'Or, A Colored Man's Reply to Bishop Foster. 69
CHAPTER XIV.
THE SIMULATION OF THE CHURCH.
| HE Methodist Episcopal Church did not affirm in a cor-
■*• ner that all members within her borders had the same
rights and immunities, but openly before the world.
Bishop Foster charges the Church with insincerety or simula¬
tion, making her guilty of assuming the mere appearance without
the reality. He says, speaking of the colored members 'It
cannot be right or christian that for any reason they should be
beguiled with false hopes or implied promises which cannot be
fulfilled, or even be attempted to fulfill without serious evil to
the Church." If an ordinary man in the Methodist Episcopa
Church were guilty of charging her publicly with hypocrisy, as
Bishop Foster has nearly every body would be ready to help to
hang him as high as Hainan unless he repented from his great sin
against the Church, or he would be regarded as a crank or insane
man. Is it not necessary for the Church to defend herself against
the charge of one of her chief pastors ? The whole Church is
challenged to deny that it has not been guilty of insincerety or
heguilment. If the Church allows this charge to go unprotested,
the Christian world will have sufficient reason to believe that the
charge is true. If the fathers of the Methodist Episcopal Church
were a live who lived, preached and advocated every where fear¬
lessly and uncompromisingly, not from their lips only but their
jhearts, equal rights in the Church, they would not be silent in the
iace, of what Bishop Foster has said but would protest against it
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