1. One is that our church system is entirely unknown among the Freedmen. It is a singular fact that they should know absolutely nothing of the churches which had led in the anti-slavery reform, and which, through this Association, are now, as is confessed on all hands, doing more for the lifting up of these lowly poor than any other. The occasion of this ignorance is at hand. The doctrine of equality in Christ’s house, as based on his own words—“All ye are brethren”—precluded the setting up of this order of church life among a people, where master and slave should vote, side by side, upon all church business. I know that it will be said at once that the Baptists, with their congregational polity, did prevail all over the South. But theirs was, after all, not a Christian democracy, but an aristocracy of the white members. All right of voting was denied the colored. Even those two much-praised ancient Congregational churches at the South, the Circular in Charleston, and the Dorchester in Liberty County, Georgia, which took root in that soil, did so only by denying suffrage to the colored members. When one of the pastors of the latter, with the Bible in one hand and a whip in the other, drove his brethren as his slaves to their tasks, if that had been a genuine Congregational church, an appeal would have been taken to the brotherhood for an application of that Scripture: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal.” One of the colored members of that church, now a worthy deacon, told me this bit of experience. His master, a fellow church member, had found him with a Webster’s spelling book in hand, trying to learn to read. For this crime he was tied down, with his face to the ground, his hands and feet made fast to four stakes, and then upon his bare back he received such a flagellation that, under the torture, he cried out: “Oh, massa, do stop, and I’ll never again look into a book as long as I live.” With a fine turn he said to me, “I GRADULATED THEN.” Now, if that brother had had the right of telling that trespass to the church, and if all the members had had the privilege of voting upon the case, that would have been a piece of pure Congregationalism. Evidently such a church system could not obtain in a slaveholding community. So it is entirely unknown in that region; and this fact becomes a disadvantage in introducing it now.