Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/819

laughter]. For some time the male and female students at Oberlin used to have their prayer-meetings together, but after a time they divided, and the young men complained to Dr. Finney that the Holy Ghost no longer came with equal force. Dr. Finney said this showed amativeness, or that the men were back-sliding. [Applause].

Brother Dickinson: As to the talk of amativeness, what about our holiness meetings and seaside meetings, where we go to hear woman, and to be moved by her words and her personality? [Applause]. Why are there so many women in the Church? It must be amativeness which urges them to go and hear men preach. [Laughter].

Dr. Roach: If this meeting has any dignity, has any Christian intelligence, has any weight of character, it ought not to take this action. [Laughter]. What wildness, what fanaticism, what strange freaks will we not take on next? [Laughter and applause].

Brother McAllister and others took part in the discussion, and finally, amid cries of "Motion," "Question," points of order, and the utmost confusion, the question was put, and the meeting refused to invite Miss Oliver to preach by a vote of 46 to 38. The result was received with ejaculations of "Amen" and "Thank God" and "God bless Brother Buckley." The Chair announced that Brother Kittrell will preach next Monday on "Entire Satisfaction," and the meeting adjourned.

Miss Oliver appealed to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in session in Cincinnati, May, 1880, for full installment and ordination. In this appeal she said:

I am so thoroughly convinced that the Lord has laid commands upon me in this direction, that it becomes with me a question of my own soul's salvation. I have passed through tortures to which the flames of martyrdom would be nothing, for they would end in a day; and through all this time, and to-day, I could turn off to positions of comparative ease and profit. I ask you, fathers and brethren, tell me what you would do in my place? Tell me what you would wish the Church to do toward you, were you in my place? Please apply the golden rule, and vote in Conference accordingly.

As answer to this appeal, and in reply to all women seeking the ministry of that Church, the Conference passed the following resolution:

Resolved, That women have already all the rights and privileges in the Methodist Church that are good for them, and that it is not expedient to make any change in the books of discipline that would open the doors for their ordination to the ministry.^[1]

An Episcopal Church Convention meeting in Boston in the summer

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1. But this Conference, which could not recognize woman's equality of rights in the Church, adjourned in a body to Chicago, before its business was completed, by its presence there to influence the Republican Nominating Convention in favor of General Grant's name for the Presidency.