Читать книгу The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church онлайн

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Here were two factions—one in favor of standing up for the emancipation of slaves, supported by thousands of influential Northern and Eastern men and money; the other, supported by not less than fifty thousand members, institutions of learning, and the slaveholding States and slaveholding sympathizers from the Atlantic to the great West, from the Lakes to the Gulf, and every slaveholding country in the entire world. Speeches, noting these facts, and declaring a bitter unwillingness to crouch before the spirit of freedom, manifested by that part of the Church which opposed the holding of slaves, began to make a breach in the Church that eternity alone, we fear, can only close. The Board of Bishops were divided on the question. From North to South, from East to West, the Church of God was disturbed. Not only this, but the world knew that if the Methodist Episcopal Church split then and there on that question, and any respectable portion opposed slavery, it would be the beginning of the end of slavery on American soil. Therefore, even the political and mercantile worlds were anxiously waiting, as well as earnestly working, either to reconcile the affair or compromise it. Any way in the world not to divide on that question at that time. God only knows how many colored people in this country sent up prayers from the rice-swamps of the Carolinas, the cotton-fields of Mississippi, and the cane-brakes of Louisiana, that “the God of Elijah, who answered prayer by fire,” would bow the gentle heavens and visit New York City with a baptism of the Holy Ghost, that that General Conference—the men of God therein—might have victory in favor of the Church, suffering humanity, and God. If there was ever any time at which more prayers besieged the throne of grace than another, it surely must have been during the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844. It is not an exaggeration to say the eyes and ears of the world were turned toward that General Conference. And why not? Were not even then the interests of every Methodist in the known world, of every colored man, woman, and child, and children of the race then in the womb of the future—aye, the future destiny of him who pens these lines, with that of our holy Christian religion at stake? Most assuredly it was so.