n the relation of master to slave
should be excluded from the ministry, if not from the communion. But the
enforcement of this rule was found to be not only difficult, but wrong,
and difficult simply because it was wrong. Then followed that illogical
confusion of ideas studiously fostered by zealots at either extreme: If
the slave-holder may be in some circumstances a faithful Christian
disciple, fulfilling in righteousness and love a Christian duty, then
slavery is right; if slavery is wrong, then every slave-holder is a
manstealer, and should be excommunicated as such without asking any
further questions. Two statements more palpably illogical were never put
forth for the darkening of counsel. But each extreme was eager to
sustain the unreason of the opposite extreme as the only alternative of
its own unreason, and so, what with contrary gusts from North and South,
they fell into a place where two seas met and ran the ship aground. The
attempts made from 1836 to 1840, by stretching to the utmost the
authority of the General Conference and the bishops, for the suppression
of "modern abolitionism" in the church (without saying what they meant
by the phrase) had their natural effect: the antislavery sentiment in
the church organized and uttered itself more vigorously and more
extravagantly than ever on the basis, "All slave-holding is sin; no
fellowship with slave-holders." In 1843 an antislavery secession took
place, which drew after it a following of six thousand, increased in a
few months to fifteen thousand. The paradoxical result of this movement
is not without many parallels in church history: After the drawing off
of fifteen thousand of the most zealous antislavery men in the church,
the antislavery party in the church was vastly stronger, even in
numbers, than it had been before. The General Conference of 1836 had
pronounced itself, without a dissenting vote, to be "decidedly opposed
to modern abolitionism." The General Conference of 1844, on the first
test vote on the question of excluding from the ministry one who had
become a slave-holder through marriage, revealed a majority of one
hundred and seventeen to fifty-six in favor of the most rigorous
antislavery discipline. The graver question upon the case of Bishop
Andrew, who was in the like condemnation, could not be decided
otherwise. The form of the Conference's action in this case was
studiously inoffensive. It imputed no wrong and proposed no censure,
but,