The quadrennium from 1868 to 1872 exhibited a marvelous growth among the colored membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This was but the pulsation started by Methodism among her hitherto downtrodden children, by her labor of love in carrying to them the gospel of free salvation through the agency of her benevolent societies, the class of bishops, General Conference officers, and the consecrated and self-denying white teachers from the North, who left their homes of comfort and joy to go South and put themselves upon God’s altar for the elevation, morally, financially, intellectually, and spiritually, of their “brother in black.” The work done, and its effects in so short a time, seem now the marvel of the age! The scattered sheep had been gathered from the hills and valleys, the cane-brakes and swamps, from the villages and the larger cities, into societies nearly everywhere. Wherever possible they had been organized into conferences as had been provided by the action of the General Conference of 1864. With the application for recognition came that also for separate conferences. Two separate annual conferences had been organized before 1865—the Delaware Conference, July 28, 1864, and the Washington Conference, October 27, 1864. Besides this, the Rule of the Discipline, requiring a probation of two years, had been suspended so far as to permit our bishops to organize annual conferences with such colored local elders as had traveled two or more years under a presiding elder, who were recommended by a quarterly conference and by at least ten white elders. Thus the constitutional rights of the colored membership of the Church had been recognized, and the marvelous growth among them during this quadrennium was but a manifestation of appreciation on the part of the religious colored people of the South, evidence of their preference for Methodism, pure and simple.