In South Carolina. 495 



furnishes of the necessity of the measures which are in progress for 

 the relief of the Church in the South and South-west. 



Your committee also consider it due to state that it does not ap- 

 pear that the action of the General Conference in the cases of the 

 bishop and of Brother Harding proceeded of ill-will, as of purpose 

 to oppress us, nor of any intended disregard of the authority of the 

 Scriptures or of the Discipline, as if to effect the designs of a 

 politico-religious faction, without warrant of the Scriptures, and 

 against the Discipline and the peace of the Church. But they con- 

 sider that action as having been produced out of causes which had 

 their origin in the financial abolitionism of Garrison and others, 

 and which being suffered to enter and agitate the Church, first in 

 New England and afterward generally at the North, worked up 

 such a revival of the anti-slavery spirit as had grown too strong for 

 the restraints of either Scripture or Discipline, and too general 

 through the Eastern, Northern, and North-western Conferences to 

 be resisted any longer by the easy, good-natured prudence of the 

 brethren representing those Conferences in the late General Con- 

 ference. Pressed beyond their strength, whether little or much, 

 they had to give way, and reduced (by the force of principles 

 which, whether by their own fault or not, had obtained a controll- 

 ing power) to the alternative of breaking up the Churches of their 

 own Conference districts, or of adopting measures which they might 

 hardly persuade themselves could be endured by the South and 

 South-west, they determined on the latter. The best of men may 

 have their judgments perverted, and it is not wonderful that under 

 such stress of circumstances the majority should have adopted a 

 new construction of both Scripture and Discipline, and persuaded 

 themselves that in pacifying the abolitionists they were not unjust 

 to their Southern brethren. Such, however, is unquestionably the 

 character of the measures they adopted, and which the Southern 

 Churches cannot possibly submit to, unless the majority who enacted 

 them could also have brought us to a conviction that we ought to 

 be bound by their judgment against our consciences, and calling of 

 God, and the warrant of Scripture, and the provisions of the Dis- 

 cipline. But while we believe that our paramount duty in our calling 

 of God positively forbids our yielding the gospel in the Southern 

 States to the pacification of abolitionism in the Northern, and the 

 conviction is strong and clear in our own minds that we have both 

 the warrant of Scripture and the plain provisions of the Discipline 

 to sustain us, we see no room to entertain any pr< position for coin 



