most iniquitous compromises preceding the war.


ECCLESIASTICAL COMPROMISES ABOUT SLAVERY.

This glance at the compromises in the political history of the nation
prepares us to look at those in the Church. Here, too, compromises on
the subject of slavery were made as in the State, and generally from the
same motives and always with the same disappointing results.

The Churches before and during the revolutionary period were emphatic in
their utterances against slavery. Their accredited leaders and official
convocations used such terms as these: Methodist, "The sum of all
villanies;" Presbyterian, "Man stealers: stealers of men are those who
bring off slaves or freemen and keep, sell or buy them;" Baptist,
"Slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature;"
Congregational, "Slavery is in every instance wrong, unrighteous,
oppressive, a great and crying sin, there being nothing equal to it on
the face of the earth."

But there were slaveholders in the churches, and as population increased
they became more numerous and naturally chafed under such denunciations.
But their impatience reached its climax under the modern anti-slavery
doctrine that immediate emancipation is the only remedy for the sin of
slavery. The South was alarmed and soon became imperious and exacting;
the North was timid and yielding. Then began the special era of
ecclesiastical compromises. Let me specify:

1. The utterances as to the guilt of slavery were modified, reaching at
length the point where some of the most eminent doctors of divinity and