eir
soul, and to make the praises of God resound over the ocean.

In strengthening the religious element, in exciting the Puritan fibre of
America, the awakening certainly contributed a great share to the
success of the party opposed to slavery. South Carolina acknowledged
this herself lately, when she inserted the following phrase in her
declaration of independence: "The public opinion of the North has given
to a great political error the sanction of a still more erroneous
religious sentiment." Is this religious sentiment, assailed by the
slaveholders, that of free thinkers, or of Christians? The South is not
mistaken; it knows that the truly difficult acts of emancipation are
accomplished on earth only by the power of the Gospel; it saw the great
abolition impulse rise in England, and spread over the United States;
journals, committees, correspondence, all indicated that the English had
become the American movement, and was continued under the same banner.
Under this banner, and this alone, it has conquered. A colossal work in
fact is here in question, before which all purely human forces fall to
the ground. If such prodigious Christian efforts were needed to give the
victory to Wilberforce, what will be required in the heart of a country
where slavery is not exiled to distant colonies, and where it has
acquired formidable proportions with years. There are easy abolitions,
which are wrought in some sort of themselves, and which seem the natural
corollary of a political revolution; as, for instance, that which
occurred forty years ago in the Spanish republics. Bolivar, Quiroga, and
the other leaders, needed the support of all classes of the population
in their struggle against Spain; they adopted the expedient of
suppressing slavery. In taking this resolution, they accomplished a
most honorable deed, but they made little change in the condition of the
country, for large planting was rare, and both the blacks and the whites
were few in numbers, less numerous, indeed, than the Indians and the
half breeds.

If political reasons then sufficed, it is evident that they are far from
sufficing to-day: we must seek elsewhere for the explanation of the
movement which, a long time wavering and suppressed, has just manifested
its irresistible power in the United States. We have recognized in it
the hand of the Gospel; and this is no indifferent matter, for if the
Gospel had no part in it, such a movement would end in destruction.