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NOTE.-Bishop Kingsley also visits our Bulgarian and Scandinavian Missions, and also the British Conference and Irish Wesleyan Conference as the Delegate of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

METHODIST

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

APRIL, 1870.

AR1. I.-GENERAL CONFERENCE OF 1844.

WHEN Coke and Asbury began to give organic form to the Church "over which the Holy Ghost had made them overseers," they found a large gathered flock in the Southern States. In that inviting and prosperous field a Gospel of perfect freedom had been preached by strong antislavery men, and accepted by slaveholders. The wrong of slaveholding had been a clear outspoken part of that Gospel, and while the humane spirit of many masters antagonized the spirit of slavery, and united with the formidable difficulties which society had opposed to emancipation to urge forbearance and delay, the animus of the system made it such an "enormous evil" that it was publicly condemned and marked for "extirpation." Orders were passed for what, under the circumstances, must be acknowledged as very prompt, decisive action-emancipation, withdrawal, or expulsion.

But slavery had become a cherished domestic institution, interwoven with the very framework of society, and was hedged about by laws which were evidently designed to make it an inseparable part of the State. The Church, therefore, found that it could be denounced; but then, and in the methods attempted, it could not be "extirpated."

In the meantime great revivals spread through the South, and the number of slaveholders in the Church, though relatively small, increased rather than diminished, as the law of FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXII.-11

the Church assumed that it would and must; and whatever the inconsistency involved, it is simple historic fidelity to say that many of these men gave strong evidence of genuine piety. They wept and struggled in prayer for mercy, rejoiced in the evidence of pardon, were most humane in the treatment of their slaves, became zealous, flaming apostles of "Christianity in earnest," and many of them died in triumph.

An era of conservatism set in. It was intended firmly to antagonize the essential spirit of slavery, and only to tolerate the legal relation till God, in his providence, should open the way for emancipation. The conservatism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, therefore, represented mainly the extreme difficulty of administering her antislavery laws, and her strong desire to save the souls of the people, notwithstanding the impediments which slavery threw in the way. She meant, not endorsement, but toleration,under what was deemed exceptional circumstances; many of her clearest minds, North and South, insisting that there was an obvious distinction between the mere fact of slaveholding, which might be a legal, and even a humane, necessity, and holding as "chattels" the bodies and souls of men. It is in the light of this distinction alone that the apparently contradictory history of Methodism can be explained. But a deep sophistry and grave practical error came out of it. History ignored our distinction. The friends of the system, in growing numbers, claimed that in conceding the legal relation we conceded the principle, and the world at length agreed that the two should stand or fall together. Our Southern brethren, from an ostensible agreement with us, including the wrong of the system, passed at length to its indorsement as a great providential arrangement for social perfection; and not a few in the North joined in asserting that any ecclesiastical law requiring manumission was a direct assault upon the civil law, which could not be justified upon moral grounds, and at length the Church as such, in its administration, held its condemnation of slavery in abeyance, in consideration for the conceded rights of slaveholders.

In this condition of things Methodist conservatism gave large room to the growth of the connectional principle, which became more grasping and less scrupulous. It was agreeable to the Methodist Episcopal Church to be great. It must, indeed, be

conceded, however humiliating, that, over and above the zeal of Christian love for the souls of men, there was a human satisfaction in the popular power and spread of our beloved Methodism. Hence we must not run the risk of alienating the South. Many of our most earnest, eminent, and princely men were there; and, beyond a question, they were very thorough "old-fashioned Methodists," full of spiritual life and power, and uncompromisingly opposed to all departures from "the old landmarks." Our slaveholding members were, it was pleaded, legitimately in the Church; they were shielded by the law of the land, and we must, at least for the present, leave the matter of "extirpation" to God. Thus, in the judgment of many, the Church came into harmony with a great dominant political idea, Union first, principle

afterward.

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But a reaction was in progress. A new exposition of liberty was coming forward under the control of Providence. Since 1772 the great decision of Lord Mansfield, "that as soon as ever any slave set his foot upon English territory he became free," had been ringing in the ears of men. Since 1774 John Wesley's incisive Thoughts on Slavery" had been working among the masses. The almost superhuman efforts of Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, John Wesley, William Pitt, Lord Grenville, and their compeers, had rendered the year 1807 illustrious, by the legal overthrow in the British Parliament of "that execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the slavetrade." This act made large rents in the vail which concealed the institution itself, to which this monster vice was only tributary. For twenty-three years this system of concentrated injustice had baffled the noblest philanthropy of the civilized world, in the most vigorous attempts to ameliorate the condition of its victims. In 1830 began one of those "ground swells " from English subjects, which, fortunately for human liberty, from the days of King John and Magna Charta no British government" has ever been able to resist. To this grand conclusion the English mind had struggled up at last-slavery itself must be overthrown. Agitations, frightful to timid minds, swept through the realm; but Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, Brougham, Lushington, Bunting, Watson, and their co-laborers, rising to the greatness of the occasion, controlled the

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storm, and in 1833 Parliament proclaimed the will of British freemen in the great act of universal emancipation.

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It is time now to remark that neither liberty, nor the work of liberty, is local. It is for no particular land or people, but for the world. The spirit of emancipation would of course cross the waters. It did not wait to complete its work in the British Empire before it came to America. It was here in the souls of Oglethorpe, Penn, Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Jay, Franklin, Rush, Benezet, Coke, Asbury, and a host of others. These were great, calm, reasoning philanthropists, and they trembled for their country," because they "knew God was just." But the "agitators" were here also. George Thompson had agitated in England, and he would agitate in America. William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur Tappan, and their confrères would smite this giant enemy of the human race with blows that would reverberate throughout Christendom. If the Colonization scheme stand in their way, down with it. If the Church sought to throw the shield of conservatism around their victim, down with the Church. If the Bible was by construction a shield for the monster, away with the Bible. Orange Scott and his associates in Church, like other great radicals in State, cried out, in effect, up with the "tares," and never mind "the wheat." Fisk, Hedding, Whedon, and others, excited storms of wrath when they pleaded for "the wheat," for they seemed to protect the "tares" also. But at length the agitators were broken against the wall of conservatism. Outside, the Union rose up against them, and they dashed against the Union; but the Union was hard, and the recoil was destructive. In Church they struck the connectional principle and its highest representative the Episcopacy; but the Connection and the Episcopacy were firm, and the agitators seceded. In the meantime the deep growl of challenge, insolence, and angry menace of fierce resentment came up from the South. The calmest reason both South and North recognized the danger. Rumored insurrections were inevitably associated in the Southern mind with abolition fanaticism; and threats of disunion, with violence against persons and the press, followed.

The misrepresentations of facts and motives, the mutual hatred, and scorn, and wild excesses of those terrific days, have

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