Almost one year after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect by reason of the refusal on the part of the South to return to the Union, the nineteenth session of the General Conference met in the city of Philadelphia. That body was composed of two hundred and sixteen delegates. Just how any body of men, whether met for political or religious interests, could properly attend to affairs, even to the minutiæ, under the then existing circumstances of so exciting character as those that occurred from May 1, 1864, until the adjournment of that General Conference, is hard to conceive. And yet the proceedings of that body were characterized by patient, wise, and prudent action. Some of the delegates to that General Conference had their thoughts, however hard they strove to prevent it, on Church interests upset, as they took up the newspapers and found an account of the atrocious butchery of colored troops at Fort Pillow by that enemy of the human family, General Forrest. Before leaving the cars upon which they were traveling, they were startled by the cry of the newsboys at every station, as they announced the startling news that the governors of the Western States had offered the United States government eighty-five thousand men for one hundred days, and that the President had accepted the offer; again, that the victory was still in the scales. They had been in session but four days until the wires flashed the news that the irrepressible Grant had crossed the Rapidan in Virginia, and commenced operations in the Wilderness! The next day news came that the armies of the North and South had met in the Wilderness—the former under that invincible hero, and the latter under the intrepid Lee. Since our own Grant was pushing Lee before him nearly everywhere, and knowing how the Church had begun to love General Grant, and that her prayers and influence and sons were with him for the preservation of the Union, it is pretty hard to understand just how that General Conference found time and disposition to work as it did. Its session was during the crisis of the war. As they understood it, “God expects every man to do his best,” and they had then an opportunity to view the whole scene, knowing that God himself was interested, since “Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; But that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadows, Keeping watch above his own.” So it was on the gory field of battle as well as in that General Conference.