all other colored members as material for the upbuilding of their work. The latter, I believe, is nearer the truth. And by this is not meant that they refused to allow colored members to join the Church, or to commune with it in the “free States,” but that _no special pains were put forth to induce them to join the Methodist Episcopal Church where either of those bodies had charge_. This is one of the advantages they have enjoyed over the colored members remaining in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Again, may it not be surmised that since ours is “the Prince of peace,” and rivalry in ecclesiastical, as other matters, usually is followed by strife, that the refusal of the Church to grant separate conferences to the colored members in those States was but an effort to avoid strife? Again, for the Church to have granted separate conferences, as a stay against the secession spirit manifested in 1816 and 1823, would have been considered by a great many good people—and used to advantage by the seceders—as a declaration of the charges made by the African Churches that “the whites were anxious to get rid of the colored element within the Church.” From whatever point we take cognizance of that matter, it would appear as if the Church tried to do what was for the best. Every conceivable thing was done to pacify and keep the colored members within the Church. The secession of the Wesleyans had a great deal to do with the complication of this matter, for they were, in many instances, naturally the main stay for African Methodism. THE FIRST COLORED BISHOP IN THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH. The interest the Methodist Episcopal Church had in the colored man was not confined to America. “The old Church sought her sheep, The parent sought her child; She followed him o’er vale and hill, O’er deserts waste and wild; She found him nigh to death, Famished, and faint, and lone; She bound him with the bands of love. She saved the wandering one.”