wall, only to renew an attempt crowned with success. The
lesson was fruitful for the prisoner.

Mr. Gibbons built several of the colored churches in Philadelphia, and
in the early forties, during my apprenticeship, he was a bidder for the
contract to build the first African Methodist Episcopal brick church of
the connection on the present site at Sixth and Lombard streets in
Philadelphia. A wooden structure which had been transformed from a
blacksmith shop to a meeting house was torn down to give place to the
new structure. When a boy I had often been in the old shop, and have
heard the founder, Bishop Allen, preach in the wooden building. He was
much reverenced. I remember his appearance, and his feeble, shambling
gait as he approached the close of an illustrious life.

The A. M. E. Church was distinctively the pioneer in the career of
colored churches; its founders the first to typify and unflinchingly
assert the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God. Dragged from
their knees in the white churches of their faith, they met exclusion by
cohesion; ignorance by effort for culture, and poverty by unflinching
self-denial; justice and right harnessed to such a movement, who shall
declare its ultimatum.

Out from that blacksmith shop went an inspiration lifting its votaries
to a self-reliance founded on God, a harbinger of hope to the enslaved.

From Allen to Payne, and on and on along lines of Christian fame, its
missionaries going from triumph to triumph in America, and finally
planting its standard on the isles of the sea.

A distinct line is ever observable between civilization and barbarism,
in the regard and reverence for the dead, the increase of solicitude is
evidence of a people's advancement. Until the year 1848 the colored
people of Philadelphia used the grounds, always limited, in the rear of
their churches for burial. They necessarily became crowded, with
sanitary conditions threatening, without opportunity to fittingly mark
and adorn the last resting place of their dead.

[Illustration: RIGHT REV. RICHARD ALLEN.

First Bishop of the A. M. E. Church.

Founder of that Faith That Once Nestled in a Blacksmith Shop, But Now
Encircles the World.]

In the above year G. W. Gaines, J. P. Humphries, and the writer
purchased a tract of land on the north side of Lancaster turnpike, in
West Philadelphia, and were incorporated under the following act by the
Legislature of the State of Pennsylvania: "An Act t