McPheeters back over the heads of a majority of his own congregation, that too will be declined. I will not have control of any church on any side." The case finally ended by the exclusion of Dr. McPheeters from his pulpit by the order of the presbytery having ecclesiastical authority in the case. In this wise and salutary abstention from any interference with the churches, which was dictated by his own convictions as well as enjoined by the Constitution, the President did not always have the support of his subordinates. He had not only, as we have seen, to administer occasional rebukes to his over-zealous generals, but even in his own Cabinet he was sometimes compelled to overrule a disposition to abuse of authority in things spiritual. Several weeks after he had so clearly expressed himself in the McPheeters case, he found, to his amazement, that the Secretary of War had been giving orders virtually placing the army in certain places at the disposition of a Methodist bishop for the enforcement of his ecclesiastical decrees. He addressed to Mr. Stanton a note of measured censure,[80] which was followed by an order from the War Department explaining and modifying the more objectionable features of the former document. The Secretary explained that his action had no other intention than to furnish "a means of rallying the Methodist people in favor of the Union, in localities where the rebellion had disorganized and scattered them."[81] This explanation was not entirely satisfactory to the President, but he thought best to make no further public reference to the matter. Scarcely was this affair disposed of when a complaint was received from Memphis of some interference by the military with a church edifice there. Mr. Lincoln made upon the paper this peremptory indorsement: "If the military have military need of the church building, let them keep it; otherwise, let them get out of it, and leave it and its owners alone, except for the causes that justify the arrest of anyone."[82] Two months later the President, hearing of further complications in the case, made still another order, which even at the risk of wearying the reader we will give, from his own manuscript, as illustrating not only his conscientious desire that justice should be done, but also the exasperating obstacles he was continually compelled to surmount, in those troubled times, to accomplish, with all the vast powers at his disposition, this reasonable desire.