While remaining subject to orders, the stimulus is lacking for that aggressive energy, indispensable to bring to the front. Temporary failure you may have, for failure lies in wait for all human effort, but sneaks from a wise and unconquerable determination. We read of the military prisoner, alone, dejected, and despairing, looking to the walls of his cell; he watches a score of attempts and failure of a spider to scale the 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.]