As the national authority began to be reëstablished throughout the States in rebellion, not the least embarrassing of the questions which generals in command were called upon to decide was that of the treatment of churches whose pastors were openly or covertly disloyal to the Union. There was no general plan adopted by the Government for such cases; in fact, it was impossible to formulate a policy which should meet so vast a variety of circumstances as presented themselves in the different regions of the South. The Board of Missions of the Methodist Church sent down some of their ablest ministers, with general authority to take charge of abandoned churches, and to establish in them their interrupted worship. The mission boards of other denominations took similar action, and the Secretary of War[75] gave general orders to the officers commanding the different departments to permit ministers of the gospel bearing the commission of these mission boards to exercise the functions of their office and to give them all the aid, countenance, and support which might be practicable. But before and after these orders there was much clashing between the military and the ecclesiastical authorities, which had its rise generally in the individual temperaments of the respective generals and priests. There was an instance in one place where a young officer rose in his pew and requested an Episcopal minister to read the prayer for the President of the United States, which he had omitted. Upon the minister's refusal the soldier advanced to the pulpit and led the preacher, loudly protesting, to the door, and then quietly returning to the altar himself read the prayer--not much, it is to be feared, to the edification of the congregation. General Butler arrested a clergyman in Norfolk, and placed him at hard labor on the public works for disloyalty in belief and action; but the President reversed this sentence and changed it to one of exclusion from the Union lines.[76] The Catholic Bishop of Natchez having refused to read the prescribed form of prayer for the President, and having protested in an able and temperate paper against the orders of the commanding general in this regard, the latter ordered him to be expelled from the Union lines, although the order was almost immediately rescinded. General Rosecrans issued an order[77] in Missouri requiring the members of religious convocations to give satisfactory evidence of their loyalty to the Government of the United States as a condition precedent to their assemblage and protection. In answer to the protestations which naturally resulted from this mandate he replied that it was given at the request of many loyal church members, both lay and clerical; that if he should permit all bodies claiming to be religious to meet without question, a convocation of Price's army, under the garb of religion, might assemble with impunity and plot treason. He claimed that there