ghts" on Mount Pisgah, and had conferred on you the degree of
_Modern Seer_, and entered upon the duties of "High Priest" of
Democracy! As I am one of the parties addressed, and the customs of the
Church and the country require a response to so grave a document, I have
felt it incumbent upon me to perform the task. I may style this the
_Last_ epistle of Aaron, the Priest, and illustrious Chief of Foreign
Catholic Sag Nicht Locofocoism!

My first impulses were, upon reading your address, to call for your
_credentials_, and to examine into your _authority_ for assuming to
dictate to the entire Ministry of the Southern portion of the Methodist
Church. You must either enter the Ecclesiastical ring under the
_imposition of the hands_ of BISHOP SOULE or _Andy Johnson_. If BISHOP
SOULE ordained you for the Ministry, and set you apart as the
Lieutenant-General of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the
presumption is that he examined you on doctrinal points, and upon all
questions affecting the government of the Church, as was his duty, and
is our custom, and that he found you orthodox! It follows, as a matter
of course, that you renounced your heresy you advocated in the Hartford
Convention, held at Nashville, and that you obtained forgiveness for
that and numerous other "sins of omission and commission"--aye, for the
whole catalogue of your inward and outward iniquities, which so
_eminently_ disqualified you for the work of the Ministry! But if _Andy
Johnson_ ordained you for the work, of which there is no sort of doubt,
the Church South, through me, protests against your authority, and
utterly refuses to submit to your teachings. Our Church does not agree
with Johnson on the "White Basis" issue, or the great question of
slavery; and in proof of this, I cite to the fact of her separation from
the North, in 1844, upon this very question. She has within her bounds
of communion, rich men and poor, educated and uneducated, and is
unwilling to unite with him in arraying the poor against the rich, or
the unlearned against the learned. Nor does our Church believe that
Jesus Christ was a Locofoco, as Johnson asserts in his Inaugural, and
held that Christianity and Democracy, in converging lines, led to the
foot of Jacob's Ladder, and thence to heaven, _via_ Mount Pisgah, from
whose lofty summit you first beheld the promised land!

It therefore follows, that, in presenting yourself as a spiritual leader
in the Church, called to the