The Baltimore Annual Conference.
We have given our readers the interesting proceedings and the important conclusions of the Baltimore Annual Conference, which has lately terminated its session in Staunton.--That Conference has formally severed its connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church North, and taken a separate and independent position. The vote for immediate separation was 87, against it 4, besides 38 who did not vote, but were understood to be opposed. This important ecclesiastical secession has its origin in the action of the General Conference, which, at its last session, interpolated an anti-slavery clause into the Discipline. There was no difference of opinion in the Conference at Staunton in regard to the obnoxious nature of this clause; but only as to whether it was advisory or mandatory. Nearly two-thirds of the delegates present held that it was mandatory, and were for its immediate repudiation. And, after the vote had been taken, many of the dissentients frankly gave in their adhesion to a course which is heartily sustained not only by the Lay Convention of the same Church lately held in Staunton, but by the public sentiment of the whole State.In the course of the debates, one of the speakers referred to the conscientious hostility to slavery which is becoming almost universal at the North, and the public sentiment in its favor which is equally universal in the South. The rupture of national ecclesiastical associations is the most significant evidence yet given, except the late formal secession of the Southern States, that we are two peoples. The bond of religious unity is stronger than any of party or politics, and when that gives way before Sectional influences, no other tie can hold us together.
