Читать книгу The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church онлайн

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“It is due to the Baltimore Conference to say that the cases referred to as evidence of their improper application of their rule, are stated in terms too vague and indefinite to authorize the inference drawn by the petitioners. It is represented that a young man applying to be received into the itinerancy is prevented by application of this rule; that it is in vain for him to urge upon a majority of the conference the impracticability of his complying with the rule, in consequence of the laws under which he lives, or any other consideration in favor of his being received; because he will not comply with the rule, he must be rejected. The same, it is assumed by the petitioners, is done with respect to those who apply for ordination. And it is inferred by them, that if the conference act consistently, stewards and leaders may be expected soon to be called upon to comply with the rule, or forfeit their official standing in the Church.

“Your committee view this subject in a very different light. In admitting a preacher to travel, or electing one to orders, a conference must have the right to act freely; and in cases which are not successful, it is wholly an assumption, on the part of the applicants or their friends, to say what particular considerations dictated the vote, unless such considerations be distinctly avowed by a majority of the conference. And it is known to all conversant with the transactions of an annual conference, that no person applying to be received or ordained ever enters as a party before the conference, pleading his own cause, and hearing and answering the objections which may be urged against his application. Any act of conference, then, in these cases, can not be justly urged as evidence that the conference denies the party concerned the benefit of the special provision in the rule. A conference or other deliberative bodies possess, and in the nature of the case must possess, the right to determine its own course, and vote freely in all such individual cases. Your committee, therefore, can not see that the privileges claimed by the petitioners have been contravened by an act of the Baltimore Conference.