In the year 1844 the slavery agitation in the Methodist Episcopal Church culminated, not in the rupture of the church, but in the well-considered, deliberate division of it between North and South. The history of the slavery question among the Methodists was a typical one. From the beginning the Methodist Society had been committed by its founder and his early successors to the strictest (not the strongest) position on this question. Not only was the system of slavery denounced as iniquitous, but the attempt was made to enforce the rigid rule that persons involved under this system in the relation of master to slave should be excluded from the ministry, if not from the communion. But the enforcement of this rule was found to be not only difficult, but wrong, and difficult simply because it was wrong. Then followed that illogical confusion of ideas studiously fostered by zealots at either extreme: If the slave-holder may be in some circumstances a faithful Christian disciple, fulfilling in righteousness and love a Christian duty, then slavery is right; if slavery is wrong, then every slave-holder is a manstealer, and should be excommunicated as such without asking any further questions. Two statements more palpably illogical were never put forth for the darkening of counsel. But each extreme was eager to sustain the unreason of the opposite extreme as the only alternative of its own unreason, and so, what with contrary gusts from North and South, they fell into a place where two seas met and ran the ship aground. The attempts made from 1836 to 1840, by stretching to the utmost the authority of the General Conference and the bishops, for the suppression of "modern abolitionism" in the church (without saying what they meant by the phrase) had their natural effect: the antislavery sentiment in the church organized and uttered itself more vigorously and more extravagantly than ever on the basis, "All slave-holding is sin; no fellowship with slave-holders." In 1843 an antislavery secession took place, which drew after it a following of six thousand, increased in a few months to fifteen thousand. The paradoxical result of this movement is not without many parallels in church history: After the drawing off of fifteen thousand of the most zealous antislavery men in the church, the antislavery party in the church was vastly stronger, even in numbers, than it had been before. The General Conference of 1836 had pronounced itself, without a dissenting vote, to be "decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism." The General Conference of 1844, on the first test vote on the question of excluding from the ministry one who had become a slave-holder through marriage, revealed a majority of one hundred and seventeen to fifty-six in favor of the most rigorous antislavery discipline. The graver question upon the case of Bishop Andrew, who was in the like condemnation, could not be decided otherwise. The form of the Conference's action in this case was