From 1796 to 1809 Judge Lemen was active in the promotion of Baptist churches and a Baptist Association. He labored to induce all these organizations to adopt his anti-slavery principles, and in this he was largely successful; but, with the increase of immigrant Baptists from the slave states, it became increasingly difficult to maintain these principles in their integrity. And when, in the course of the campaign for the division of the Territory in 1808, it became apparent that the lines between the free-state and the slave-state forces were being decisively drawn, Lemen prepared to take a more radical stand in the struggle. With this design in view he asked and obtained the formal sanction of {p.18} his church as a licensed preacher. In the course of the same year, 1808, he is said to have received a confidential message from Jefferson "suggesting a division of the churches on the question of slavery, and the organization of a church on a strictly anti-slavery basis, for the purpose of heading a movement to make Illinois a free state."[21] According to another, and more probable, version of this story, when Jefferson learned, through a mutual friend (Mr. S. H. Biggs), of Lemen's determination to force the issue in the church to the point of division, if necessary, he sent him a message of approval of his proposed course and accompanied it with a contribution of $20 for the contemplated anti-slavery church. The division of the Territory was effected early in the year 1809, and in the summer of that year, after vainly trying to hold all the churches to their avowed anti-slavery principles, Elder Lemen, in a sermon at Richland Creek Baptist church, threw down the gauntlet to his pro-slavery brethren and declared that he could no longer maintain church fellowship with them. His action caused a division in the church, which was carried into the Association at its ensuing meeting, in October, 1809, and resulted in the disruption of that body into three parties on the slavery question--the conservatives, the liberals, and the radicals. The latter element, headed by "the Lemen party," as it now came to be called, held to the principles of The Friends to Humanity, and proposed to organize a branch of that order of Baptists. When it came to the test, however, the new church was reduced to a constituent membership consisting of some seven or eight members of the Lemen family. Such was the beginning of what is now the oldest surviving Baptist church in the State, which then took the name of "The Baptized Church of Christ, Friends to Humanity, on Cantine (Quentin) Creek." It is located in the neighborhood of the old Cahokia mound. Its building, when it came to have one, was called "Bethel Meeting House," and in time the church itself became known as "Bethel Baptist Church."