Every age and country have reproduced in some form the altar and the victim, the persecutor and the persecuted, the Caiaphas and the Christ, without material alteration in the charge or the trial. Missouri has provided the altar, the wood, the fire and the sacrifice for the offering demanded by this age and country in the interest of the Church. Woods, Sexton, Glanville, Wollard, Robinson, Wood, Headlee and others supplied the sacrifice. While this chapter prepares the way, in an important sense, for the better understanding of the subject in hand, it will also embody a standing declaration and testimony against the peculiar spirit and character of sectarian strife in Missouri. CHAPTER IV. Division of the Church in 1844—Slavery only the Occasion—Action of the General Conference in 1836—Slavery in the Church in 1796 and in 1836—No Change of its Moral Aspects in 1844—Facts Perverted—Constitutional Powers of the Church—Bishop Andrew, a Scapegoat—Protest of the Southern Conferences—Resolution and Plan of Separation—Dr. Elliott and Schism—The Vote—The Question in the South—Louisville Convention in 1845—Division—The Bishops of the M. E. Church Accept the Division the following July—Failure to Change the Sixth Restrictive Rule—General Conference of 1848 Pronounce the Whole Proceedings Null and Void—Dr. Lovick Pierce Rejected—Fraternization Denied—Responsibility of Non-Fraternization—Northern Church Refuse to Make any Division of Property—Appeal to the Civil Courts—Decision of the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York—Justice McLean—United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio—Judge Leavitt’s Decision—Supreme Court of the United States—Points Decided—The Decision of the Supreme Court in Full. It is due to the uninformed that a true statement be made here of the causes, conditions, plan and immediate results of the great division, in 1844, of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. This is made the more necessary by the misrepresentation of the facts made by the press and pulpit of the Northern wing of the Church, and the political and other uses a perversion of the facts was made to subserve in Missouri. 1. Slavery was not, in any proper sense, the _cause_ of division, but was made, incidentally, the _occasion_ only. American slavery had existed in the Church for sixty years in the same form, and under the same civil and religious sanctions that authorized and covered it in 1844. If it was the “sum of all evils” in 1844, it was the same in 1796; and the moral character of the institution was not changed in 1836, when the General Conference in Cincinnati, by a vote of 120 to 14, adopted the following _preamble_ and resolutions: