Without further comment, the above corroborates the statement that the condition of the freedmen in the South directly after the war, temporally, spiritually, morally, and intellectually, was a loud enough call, and the mission of enough importance to warrant the action of the General Conference of 1864 in its action that virtually announced the intention of the Methodist Episcopal Church to go into the South. The fact that conferences had been opened in the South for colored people was sufficient proof. THE CHURCH IN THE SOUTH. When the General Conference of 1868 met in the city of Chicago, Ill., for its twentieth session, among other things it took up the subject of the relation of the Church to the colored man. There were present at that General Conference two hundred and forty-three delegates. When the General Conference of 1864 authorized the formation of mission conferences in the South for colored people, as a Church, it “had been practically excluded for twenty years” from Alabama, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, while a generation had grown up under the immediate care, as if were, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. It is true that the Methodist Episcopal Church had held on in some sort in the city of Baltimore—this being her strongest fort—while through some parts of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri it had a foothold. Our Church in 1863, in the last-named States, claimed 332 effective preachers, 84,673 members, and 919 church-buildings. By the next year, when the General Conference of 1864 met for its nineteenth session in Philadelphia, it claimed in the above-named five slave States 309 effective preachers, 87,072 members—15,898 being colored—and 982 churches, being an increase in these five States of 2,399 members, not including probationers, and a decrease of 23 effective preachers, and an increase of 63 church-buildings. Thus it may be seen that a wise Providence proclaimed the mission of our Church; and there was then, as we see now, no mistake made on the part of our Church when it heard and obeyed the commission in this case, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” The crowning act touching the subject we discuss was given by the General Conference of 1864 in these words: “We are not aware of any legal obstacle to the reception of colored preachers into our annual conferences.” Touching the work done by the last General Conference, and showing somewhat of the results attained, the Bishops’ Address to the Twentieth General Conference contained the following: