I thank you, Brother, and through you the Preachers' Association, for your had expression of sympathy and regard. I claim, as a Union man, to have done nothing but my duty. I have always been a Union man, and have edited a Union paper for the last twenty-five years. I was traveling a circuit in South Carolina in 1832, when I was elected to the General Conference, and there met with Rev. L. F. Wright and L. Swormsted. I was also traveling the Anderson District of the Holston conference in the same State, and living near Calhoun during the nullification troubles which were so soon throttled by Old Hickory. This thing called Secession originated in falsehood, theft and perjury. Floyd did the stealing, the masses of the people did the lying, and fourteen U. S. Senators from the Cotton States the perjury. While in the Senate, in the day time, they made a show of keeping their oaths, but at night they held their secret caucuses, planning Secession, and advising their leaders to seize the prominent forts of the South, and arms of importance wherever they could find them. I have no doubt there are better men in hell, or in the Penitentiaries of this or any other State, than the prominent leaders in this Secession movement. And I am sorry to say that the worst class of men now in the Southern Confederacy are the Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian preachers. High functionaries in the Episcopalian church are now drinking and swearing. Men who have met in our General Conferences with some of these aged brethren whom I now see around me, preach as chaplains on Sabbath, but swear and get drunk through the week. A Presbyterian minister in Knoxville invited all denominations to hold a union prayer meeting, to pray to the Lord to sink Burnside's fleet, and raise Lincoln's blockade. And at it they went, composed of many old clerical rips, who besieged a throne of grace, raising their hands, heaving and setting like an old Tennessee ram at a gate-post, that God would send lightning and storm and raise the blockade. And the Lord did give them a _raise_--at Roanoke Island, and with that kind of lightning and storm which they did not expect in answer to prayer. I also heard a Presbyterian minister in Knoxville make use of the following words on the Lord's day, which he would give to show the degradation of the pulpit. In the course of his remarks he stated that Jesus Christ was a Southern man, and all of his Apostles were Southern men, save Judas, who was from the North. And that he would rather read a text from a Bible bound in hell than front one printed and bound North of Mason and Dixon's line. I regard the churches in the South ruined; and financially they are in a bad fix. I came across Dr. McFarren about seventy miles from Nashville, trying to run away; but his horse wouldn't work. He traded the horse for a mule, but the mule wouldn't work. When I left him he was standing on the street, in company