# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1863_S189
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 189

that had gone through the General Conference in 1860, with 87 votes against 45 for separation
from the General Conference, but the outbreak of the war prevented actual secession.
One of the most important questions that agitated the Episcopal Methodist Church in the course
of the year 1862 was that of lay delegation. In accordance with a resolution adopted by the
General Conference in 1860, the votes of the preachers and laity of every annual conference
were taken on the subject, with the following result: preachers (in 48 conferences) for lay
delegation, 1336; against, 3025; laity (in 46 conferences) for, 27,984; against, 46,405. By the
end of the year the Baltimore and Kentucky conferences had not yet voted. The preachers' vote
shows a majority for the measure in only 4 conferences — Philadelphia, East Genesee, Genesee,
and Oregon — and likewise the vote of the laity in the following 12 conferences: Philadelphia,
New York, Eastern New York, Providence, New England, New Hampshire, Black River, Oneida,
East Genesee, Genesee, Wyoming, California.

II. Abroad.

Mission and the Slave Question. In the mission conducted from Basel on the Gold Coast
in Africa, too, great difficulties have arisen out of the slave question. We read of this in the
Evangelical Lutheran Mission Gazette from Leipzig of March 1, as follows: "It had come to
light that not only individual Christians in the congregation, but also several catechists and
preaching assistants, owned a greater or lesser number of slaves. For many years the question
of whether this was permitted or not permitted met with less resistance from the missionaries,
and the negotiations about it were also repeatedly 'put off by the president of the General
Conference and then undertaken without proper preparation.' The individual missionaries were
thus compelled to act for themselves and took various, non-uniform courses. In the end,
however, a unity of principle and of its application had to be established. And here it was in
fact difficult, both to retract steps that had already been publicly taken and, amid the prevailing
agitation of minds, to let justice be done to one another at all and to come to an understanding
with one another. Negotiations are still continuing, but the Committee lives in the confident
hope that before long a full unity in principle and practice will come about, and it holds itself
convinced that 'the principles on which it proceeds are decidedly grounded in the Word of
God.' If, however, the very first of these principles declares that it is incompatible with the
commandment of love to own a human being as a slave — from which the abolition of slavery,
necessary under all circumstances, would then naturally follow of itself — then we for our part
cannot indeed share that conviction, but must instead regard it as a very questionable,
unscriptural mingling of spiritual and natural things. The holy apostles admonish, to be sure, as
goes without saying, the Christian masters in the congregations earnestly to show themselves
Christian toward their slaves as well, in the fear and love of God, for they are no friends or
defenders of slavery with all its horrors; but they think so little of demanding, in the name of
the Gospel, the abolition of slavery as such — even on its civil-legal side — as an inescapable
commandment of love, that it is in truth incomprehensible to us how one believes one can
support such a demand on the word of Scripture. An essay in the June issue of the Basel
Evangelical Mission Magazine on 'Polygamy and the Mission' does indeed acknowledge that
this position on the slavery question does not correspond to apostolic practice. But when it
nevertheless — thus in contradiction with the holy apostles — attempts to maintain and justify
that position, the matter thereby becomes, to be sure, considerably more questionable still. After
the article has designated slavery, polygamy, and caste as the three chief forms of sinful
corruption on the social terrain of pagan life that are in no way to be tolerated, it continues
verbatim as follows: 'One might object to us that the apostles, too, did not expressly oppose
such social evils as slavery and polygamy, but rather simply let them stand as they found them,
and that nevertheless the Spirit of the