restlessness of the members, begotten by such unsolicited and sophisticated sympathy, showed it necessary. Just why separate conferences were not given them in the free States does not appear on the surface. Those who were in authority at that time no doubt had good and sufficient reasons for not granting the privilege of membership with white ministers in the annual conferences on the one hand, nor separate conferences on the other hand. While it does not appear that it would have been wisdom to have granted them the latter in the slave States, we submit, now, without questioning the wisdom displayed by those godly fathers. Those who wish to speculate may do so; we are satisfied. All this but declares “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VI DURING THE WAR. The Abolition Church! If there was any one denomination of Christians in this country, north of Mason and Dixon’s Line, that was anathematized beyond another, declared by many in the South one of the most forward instigators and abettors of the late Civil War, it was the “Northern” or “Abolition Methodist Church,” as they called our Church. Well do I remember the “yarns” told by the soldiers of General Sterling Price’s army on a preacher they captured from the Union soldiers in Missouri. The preacher was a noble specimen, and looked more like a Norman king than any of those about him. This minister of the Lord Jesus was terribly abused by his captors. Not so much, as they said, because he was a Union soldier—that was bad enough—but he belonged to the “Northern” or “Abolition Methodist Church.” “The Methodist Episcopal Church, South”—or as it is, and was, better known as “The Southern Methodist Episcopal Church”—is a relative term or name. It was natural, therefore, for the Southern Confederacy to adopt it, and grant it a kind of supremacy above every other denomination. Did it not lead the secession movement in favor of slavery? It is no stretch of imagination to say some people united with it for that very reason. It was to have been expected that the two Churches, wherever they met, would sustain the same relations that the Jews and Samaritans used to sustain to each other. It was impossible to expect anything less than bitter opposition to the “Northern Church.” There was a time in the South when he who spoke favorably of our Church was not only suspected as a “lover of niggers,” but one to be “let alone,” for all intents and purposes, as a traitor. That times have changed but very little in the South along these lines, but few doubt.