Читать книгу The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church онлайн

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When it is remembered that the “Absalom Jones” mentioned as having joined Richard Allen in this movement, was a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and that Richard Allen had acquired considerable wealth, more light falls on the dark background. Notwithstanding the fact that many thousands of colored members had joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, and were considered in general orderly and exemplary members, some of the more intelligent males possessing gifts, grace, and usefulness, as such, had been licensed, and several ordained deacons and elders, and that the colored members under Richard Allen had formed an organization, having built a respectable church and were under the oversight of one of our white presiding elders, they were restless, and chafed in the harness. In April, 1816, one month before the session of the General Conference that met in Baltimore, upwards of one thousand colored members, under the leadership of Richard Allen, had withdrawn from our Church. Why? A General Conference was called immediately after the formation of a Church by Rev. Richard Allen, and he was elected their first bishop! The most wonderful thing concerning this whole affair is the constant, regular succession of events! These, however, are the straws in the winds. It is, therefore, but little distance to the prime cause of that secession. Of the 42,304 colored members remaining in the Church during the quadrennium, many of them were praying that the unpleasant episode at Philadelphia would end there, and give the Church peace. Notwithstanding the trouble with the Allenites, as they were called, the Church still sympathized with the race, and the Committee on Slavery at the General Conference gave no sound for retreat from the vantage ground assumed. The whole report read thus: