Let us examine the status of these two classes. The whites had been (1) “impoverished by the war,” whether they took sides with the Union or against it. If the latter was the case, it is evident that they had been slaveholders themselves or friendly to the slave oligarchy. And yet these same people had left them some “possessions and some kinds of business.” They had “church-buildings, however dilapidated. They were ready for reorganization.” It was not so with the colored people. “These were without homes, without the relations of home; not only without earthly possessions, but impoverished in the best elements of their nature.” These poor colored people had never had the advantages of any enlightening influences save such as came to “house-servants, slave-mechanics, and field-hands.” How true is it that “here among them the very foundations of Church-work had to be laid.” The Methodist Episcopal Church went down South hunting “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” for whom no denomination seemed to care much at that time. The whites had for twenty years, more or less, worshiped with, or were members of, the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church; a few standing alone and waiting till a better day appeared. Here was an opportunity also to turn aside and give aid to this other class of our membership in the South, by teaching them the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Such men as Rev. John P. Newman and Bishop Gilbert Haven went down to help. Their eloquence, erudition, religious and moral force, told only here and there. Such men made but little headway toward the bringing in of “whole annual conferences” among the whites into our Church. They were unpopular save among the poor freedmen. Some of the white members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the South have no interest in the work of the Methodist Episcopal Church that does not come to them unencumbered by any reminiscences of the past or present relations of the two races. The growth of our white membership in the South during the last ten years has been considerable. Is it not strange that the whites and the blacks within the Methodist Episcopal Church in the South sustain _to-day_, in some places, the same relation to each other that the Jews used to sustain to the Samaritans? Do we not find, just along here somewhere, the key to the situation in the South within our Church, as well as cause for the action of the General Conference above referred to?