uestionably Christian
brother for doing an undeniable duty. (5) To lay down, broadly and
explicitly, the principles of Christian morality governing the subject,
leaving the application of them in individual cases to the individual
church or church-member. This was the course exemplified with admirable
wisdom and fidelity in the Presbyterian "deliverance" of 1818. (6) To
meet the postulate, laid down with so much assurance, as if an axiom,
that "slave-holding is always and everywhere a sin, to be immediately
repented of and forsaken," with a flat and square contradiction, as
being irreconcilable with facts and with the judgment of the Christian
Scriptures; and thus to condemn and oppose to the utmost the system of
slavery, without imputing the guilt of it to persons involved in it by
no fault of their own. This course commended itself to many lucid and
logical minds and honest consciences, including some of the most
consistent and effective opponents of slavery. (7) Still another course
must be mentioned, which, absurd as it seems, was actually pursued by a
few headlong reformers, who showed in various ways a singular alacrity
at playing into the hands of their adversaries. It consisted in
enunciating in the most violent and untenable form and the most
offensive language the proposition that all slave-holding is sin and
every slave-holder a criminal, and making the whole attack on slavery to
turn on this weak pivot and fail if this failed. The argument of this
sort of abolitionist was: If there can be found anywhere a good man
holding a bond-servant unselfishly, kindly, and for good reason
justifiably, then the system of American slavery is right.[277:1] It is
not strange that men in the southern churches, being offered such an
argument ready made to their hand, should promptly accept both the
premiss and the conclusion, and that so at last there should begin to be
a pro-slavery party in the American church.

The disastrous epoch of the beginning of what has been called "the
southern apostasy" from the universal moral sentiment of Christendom on
the subject of slavery may be dated at about the year 1833. A year
earlier began to be heard those vindications on political grounds of
what had just been declared in the legislature of Virginia to be by
common consent the most pernicious of political evils--vindications
which continued for thirty years to invite the wonder of the civilized
world. When (about 1833) a Presbyterian