THE NEGRO IN AMERICA, AND HIS DUTY HERE.          431

   The drum of sects avoid-both sacred and profane-
   Who wrest from Truth her light, and all her laws disdain.
   The godless forum shun, its cheats and tinsel base,
   Which stoops to all that is devoid of truth and grace.
   Injustice, fraud, avoid and all their brood earthborn,
   By their own weight they fall, now wretched and outworn.
   The doubtful good; 'tis vice; in it is crafty snare;
   Within the doubtful good is misery, beware !
   The highest virtue this, the total of all good,
   'Tis loving God and man, here law and prophets stood.

  Kittrell Institute, N. C.




                             XVI.

            THE NEGRO IN AMERICA, AND HIS DUTY HERE.

                     BY REV. B. W. ROBERTS.

  WHEN the Mayflower started from England with a cargo of
Englishmen, the Dutch man-of-war left the west coast of Africa
with a cargo of Africans, in 1619 or 1620, as some historians
say.  When the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, in Massa-
chusetts, the Dutch man-of-war landed in Jamestown, Virginia,
with her 20 Africans. From that number 8,000,000 or more tread
the soil of this great American continent. We began life in this
country together; though we were stolen from our native land,
yet God was watching us; and in two hundred and fifty years or
more, in proximity with the whites, we had learned the Ten Com-
mandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the name of
Jesus; the art of agriculture, mechanics, mechanism, etc. The
great God of all nations and Judge of the Universe, by His infi-
nite wisdom and almighty power, had opened the stables of His
economy, and out came the red horse of war, and from the lakes
in the North to the blue waves of the Gulf in the South, and from
the Golden Gates of the Pacific in the West to the laughing
waters of the Atlantic in the East, men were agitated until they left`
their warm beds in the North and came to the battle-fields and
spilled their blood like water, not to free us--for there were men
in the Federal army who said if they thought that they were fight-
ing to free the Negro they would resign-but, impelled by a
superhuman power, they fought on, until, by the pen of that
sainted martyr, Abraham Lincoln, the fetters from the limbs of
4,000,000 human beings fell all over this beautiful Southland,
and by the thundering from the iron throats of the cannon, the
     28




			

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 07, Num. 4

Negro in America and His Duty Here

W.

Volume:  07
Issue Number:  04
Page Number:  431
Date:  04/1891