ethodists and
the southern Baptists had, a dozen years before, relieved themselves
from liability to rebuke, whether express or implied, from their
northern brethren for complicity with the crimes involved in slavery, by
seceding from fellowship. Into the councils of the Episcopalians and the
Catholics this great question of public morality was never allowed to
enter. The Presbyterians were divided into two bodies, each having its
northern and its southern presbyteries; and the course of events in
these two bodies may be taken as an indication of the drift of opinion
and feeling. The Old-School body, having a strong southern element,
remained silent, notwithstanding the open nullification of its
declaration of 1818 by the presbytery of Harmony, S. C., resolving that
"the existence of slavery is not opposed to the will of God," and the
synod of Virginia declaring that "the General Assembly had no right to
declare that relation sinful which Christ and his apostles teach to be
consistent with the most unquestionable piety." The New-School body,
patient and considerate toward its southern presbyteries, did not fail,
nevertheless, to reassert the principles of righteousness, and in 1850
it declared slave-holding to be _prima facie_ a subject of the
discipline of the church. In 1853 it called upon its southern
presbyteries to report what had been done in the case. One of them
replied defiantly that its ministers and church-members were
slave-holders by choice and on principle. When the General Assembly
condemned this utterance, the entire southern part of the church seceded
and set up a separate jurisdiction.[346:1]

There seems no reason to doubt the entire sincerity with which the
southern church, in all its sects, had consecrated itself with religious
devotion to the maintenance of that horrible and inhuman form of slavery
which had drawn upon itself the condemnation of the civilized world. The
earnest antislavery convictions which had characterized it only
twenty-five years before, violently suppressed from utterance, seem to
have perished by suffocation. The common sentiment of southern
Christianity was expressed in that serious declaration of the Southern
Presbyterian Church, during the war, of its "deep conviction of the
divine appointment of domestic servitude," and of the "peculiar mission
of the southern church to conserve the institution of slavery."[346:2]

At the North, on the other hand, with larger liberty, th