church merely because I was afraid of leaving it was ununtterably far beneath me, and too despeciable a cowardice for him to support in any friend of his . Therefore, on the coming Sunday, he would buy two tickets to a Broadwy matineed and meet me on the steps of the 42nd STreet Library, at two o'clock in the afternoon. He knew that I spent all day Sunday in church--the point, precisely, of the challenge. IF I were not on the steps of the library (in the bookshelves of which so much of my trouble had begun! then he would be ashamed of me and never speak to me again and I would be ashamed of myself. (32)

The choices do not involve, for example, that seismographic shudder which the word, homosexual, until today, produces in the American mind, or soul: I doubt that Americans will ever be able to face the fact that the word, homosexual, is not a noun. The root of this word, as Americans use it--or as this word uses Americans--simply involves a terror of any human touch, since any human touch can change you. A black man and a white man can come together only in the absene of women, which is, simply, the American legend of masculinity brought to its highest pressure, and revealed, as it were, in black and white. (67)

There was a rite in our church, called pleading the blood. When the sinner fell on his face before the altar, the soul of the sinner then found itself locked in battle with sAtan: or, in the place of Jacob, wrestling with the angel. All of the forces of Hell rushed to claim the soul which had just been astonished by the light of the love of God. The soul in torment turned this way and that, yearning, equally, for the light and for the darkness: yearning, out of agony, for reconcillation--and for rest: for this agony, for recncillaiton--and for rest: for this agony is compounded by an unimaginable, unprecedented, unspeakable figure. Only the saints who had passed through this fire--the incredible horror of the faining of the spirt-had the power to intercede to "plead the blood" to bring the embattled and mortally endangered soul "through". The pleasing of the blood was plea to whosoever had loved us enough to spill his blood for us that he might springle the soul with his love once more, to give us power over SAtan, and love and courage to live out our days.... (113-4)

Baldwin The DEvil Finds Words