ns.

* * * * *

Parallel with the course of the gospel, we trace in every period the
course of those antichristian influences with which the gospel is in
conflict. The system of slavery must continue, through many sorrowful
years, to be in view from the line of our studies. We shall know it by
the unceasing protest made against it in the name of the Lord. The
arguments of John Woolman and Anthony Benezet were sustained by the
yearly meetings of the Friends. At Newport, the chief center of the
African slave-trade, the two Congregational pastors, Samuel Hopkins,
the theologian, and the erudite Ezra Stiles, afterward president of Yale
College, mutually opposed in theology and contrasted at every point of
natural character, were at one in boldly opposing the business by which
their parishioners had been enriched.[204:1] The deepening of the
conflict for political liberty pointed the application of the golden
rule in the case of the slaves. The antislavery literature of the period
includes a printed sermon that had been preached by the distinguished
Dr. Levi Hart "to the corporation of freemen" of his native town of
Farmington, Conn., at their autumnal town-meeting in 1774; and the poem
on "Slavery," published in 1775 by that fine character, Aaron
Cleveland,[204:2] of Norwich, hatter, poet, legislator, and minister of
the gospel. Among the Presbyterians of New Jersey, the father of Dr.
Ashbel Green took the extreme ground which was taken by Dr. Hopkins's
church in 1784, that no person holding a slave should be permitted to
remain in the communion of the church.[204:3] In 1774 the first society
in the world for the abolition of slavery was organized among the
Friends in Pennsylvania, to be followed by others, making a continuous
series of abolition societies from New England to Maryland and Virginia.
But the great antislavery society of the period in question was the
Methodist Society. Laboring through the War of Independence mainly in
the Southern States, it publicly declared, in the conference of 1780,
"that slavery is contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature, and
hurtful to society; contrary to the dictates of conscience and pure
religion, and doing that which we would not that others should do to us
and ours." The discipline of the body of itinerants was conducted
rigorously in accordance with this declaration.

It must not be supposed that the instances here cited represent
exception