Читать книгу The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church онлайн

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The language of their most accurate historian will give a faint idea of the pressure we speak of, which was and is now brought to bear upon our people in some localities. He says: “It is true our colored brethren within the communion of the Methodist Episcopal Church worship in a large number of churches in Maryland, Delaware, and other of the Southern States, and many of them are fine ones; but the question is: ‘To whom do they belong—the congregations worshiping in them, or the Methodist Episcopal Church?’ We all know that it is our glory, that our churches belong to no one congregation or body of trustees in particular, but to the connection in general.” Again, ibid: “It would have been a source of unspeakable joy had he been able or permitted truthfully to record that your Church had acknowledged your full and true manhood, and not denied it both in practice and in law; that it had opened its school-doors to you, as did other Christian bodies, and like them, too, have received you into conference upon a perfect ministerial equality; but, alas! the doors of its schools, and of its conferences as well, were locked, and bolted, and barred against you.” He was quoting and commenting upon the words of another. Such strong talk, mixed as it was with braggadocio, pretty soon had the desired effect upon two large classes amongst us—the ambitious illiterates and the pompous, aspiring for recognition, minus merit. These two classes were soon, after such a process of pumping, inflated until their sides puffed nearly to bursting. A number of the above-mentioned classes soon concluded that they must be in a Church where there was a favorable chance for every member of an annual conference to be put forth before the world as a noted preacher, appointed presiding elder or a General Conference officer, or elected to the bishopric. It is difficult for any one, who understands in some sort the feelings of white men when they are ambitious for notoriety or office and fail, to say or appreciate the feelings of a disappointed colored man who has known nothing save ostracism. To expect him to refuse preferment, emolument, or office, when tendered, is to expect an ox in August to refuse the shade. Notwithstanding the disadvantages the colored man has labored under hitherto, he has found out that in a nation of blind men the one-eyed man ought to be, and is, king. To this day but few white people have learned that it is not always the most profitable thing to exchange an old lamp for a new one; that “it is better to bear the ills we have, than fly to others we know not of.”