l their strength at the South,
levied a spiritual warfare against this great wrong. It was at the South
that the Baptists, in 1789, "_Resolved_, That slavery is a violent
deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican
government, and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of
every legal measure to extirpate this horrid evil from the land."[222:1]
At the North, Jonathan Edwards the Younger is conspicuous in the
unbroken succession of antislavery churchmen. His sermon on the
"Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave-trade," preached in 1791 before the
Connecticut Abolition Society, of which President Ezra Stiles was the
head, long continued to be reprinted and circulated, both at the North
and at the South, as the most effective argument not only against the
slave-trade, but against the whole system of slavery.

* * * * *

It will not be intruding needlessly upon the difficult field of dogmatic
history if we note here the widely important diversities of Christian
teaching that belong to this which we may call the sub-Revolutionary
period.

It is in contradiction to our modern association of ideas to read that
the prevailing type of doctrine among the early Baptists of New England
was Arminian.[222:2] The pronounced individualism of the Baptist
churches, and the emphasis which they place upon human responsibility,
might naturally have created a tendency in this direction; but a cause
not less obvious was their antagonism to the established
Congregationalism, with its sharply defined Calvinistic statements. The
public challenging of these statements made a favorite issue on which to
appeal to the people from their constituted teachers. But when the South
and Southwest opened itself as the field of a wonderfully rapid
expansion before the feet of the Baptist evangelists, the antagonism was
quite of another sort. Their collaborators and sharp competitors in the
great and noble work of planting the gospel and the church in old and
neglected fields at the South, and carrying them westward to the
continually advancing frontier of population, were to be found in the
multiplying army of the Methodist itinerants and local exhorters, whose
theology, enjoined upon them by their commission, was the Arminianism of
John Wesley. No explanation is apparent for the revulsion of the great
body of American Baptists into a Calvinism exaggerated to the point of
caricature, ex