have unitedly and firmly said, "Gentlemen of the South, you can go out of the Methodist Episcopal General Conference and Church if that be your free choice; but you must go as a secession, leaving all the privileges, dignities, and properties behind you. You go as so many private laymen, able, no doubt, to reorganize a new Church, and reconstitute yourselves ministers on your own authority, but entitled to carry nothing out from the Church you abandon." These defenders of slavery must have gone out as truly a set of refugees, as the champions of freedom, the poor Wesleyans, did.

Against this course the Southern majority could not have uttered a valid argument. For, twenty years before, when the Methodism of Canada separated from our General Conference, it was allowed to take no part of the central property. And what conclusively shuts off all argument in the case of the Southern withdrawal is this glaring fact, that upon the question whether Canadian Methodism should take a share of the property, the Southern vote was nearly unanimous in the negative! The adoption of the plan proposed by the Committee of Nine was, therefore, a gratuity, which might and ought to have been withheld, a generosity without consideration or compensation, a most extraordinary and uncalled-for act of magnanimity.

Yet this act of GRACE has been, from almost the day of its adoption to the present hour, made the basis of action against us. It was upon the vantage ground gratuitously donated to them by this action that they have fought all their battles with us. Without this they could never have even attempted to erect a new Church under our authority; never have claimed a penny of Church property; never instituted a suit; never could have pretended that any "plan" excluded us from the occupancy of Southern territory. Such are the thanks sometimes paid for generous dealing-the using your magnanimity to strike you down with.

II. THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF NINE WAS NOT A 66 COMPACT," BUT SIMPLY A REPEALABLE ENACTMENT OF THE GENERAL CONFERENCE.

The Southern Bishops, in their response, do indeed only repeat the sentiment that has been so often uttered that it has

acquired with them the force of undoubted truth. But a compact is a mutual agreement made by two equally independent parties-men, societies, or nations-with mutual stipulations and compensations, by which they are thenceforth bound, until broken by one or the other. This is the sense in which the Bishops employ the term, for they say "The separation was by compact, and mutual." But there were no equally independent parties in the General Conference; that body was one. Men were there from the South and from the North, indeed, but from the East, West, and Middle, as well. They were from different sections of the country and different Annual Conferences, but constituting one homogeneous body, one General Conference of the one Methodist Episcopal Church, assembled and working under the common authority of a written constitution. As a regular legislation under that constitution this enactment was passed, and by a regular constitutional enactment it could be (as it was by the ensuing General Conference) repealed. So that when our Southern brethren appeal to this pseudo "Plan of Separation," they appeal to a long since repealed enactment.

In order to a "compact" it is further necessary that there should be mutual compensations from one side to the other. But here it was all on one side. The "understanding" that the southern section should make no incursions into the northern section was no compensation for the withdrawal of General Conference jurisdiction. That jurisdiction owned both sides; and if it gave, it gave gratuitously, it being no compensation that those who had nothing to give in return should not grasp a larger amount. The fact is simply this: The "understanding" suggested a prospect of peace; and wish ing peace, the General Conference simply enacted, that, under such a prospect, the ministers still remaining under its jurisdiction should confine themselves to certain boundaries. Whether that enactment should continue depended on two things: First, whether the General Conference still should continue to consider that such peace was desirable at such cost; and second, whether the peace were really attained. It was upon the failure of the last of these two motives that the General Conference of 1848, as we shall see, most wisely repealed the enactment.

III. THE GENERAL CONFERENCE DID NOT DIVIDE THE CHURCH, BUT SIMPLY MADE PROVISION FOR QUIET IN CASE THE SOUTH SECEDED.

In the debates on the cases of Mr. Harding and Bishop Andrew threats of division and secession were freely made, the two terms being used as synonyms. The first specific step (before the Committee of Nine was contemplated) toward their accomplishment was in the resolutions of Dr. Capers, which proposed a division of the‘General Conference. The Committee held this to be impossible; or, as Dr. Capers himself said, they agreed that the thing sought "ought not to be done in the manner specified in the resolutions, or by any action on the resolutions." So division does not date there. Drs. Longstreet and Paine next prepared a plan similar to that of Dr. Capers, which was at once set aside. The next step (upon which the appointment of the Committee of Nine was based) was the Declaration above given, not asking for division, but calling attention to the coming separation of the South. After the appointment of the Committee of Nine, Mr. M'Ferrin's resolution instructed them conditionally to "devise, if possible, a constitutional plan for a mutual and friendly division of the Church." They did consider it, and found it not "possible;" and Dr. M'Ferrin's own statement, made a few months later, that " the General Conference did not assume the right to divide the Church," is conclusive upon the point that no division was based upon his resolution.

The Report treats of the division of property, but not of the Church. It speaks of the separation of persons from it, but always as their own act. It assumes "the event of a separation" as a "not impossible contingency," according to the "Declaration," and creating an "emergency" which the General Conference ought to "meet" in a Christian manner. The entire enactment is based upon one contingent fundamental condition, namely, "should the Annual Conferences in the slaveholding States find it necessary to unite in a distinct ecclesiastical connection;" and its provisions relate exclusively to the course of the Methodist Episcopal Church consequent upon this action, and not at all to the course of the South. It gives no permission, sanction, or consent to that separation, which it anticipated somebody would make, but simply enacts that the separators

shall be let alone. Nor did they make a "Plan of Separation," but simply made restrictive enactments upon those who still adhered after certain others had separated.

With these views agree statements made by Southern delegates, not only in the debate on the report, but afterward. "Is the Methodist Episcopal Church divided?" asked Dr. Paine only a month after the adjournment. "No; the General Conference has no power to divide it. Ours was a delegated power, to be exercised under constitutional limitations, and for specific purposes." Mr. M'Ferrin said: "To be sure we did not divide the Church; to do this we had no authority." "The General Conference," he wrote in the beginning of 1845, “did not divide the Church. It only made provision for an amicable separation in case the Southern Conferences found it necessary to form a distinct organization. And when the General Conference adjourned, the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church still existed as before, complete and untouched. It would have remained so to the present hour had the Southern Conferences refrained from their unauthorized and unnecessary withdrawal from its jurisdiction."

The Convention for organizing the new Southern Church met at Louisville, Kentucky, in May, 1845, being one year subsequent to our General Conference. This Louisville Convention, in its instructions to the Committee on Organization to "inquire whether or not any thing has transpired to render it possible to maintain the unity of the Methodist Episcopal Church under the same General Conference jurisdiction," assumed and declared thereby that the "unity" of the Church was still complete and unbroken; that the supremacy of the General Conference was unimpaired; and, therefore, that neither the Church nor the General Conference had been divided or weakened by the Report of the Committee of Nine. Whatever view was afterward held by the South, the General Conference of 1844 did not divide the Church, that Convention being judge. In May, 1845, the Methodist Episcopal Church had not separated from the South; neither it nor any of its loyal Conferences was represented in the Convention, and no act of separation of a later date can be discovered; yet the Southern Bishops tell us, "we separated from you in no sense in which you did not separate from us!"

Good men could not contemplate the probable angry feelings and collisions consequent on a violent dismemberment of the Church without a shudder, and a desire to do something to prevent them. Ill-advised as its results prove it to have been, the Report of the Committee of Nine was designed, and by its friends publicly claimed to be, a "a peace measure," a measure by which brethren who had labored together in love might not part in bitterness, that would save Societies and Conferences from internal strife and schism, preserve order and quiet on the border, and thus render the secession which the South might inaugurate, peaceable, and as lightly injurious as possible, instead of violent and disastrous. True, it was not styled a secession, and Southern delegates begged that the term might not be applied to them; and, such was the spirit of kindness that prevailed, the more euphonious and agreeable word "separation" (a generic term under which secession is a specific) was employed, although all concerned knew full well that defining secession as an illegal withdrawal from a legal jurisdiction, it was in fact a SECESSION, and nothing else.

IV. NOT ONLY DID THE GENERAL CONFERENCE CREATE NO DIVISION, BUT NO POWER EXISTS IN THAT BODY TO DIVIDE THE CHURCH.

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It was constituted to preserve, not to destroy; to govern, to dissolve; to strengthen in unity, not to divide. It has "full power to make rules and regulations for our Church," with certain specified exceptions, not for overthrow or destruction, but for perpetuity and efficiency, adapting them always to the purposes for which the Church was organized. Regulations for those purposes involving a change in the organization, as in division, destroy the Church, for the destruction of its organization is the destruction of itself. And with all its power the General Conference cannot place an Annual Conference beyond its jurisdiction or the supervision of "our itinerant general superintendency," which it would assuredly do in creating a division. Nor can it so disconnect a Conference or Society, a minister or member, from the Church, as to take away guaranteed rights of trial and appeal in regular judicatories of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Church South is outside of its jurisdiction as much as is the Presbyterian or Episcopal Church, and however similar to, or identical with, ours, its rules