Читать книгу The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church онлайн

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Thus the colored man early learned to love Methodism, and soon large numbers were brought into its communion. The emancipation and enfranchisement of the race did not put a quietus upon the agitation of the question. Many white and colored members are not conversant with the history of our Church touching this subject. It has always been a question to many, why men of the race within the Church have not been as ready to write the actual facts in the case, as some of the race in other Churches have been to record many half truths relating thereto. It is true that while the public eye and ear appear always open and attentive to anything written or spoken by those who can claim kin with Jefferson, Clay, Sumner, Lincoln, or Grant, there is an apparent unwillingness to give audience to those who have always been subjected to ostracism.

These lines are written because it is believed that our Church has had to suffer because only one side of the story has been told by any person of the race, and in nearly, if not every instance, by those unfriendly to the relation the colored man has sustained to the Church; because some wrong impressions may be righted by the collation of facts that lay bare the glaring inaccuracies hitherto related concerning the imposition of the white members of the Church upon the colored; to show that, so far as the question goes, the heart of the Methodist Episcopal Church has always been right; and that, though errors may have been committed, they have been, in most instances, from the head and not from the heart of the Church; that it has come as near reaching the proper solution of the question, “What shall be done with the colored man?” as any other organization that has had to do with the question.