delegates to the Lay Electoral Conferences were never challenged until
they came here asking for seats. They were good enough to elect laymen
to this body, but not good enough to take seats with laymen in this
body. With what consistency can laymen accept seats by the votes of the
women and then deprive women of their seats? I am surprised at some of
the "subtle insinuations" of the Episcopacy concerning constitutional
law. Allow me to say at this point that, having introduced into the
Quarterly Conference these women, and having given them a right to
vote there, and in the District Conferences, and in the Lay Electoral
Conferences, in all honesty we must do one of two things, if we would
be consistent, we must go back and take up that old foundation of lay
delegation that we laid in 1868, or we must go forward and allow these
women to have their seats. In a word, we must either lay again the
"foundation of repentance from dead work, or go forward to perfection."
And I am not in favor of going back.

If it is true that the body of the Constitution is outside of the
Restrictive Rules, and cannot be changed except in the way prescribed
for altering the Restrictive Rules, then I say that this General
Conference has again and again been both lawless and revolutionary.
Every paragraph of the chapter, known as the Constitution, beginning
with §63, and closing with §69, was put into that Constitution without
any voice from an Annual Conference of this foot-stool. Not one single
one of them was ever submitted to an Annual Conference; §20, ¶183, stood
for many years in the Constitution of the Church, but was transferred
bodily from that Constitution by the General Conference to the position
it now occupies. You come and tell us to-day that we cannot change the
Constitution outside of the Restrictive Rules without going down to the
Annual Conferences; it is too late in the day to say that. We have made
too much history on that point. The present plan of lay delegation was