meetings are strictly Methodistical. I have already noticed two of the principal particulars objected to the Leeds meeting, the sanction they gave to the test and to the suspension of the local preacher; and I have said enough, I hope, to satisfy any reasonable mind that upon these points the preachers of the special district meeting do not merit censure, but are entitled to praise.

It is contended, however, that the meeting was illegally constituted; the president having invited persons who had no right to attend, and the superintendent having invited three distant, instead of three of the nearest superintendents. Had the meeting, thus constituted, tried the offenders, I think the act would have been illegal; but they did no such thing; they merely gave advice to the superintendent, as to the mode of trial; and attended the trial of two or three of the disaffected, without presuming to give a vote. What was there illegal in this? Has not a superintendent a right to ask advice of any of his brethren, in a case of difficulty? I hope he will not be denied this privilege by free-born Englishmen. We all know how common it is for a judge to consult his brethren on intricate subjects. And what law was violated by the mere presence of the preachers at these trials? None whatever, either divine or human.

Your people it appears, however, from recent occurrences have adopted a much more expeditious method of dealing with officers and members who are deemed refractory. Some time ago a leader of your connexion at Holbeck, near this town, for some cause, was deprived of his office and membership. Some time after he commenced meeting in class, and was admitted a private member. Afterwards he was proposed as a fit person to be again a leader, and was elected by a large majority of the leaders' meeting; only one or two being opposed to him. A leader of the Holbeck society complained to the quarterly meeting against this re-election; and the meeting decreed, and wrote to the Holbeck leaders, that they had done wrong in putting this person again into office, and that his re-election was void. The

Holbeck leaders were not enlightened by such logic, and refused to undo what they had done. When the proper season arrived, an elder from Leeds, a great stickler, no doubt, for the liberties of Englishmen, attended at Holbeck to renew the society's tickets. When he came to the class of the re-elected leader, he refused tickets to him and all his members. The Holbeck leaders were highly indignant at this mode of treatment of one of their members and his class, and held a parley with the meek-spirited elders of Leeds, at the last quarterly meeting: but these gentlemen, partly by threats, that they could convert the Holbeck society into an independent church, and partly by promises, that the affair should be presented for final adjudication to the next yearly meeting, obtained a trifling majority in favour of a despotic act which never had its equal in our connexion. Neither the leader nor his members were tried by a leaders' meeting, or received any notice of trial before any tribunal whatever. Thus the matter stands at present. My authorities for the above facts are quite satisfactory. A few remarks on them may be proper.

With the fitness or unfitness for his office, of the leader in question, I have nothing to do. Suppose, if you please, that he is every way qualified for it; and then the injustice of the treatment he has received is vividly apparent. If you suppose him to be unworthy, you see the necessity of a controlling power somewhere, to correct the errors of subordinate jurisdictions, and to bring them into harmony with the general system. That is the business of our special district meetings; and you cannot object to these, if you imitate them. But your laws have not vested any such power in any class of officers. The great outcry from the beginning to the end of the answer to Mr. Watson, by your London brethren, is, that the local authorities ought to be maintained inviolate. But here the decision of a leaders' meeting is annulled by a message from a quarterly meeting. Though you have made no provision for such a case in your laws, yet you have no

sooner set your system to work, than you find it cannot go on, without the intervention of an authority similar to that against which you have been protesting. And though Mr. Watson's argument, that the want of all power of revision of local decisions must issue in independency, has been publicly denied in the boldest manner, yet we perceive from the threat held out to the Holbeck leaders that your rulers feel his argument to be conclusive.

And this case is to be referred to the yearly meeting! But your laws have given no judicial authority to that august assembly. And have you forgotten that two of the chief reasons of the division were, that we allow a power to special district meetings, in certain cases, to settle differences which the local authorities cannot; and to the Conference to receive final appeals. And now your masters have discovered the secret, that they cannot keep you together for a single year, without having recourse to similar means!

The quarterly ticket is the token of membership, and the withholding of it is the mode of expulsion. The rule says, p. 12, "The mode of excluding a private member, shall be by withholding the ensuing quarterly ticket." As this token of membership was withheld from the leader, as well as from his members, he was excluded the society, as a member; and as no man can be a leader who is not a member, he was put out of office as well as out of society, by the same act. Now look at this case. Here is a leader and his class all turned out of society by a single elder, without any trial at all; and the quarterly meeting approve the arbitrary act! And all this in the face of rules which require that" private members of society shall be tried by the leaders' meeting;" that " on the appointment or trial of leaders, the leaders alone shall be allowed to vote;" and that " to prevent everything like unfair or clandestine expulsions" of leaders, a certain process of trial is ordained, adapted to secure justice to the accused. But all these enactments are swept away, like a spider's web, by the hand of a single elder. Here is your glorious liberty!

If there were any sinners in this business, they were the Holbeck leaders, and not the leader and members who were expelled. Just examine the case a moment. These leaders were hectored by the quarterly meeting for re-electing their brother. Neither he nor his members can be blamed for the act of the leaders' meeting, which placed him over them. The leaders refused to depose him; and how could he or his members be blamed for that? If the elder, therefore, thought himself authorized to visit the offence with excision, the contumacious leaders were evidently the offenders, and not the party who suffered; these received no message from the quarterly meeting, no notice of trial, no summons to appear before any tribunal, no trial of any sort; they were cut off by a single elder; the leader, because he would not resign his office at the bidding of this important personage; and the members, because they would not abandon a leader placed over them by their own leaders' meeting, and not legally deposed.

You have seen much in your Magazine from time to time, of the blessed spirit of union and love which prevail in your meetings, and of the mighty power of God, which rests on your assemblies, now that you are emancipated from the thraldom of the old connexion ; and there is much of this cant in the number for the present month; but no notice is taken in this truth-telling periodical, of the heavenly tempers, and the heavenly language, which flowed with amazing rapidity up to the midnight hour, in your last quarterly meeting, while this subject was under debate.

Before we have any more blustering on the Leeds case, as your people call it, we shall have some explanation, I hope, of the Holbeck case. Compare the timidity of more than twenty of our preachers, in confining themselves to mere advice, with the despotic air of your elder, who alone, and at a single blow, audaciously strikes out of your society a whole class with their leader. The advice offered by our preachers was sound and good; they saw no necessity for setting aside the

ordinary tribunals; they only recommended a test for the purgation of the jurors. No judge would allow a jury to try a prisoner, if he knew that some of them were his partners in guilt. He would try to get a honest jury; and he would not be deterred from this by the clamour of the disaffected, in calling it a packed jury. In our case, no law was set aside; in yours, every law applicable to the subject was fearlessly trampled upon.

Our people, generally, are warmly attached to Methodism, and require much dexterous drilling to prepare them to turn their backs upon it. You were warned from the first, that your seducers were driving at this point; but this was denied in the most solemn manner. Mr. Watson had charged the London protestors with a design to make a separation. In the review of their reply, which appeared in the Protestant Magazine for September last, it is said, "The pamphlet proceeds to repel the charge of a factious desire of innovation which Mr. Watson had thrown out; a charge which it successfully refutes, stating, in the words of former publications from that circuit, 'We do not yield, even to the Conference itself, in ardent attachment to the constitution and discipline of the connexion, as laid down by Mr. Wesley; we wish for no changes in the system of Methodism; but we are content and satisfied with that system as it has long been established in this circuit. These solemn declarations of a whole circuit, attested by the signatures of the circuit stewards in the first instance, and subsequently by those of 104 officers of the church, many of them of the highest character, for respectability, piety, and long standing in the societies, will, we think, have weight with the connexion.' Yet all this attestation, was, it seems, inadequate to gain the credit of truth with Mr. Watson. And Mr. Watson was right; for in spite of all these protestations. and attestations, as soon as they had succeeded in alienating the affections of a few of the people, they threw off the mask, and went away.

Now let us hear what Mr. Barr had to say in reply to