Читать книгу The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church онлайн

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From the beginning the Church has gone after “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” A Church needs no higher encomium than that the “common people” hear her ministers gladly. This has been, and we hope now is, the glory of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Should a time ever come when this can not be truthfully said of the Church, her pristine glory will have departed. Worldly popularity has not hitherto been the acme of her ambition. May it never be! Where duty called, popular or unpopular, the Church has given the command, “Go forward,” with the understanding that “it is better to obey God than man.” The wholesome doctrine of “the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” as taught by the apostle when he exclaimed, “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” has been taught by the Methodist Episcopal Church ever since John Wesley declared slavery “the sum of all villainies.”

It may be, as you scrutinize the last sentence, a fear may arise that it will not remain intact under the electric light of investigation. The redeeming feature is, that the Methodist Episcopal Church has come as near preaching and practicing that doctrine as any other American ecclesiastical organization. This may not be much in its favor, when taken in reference to the colored man, but it is something. There has never been an hour since Bishop Asbury preached Jesus and him crucified to a poor slave on the bank of a river in South Carolina, in the which the great heart of the Methodist Episcopal Church did not throb with sympathy for the poor colored man in this country. As evidence, it is only necessary to look up or remember the Herculean efforts it made on his behalf as early as 1796, to save him from the cruelty and barbarism of his subjection. Could the Church, at so early a period, have received the moral and religious support of the good people of other denominations, the civil war might have been averted, and the poor slave rescued from the power of Satan unto God, from the midnight of sin to the marvelous light and liberty of the gospel of Jesus Christ.