against the bill, "in the name of Almighty God and in his
presence," as "a great moral wrong; as a breach of faith eminently
injurious to the moral principles of the community and subversive of all
confidence in national engagements; as a measure full of danger to the
peace and even the existence of our beloved Union, and exposing us to
the just judgments of the Almighty." In like manner the memorial of one
hundred and fifty-one clergymen of various denominations in New York
City and vicinity protested in like terms, "in the name of religion and
humanity," against the guilt of the extension of slavery. Perhaps there
has been no occasion on which the consenting voice of the entire church
has been so solemnly uttered on a question of public morality, and this
in the very region in which church and clergy had been most stormily
denounced by the little handful of abolitionists who gloried in the
name of infidel[285:1] as recreant to justice and humanity.

The protest of the church was of no avail to defeat the machination of
demagogues. The iniquitous measure was carried through. But this was not
the end; it was only the beginning of the end. Yet ten years, and
American slavery, through the mad folly of its advocates and the
steadfast fidelity of the great body of the earnestly religious people
of the land, was swept away by the tide of war.

* * * * *

The long struggle of the American church against drunkenness as a social
and public evil begins at an early date. One of the thirteen colonies,
Georgia, had the prohibition of slavery and of the importation of
spirituous liquors incorporated by Oglethorpe in its early and
short-lived constitution. It would be interesting to discover, if we
could, to what extent the rigor of John Wesley's discipline against both
these mischiefs was due to his association with Oglethorpe in the
founding of that latest of the colonies. Both the imperious nature of
Wesley and the peculiar character of his fraternity as being originally
not a church, but a voluntary society within the church, predisposed to
a policy of arbitrary exclusiveness by hard and fast lines drawn
according to formula, which might not have been ventured on by one who
was consciously drawing up the conditions of communion in the church. In
the Puritan colonies the public morals in respect to temperance were
from the beginning guarded by salutary license laws devised to suppress
all dram-sho