Page:Daniel Minort Baxter - Bishop Richard Allen and His Spirit (1923).pdf/58

50 promise or excuse for it. Just like lots of people are trying to get us to say we are not Americans, and to leave this country and go elsewhere, we refuse because we are Americans, nevertheless, we are not given the square deal; they are constantly putting ceilings over the heads of our boys and girls in the educational, economic, yea even the religious world, but by God’s grace we will smash the ceiling right here in our own America; just let us have Allen’s spirit. He started with forty-two members and all of them but three or four left him in the strain, and these ultimately left him, but he saw a star of hope and had a vision and made other friends, and gave his own lot, and bought an old blacksmith shop and hauled the old frame with his own team, and hired carpenters and helped erect a meeting place with his own hands. Bishop Asbury dedicated it (1792) and they called it Bethel, the "House of the Lord.”

He was a Mason, and with Absalom Jones, his compeer in the ministry, Peter Mantore, William Harding, Peter Richmond and Richard Parker and others, on March 2, 1797, petitioned African Lodge of Boston, Mass.,