our ministry, making a probable population of between five and six hundred thousand. They have a colored church-membership, including probationers, of about twenty-seven thousand, with the attendants upon our ministry, making a probable population of upward of one hundred thousand. A portion of this population are slaves. The others are mostly poor. They are generally strongly attached to the Church of their choice, and look to it confidingly for ministerial services, religious sympathy, and all the offices of Christian kindness. The white membership in these conferences, in respect to intelligence, piety, and attachment to Methodist discipline and economy, will compare favorably with other portions of the Church.

"In our judgment, the existence of these conferences and churches, under their present circumstances, does not tend to extend or perpetuate slavery. They are known to be organized under a Discipline which characterizes slavery as a great evil; which makes the slaveholder ineligible to any official station in the Church, where the laws of the State in which he lives will admit of emancipation, and permit the liberated slave to enjoy freedom; which disfranchises a traveling minister who by any means becomes the owner of a slave or slaves, unless he executes, if it be practicable, a legal emancipation of such slaves, conformably to the laws of the State wherein he lives; which makes it the duty of all the ministers to enforce upon all the members the necessity of teaching their slaves to read the Word of God, and allowing them time to attend upon the public worship of God on our regular days of divine service; which prohibits the buying and selling of men, women, and children, with an intention to enslave them, and inquires what shall be done for the extirpation of slavery?

"With this Discipline freely circulated among the people, or certainly within the reach of any who desire to examine it, and with other Churches existing in the same territory without these enactments, these societies and conferences have, either by elective affinity, adhered to, or from preference, associated with, the Methodist Episcopal Church. In a few instances their church-relations have exposed them to some peril, and in numerous cases to sacrifice. But such have been their moral worth, and Christian excellence, and prudent conduct, that generally they have been permitted to enjoy their religious immunities, and serve and worship God according to their consciences."

This testimony of the bishops, in 1856, was corroborated by the delegates from the Border, and the Committee on Slavery appointed

at that session confirmed its truth by the following language, which forms part of their report, namely:

"It is also affirmed and believed that the administrators of Discipline within the bounds of slave territory have faithfully done all that in their circumstances they have conscientiously judged to be in their power, to answer the ends of the Discipline in exterminating that great evil.”

Such is the position of the Church on the Border, and it is the position held by most of the members of this General Conference. Very few indeed of the members of this body believe or teach that slaveholding, except for mercenary or selfish purposes, ought to be made a test of membership. Our view of the subject is sustained by the Scriptures, and also by Mr. Wesley, who received slaveholders into his societies, and is in strict accordance with the instructions given by the Wesleyan Connection to their missionaries in Jamaica. These instructions are in the following words, namely:

"As in the colonies in which you are called to labor a great proportion of the inhabitants are in a state of slavery, the Committee must strongly call to your recollection what was so fully stated to you when you were accepted as missionaries to the West Indies, that your only business is to promote the moral and religious improvement of the slaves to whom you may have access, without, in the least degree, in public or private, interfering with their civil condition." Who, then, have changed position on this subject? The Border preachers have NOT The change of ground is with those who ask for an altered Discipline, a new term of membership.

In conclusion, the minority respectfully submit, 1. That the action proposed in the report of the majority has been recommended without the proper consideration, in Committee, of the documents referred to them by the General Conference, which, in our judgment, the gravity and importance of the subject demand.

2. The minority further represent, that the desire of the Church at large for any important change in our rules on the subject of slavery is not sufficiently indicated in the petitions that have been referred to this Committee to demand such action as is set forth in the report of the majority. The whole number of petitioners is less than one in twenty of the entire membership, and in those Conferences that have spoken most largely, two-thirds of the entire membership have remained silent. (8)

3. The action of the Annual Conference, as expressed in their

recorded votes, does not indicate such a desire for a constitutional change as to call on this General Conference to inaugurate an attempt to secure it by sending down a new rule for their action. This will be evident if we consider that, taking the highest vote obtained in the several Annual Conferences by any single measure, it falls short, to the extent of over five hundred of the requisite number among those voting, and falls short more than three thousand of threefourths of the whole number of the traveling preachers in the Methodist Episcopal Church.

4. The change in the General Rule proposed in the report of the majority is still further objected to, in that the action they recommend approaches nearest in form to the one coming from the Providence Conference, and would be likely to be understood by our people as embodying the spirit of that most objectionable of all the changes which had been previously proposed.

5. The form of the chapter proposed in the report of the majority, the minority confidently believe will not be considered by the Church as embodying sufficient advantages over the present chapter to warrant the risk incurred in making any change. Though being intended only as a declaration of sentiment, as it is placed in what is regarded as a book of ecclesiastical law, it may become a source of embarassment by being misunderstood by our people and misrepresented by our enemies,

6. The minority further represent, that the action proposed in the report of the majority will very greatly embarrass and cripple, if it does not altogether destroy our Church in the slaveholding States and along the border. It is especially calculated to do this in the present highly excited state of the public mind in that territory.

7. The minority still further believe that such a result would involve a loss of position and influence in slaveholding territory, by the most decidedly anti-slavery Church among the larger denominations of the land, which it might require many long years to regain. Such a surrender of advantages now possessed must be deprecated by every one who sincerely asks, "What shall be done for the extirpation of the evil of slavery?"

8. It is further objected to the action proposed, that it would operate most disastrously upon the interests of the enslaved. It would not only deprive them of ministrations by which thousands of them have been blessed and saved, but from those by whom their emancipation can only be secured it would withdraw the influence of that

Church, in regard to which the majority of the Committee on Slavery in 1856 say: "It is affirmed and believed that it has done more to diffuse anti-slavery sentiments, to mitigate the evils of the system, and to abolish the institution from civil society, than any other organization, either political, social, or religious."

9. The members of the minority representing conferences located in non-slaveholding territory also submit, that the action proposed in the report of the majority would, in its results, as admitted by the majority (in committee) themselves, expose our ministerial brethren and their families, in the Border work, to privations and perils which, while they ought not to be shrunk from, if necessary to maintain uprightness and truth, yet, if brought about without sufficient cause, might properly be considered an unbrotherly recklessness as to their condition, specially calculated to alienate them from us in spirit and affection.

10. The testimony of the representatives of the work on the Pacific coast in this Committee, impresses us with the conviction that the results of the action proposed in the report of the majority would be highly disastrous in that quarter, destroying much of the fruit of their past labor, and greatly retarding the work for many years to come.

11. The minority are still further impressed with the conviction that among the results of the action proposed in the majority report, one painfully probable is the enfeebling of the prestige and moral power of the whole Church by the strifes and divisions that may ensue, which will greatly incapacitate her for the performance of that grand work, both at home and abroad, to which God in his providence is now so evidently calling her, in this the opening of the second century of her history, and in which, if her resources and influence are properly husbanded and guarded, she may achieve so eminent and glorious a success.

12. The minority are not insensible to the fact that an embarrassing pressure, produced by misrepresentations of our anti-slavery position, is felt in some portions of our work in non-slaveholding territory; but they believe that this may be relieved by a distinct and emphatic testimony on the subject, in a mode which would not involve the disasters apprehended from the course to which they object. They, therefore, recommend the adoption of the following

RESOLUTIONS:

Resolved, 1. That the Methodist Episcopal Church has, in good faith, in all the periods of its history, proposed to itself the question,

"What shall be done for the extirpation of the evil of slavery?" and it has never ceased, openly before the world, to bear its testimony against the sin, and to exercise its disciplinary powers to the end that its members might be kept unspotted from criminal connection with the system, and that the evil itself be removed from among us.

Resolved, 2. That any change of our Discipline upon the subject of slavery in the present highly-excited condition of the country would accomplish no good whatever, but, on the contrary, would seriously disturb the peace of our Church, and would be especially disastrous to our ministers and members in the slave States.

Resolved, 3. That the Committee on the Pastoral Address be instructed to state our position in relation to slavery, and to give such counsel to our churches as may be suited to the necessities of the

case.

JOHN S. PORTER, Chairman.
P. COOMBE, Secretary.

BUFFALO, May 16, 1860.

REMARKS ON THE PRECEDING ECCLESIASTICAL ACTION.

(1) The attempt to enforce a rule of the Church, excluding slaveholders from its communion, having failed, and the necessity of dropping it altogether in the South, argues a very different state of public sentiment, in the days of early Methodism, in relation to slavery, from what has been supposed to have existed. The duty of emancipation could not have been a common sentiment, otherwise the Rule of the Church on slavery would have been easily enforced. That it had to be abandoned, in both the North and the South, is conclusive on this question. In this fact we find another ground for setting aside the abolition interpretation of the Constitution, which claims that it must be understood as anti-slavery, because the sentiment of the country was then opposed to the institution. No such general hostility to slavery prevailed throughout the country; and even in the States where emancipation was finally adopted, the feeling in its favor was by no means unanimous.

(2) It will be noted, that as early as 1824, the General Conference made provision for the distinct organization of churches of the colored people, and for employing colored men as traveling preachers.