f,
says Dr. Channing, with spreading principles, which, however slowly,
could not but work its destruction. Dr. Wayland says, that if the
apostles had pursued the opposite plan of denouncing slavery as a crime,
the Christian religion would have been ruined; its very name would have
been forgotten. Then how can the course of the modern abolitionists,
under circumstances so nearly similar, or even that of these reverend
gentlemen themselves be right? Why do not they content themselves with
doing what Christ and his apostles did? Why must they proclaim the
unlawfulness of slavery? Is human nature so much altered, that a course,
which would have produced universal bloodshed, and led to the very
destruction of the Christian religion, in one age, wise and Christian in
another?

Let us, however, consider the force of the argument as stated above. It
amounts to this: Christ and his apostles thought slaveholding a great
crime, but they abstained from saying so, for fear of the consequences.
The very statement of the argument, in its naked form, is its
refutation. These holy men did not refrain from condemning sin from a
regard to consequences. They did not hesitate to array against the
religion which they taught, the strongest passions of men. Nor did they
content themselves with denouncing the general principles of evil; they
condemned its special manifestations. They did not simply forbid
intemperate sensual indulgence, and leave it to their hearers to decide
what did or what did not come under that name. They declared that no
fornicator, no adulterer, no drunkard could be admitted into the kingdom
of heaven. They did not hesitate, even when a little band, a hundred and
twenty souls, to place themselves in direct and irreconcilable
opposition to the whole polity, civil and religious, of the Jewish
State. It will hardly be maintained that slavery was, at that time,
more intimately interwoven with the institutions of society than
idolatry was. It entered into the arrangements of every family; of every
city and province, and of the whole Roman empire. The emperor was the
Pontifex Maximus; every department of the State, civil and military, was
pervaded by it. It was so united with the fabric of the government that
it could not be removed without effecting a revolution in all its parts.
The apostles knew this. They knew that to denounce polytheism, was to
array against them the whole power of the State. Their divine Master had
dis