internal wranglings in the general Church, and imposed additional hardships upon the colored man, in that masters would probably have felt it incumbent upon themselves to prohibit any slave from enjoying the benefits derivable from membership in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and thus added injury to insult, and left them a prey to “the false accuser of the brethren.” Notwithstanding the construction others put upon that decision, or what we now think of it, the colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church were not well pleased, as a protest from Sharp Street Church declares. The author of “The Anti-slavery Struggle and Triumph in the Methodist Episcopal Church,” at page 148, says: “At the General Conference of 1840 a memorial was prepared by forty official members of Sharp Street and Asbury Churches, in Baltimore, protesting against the colored-testimony resolution. It was put in the hands of Rev. Thomas B. Sargent, and by him given to one of the bishops. Through the efforts of Dr. Bond and others the memorialists were pacified without the conference knowing anything of the document.” The Rev. Dr. Elliott declared that “the colored members of the Church were greatly afflicted. This matter had like to have done great mischief.” The document was afterward published. Among other things equally pungent, the memorialists said: “We have learned with profound regret and unutterable emotion of the resolution adopted May 18th, which has inflicted, we fear, an irreparable injury upon eighty thousand souls for whom Christ died; souls which, by this act of your venerable body, have been stripped of the dignity of Christians, degraded in the scale of humanity, and treated as criminals, for no other reason than the color of their skin. The adoption of this soul-sickening resolution has destroyed the peace and alienated the affections of twenty-five hundred members of the Church in this city, who now feel that they are but spiritual orphans or scattered sheep. The deed you have done could not have originated in that love which works no ill to his neighbor, but in a disposition to propitiate that spirit which is not to be appeased, except through concessions derogatory to the dignity of our holy religion! And, therefore, they protest against it, and conjure you to wipe from the journal the odious resolution.” This was strong language, prompted by a stronger feeling.