PERSONAL CONFLICT IN THE M. E. CHURCH.
The conflict in the M. E. Church on the slavery question is generating again, as in years gone by, a great deal of personal ill will among professedly antislavery men. Not long since one of the corresponding editors of the Northern Independent, a thoroughly anti-slavery sheet was expelled from one of the Genesee conferences, for some things written in the Independent, and now Rev. Dr. Mattison, of the Black River conference, has presented charges against Rev. Abel Stevens, editor of the Advocate and Journal, for "immoral and unchristian conduct." The charge and specifications appear in the last Independent. These personal difficulties and terribly bitter assaults upon character among brethren are but a repetition of the scenes which resulted in the organization of the Methodist Protestant and Wesleyan Methodist churches. It may be that Mattison, Hosmer and other methodists who are bent on the exclusion of slavery from the M. E. church, may not be themselves excluded or driven out; but at present their prospects look gloomy. They have put God's law first and Methodism second,—a crime not easily overlooked in official quarters. This conflict refreshes in our minds the question of an apostle—“How can two walk together except they be agreed?” Freedom and slavery are essentially and eternally antagonistic, and therefore never can dwell peaceably together in the same203church, unless the church itself be “dead, twice dead and plucked up by the roots,” in which case it has ceased to be a church, and has sunk to the level of a mere worldly organization. At this period while the Methodists in the North church are in this severe conflict among themselves, those in the south are at rest. The reason is that while freedom is contending with slavery in the North church, in the South freedom has recently been strangled and buried and slavery sways an undisputed scepter.—Religious Telescope.