THE TRACT SOCIETY AND SLAVERY, Illustrated from Paul, Jonah, and John

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 25, 1858

THE TRACT SOCIETY AND SLAVERY, Illustrated from Paul, Jonah, and John.

PAUL the apostle might have proclaimed Christ and him crucified through all Judea without molestation, if he would have consented to keep silent in regard to one sin. If he would only have said nothing against circumcision, if he would have spared that legal rite, if he would have refrained from denouncing it as usurping the place of faith in Christ, and making salvation impossible, if he only would just have said nothing about it, if he only would have yielded to the cry, Give us the gospel, and let circumcision alone; then would they all have let him alone.

And the Tract argument, the argument of expediency, was most assuredly pressed upon him, as it is upon us. Do you not see, O Paul, that by your fanatical obstinacy, and your one-idea'd narrowness in regard to this point, because you are mad on that, and must be ever thrusting the gospel against that, you are preventing a vast deal of good, cutting yourself off, and along with you, from the circulation of religious truth in whole communities, where it might go acceptably and freely, but where they will refuse it utterly, if you attempt to speak in regard to this evil? Let the iniquity of trusting in circumcision quite alone, and preach Christ and him crucified, and in that way you will conquer the sin.

But no! In that way you will only bind and crucify the gospel, and make that a minister of sin, in that way you fetter your own freedom, and give it to men to say, instead of God, what part of his word shall be spoken, and what shall not. To whom we gave place by subjection, says Paul, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might remain with you. Not the gospel in name merely, and sin acquiesced in under it, but the truth of the gospel, was what Paul would proclaim, the truth against all sin. Christ crucified meant, in Paul's view, the doctrine of sin crucified for Christ's sake, not speculative doctrine as the shield of sin. It is a false gospel which is the cloak and minister of sin.

And it is bribery of the worst sort, accepted, by which you consent to consecrate the gospel, in order to gain a sale for your dilutions of it; reducing its qualifications for service to just those required for the ministry of eunuchs in an oriental harem. You take away the life of the gospel, if you take away its testimony against sin; if sin can thrive along with it, and even be protected and sanctioned by its silence, then it is worse than no gospel at all. Its life becomes death, for by it men imagine they are going to heaven, when by sin under it they are only insuring for themselves a deeper hell.

THE BISHOP TO THE ZULUS.

The examples of such compromise with popular sin, in order to make truth popular, are pernicious in the extreme, when men see them in such high places, and with such expressions of pious zeal and unction. A similar proceeding has been adopted by the Bishop of Zulus in South Africa, who agreed that if they would only let him preach, he would not preach against their polygamy. The domestic institution should be sacred from the rebukes of the gospel, if they would let him and his ministers preach and make converts; their polygamy should not stand in the way of their piety, if they themselves would not stand in the way of his preaching. They might keep their wives and the gospel together, if only they would not turn him and the gospel out of the country.

What better is such preaching of the gospel, than the professed conversion of the heathen in the palmy days of Romanism, by sprinkling the idolatrous temples and the idols with holy water, and baptizing them with the names of saints, so that all their worship and their life might go on as ever, and they be proclaimed as christians? The gospel with a tariff of permitted and popular abominations was the appropriate result of such a policy; the truth more and more disappearing, and the indulgence and sanction of sin more and more becoming the essence of the system.

On the same theory of compromise, John the Baptist would have been excused for not speaking to Herod against his particular cherished sin; nay, on the theory of expediency, he would have been forbidden to do so; silence would have been the cardinal virtue, that the gospel might continue to speak out. Herod was much pleased with John's ministry; he did many things, and heard him gladly; he would doubtless have continued to hear him gladly, if he would only have kept silent on that one sin. He would have let him range up and down his Court and Kingdom undisturbed, preaching and distributing tracts, preaching the whole gospel, all but its warnings against that one sin. John and his disciples might have instituted a system of colportage over all Judea, and dispensed religious truth by the tun, out of their lips and knapsacks. They might even have preached against dancing, and Herod would have been interested with the tract and the argument; so that even the mazy evolutions of Herodias' daughter's twinkling feet might have been forbidden of John, and yet John himself not have been forbidden to preach.

JOHN THE BAPTIST A FANATIC.

And was not that sufficient freedom of the Pulpit? What greater liberty ought he to have desired than that? Herod's views of the freedom of the pulpit, and John's, were evidently the same. And having such doors of usefulness open before him, and so many subjects popular to preach upon, was not John a fanatical fool, a madman, to shut all those doors in his own face, and shut out all this truth, all those tracts, all that gospel, just for the sake of assailing Herod's adultery, just on the imagination that the gospel required him to denounce that sin? Why not let that sin alone, and continue to preach Christ crucified? It was manifestly not expedient to meddle with that sin, and the true view of expediency would have kept John silent.

But John must needs undertake to abolish instead of quietly and silently reforming. He might have satisfied himself with preaching about the moral duties that grow out of the existence of adultery, without attempting to turn the gospel into an abolition agency for abolishing the sin. But he must needs undertake to abolishize the gospel, and drive with radical madness and impudence at that particular sin. The very sin of all others, which Herod and his court held in highest regard, held dearest, and which, therefore, John ought to have carefully avoided, since, having become a court sin, it was political, and as such, forbidden to be touched; that very sin John must needs openly attack, and thereby lost his head, so that his whole preaching was put a stop to.

Manifestly, according to the theory of the Tract Society, John ought to have concealed the gospel in regard to that sin, in order that he might continue to preach the gospel unmolested. John was guilty of preventing a vast deal of good by his rash and impudent radicalism.

HOW JONAH MIGHT HAVE DONE.

There was Jonah also; very strange that he had not the sagacity of our Tract Committees; strange that he should take such a roundabout and troublesome way of evading duty, when he might have gone with the gospel, and concealed the truth. Must he needs go into the ship's sides, and into the whale's belly, and have his lights clean extinguished there, when he might have gone straight to Nineveh, and preached a compromise with sin? He might have traveled to Nineveh, consulted with the inhabitants, and had his choice of their sins, at their suggestion, with their permission, to hang upon, and he might have taken the one the least dangerous to meddle with. He might have preached against dancing, instead of saying a word against idolatry; and so he could have ranged up and down the streets of Nineveh, and preached in the market-places, unforbidden, undisturbed.

But the difficulty with Jonah was just this, that they did not then know how to do things by Committees, nor by resolutions passed in General Assemblies, to which men might refer for the testimony of God's word against prevailing and popular sins, when it would be difficult to preach against them. The prophet Jonah had to take his

commission from God, and to consult God and not man as to the interpretation and application of his word. Jonah had no Committee of fifteen to counsel him, and assume his responsibilities; no publishing committee, with Sambo and Toney as an example of the kind of preaching which might be expedient.

And the Prophet seems to have been himself very deficient in the inventive and apologetic faculty, while there was as yet no contrivance discovered by conservative philosophers, to avoid assailing sin as an iniquity, by proclaiming the moral duties that grow out of sin as an institution. Jonah was completely tied up by his instructions from God; preach the preaching that I bid thee; and he had not the authority of a Tract Society to put their interpretation on his commission, selecting such parts of the preaching as would be popular, and making it unconstitutional to assault organic sins.

Now how stands the case in regard to the example and teachings of the Tract Society on the sin of slavery? You agree to keep back and conceal the testimony of the word of God against a prevalent sin, because the sinners in that sin affirm that if you preach against it, you shall not preach at all, you shall not publish any of your tracts in that part of the country. On this ground you affirm that expediency, or a regard to the greatest good, requires you to make this compromise. But if you set up expediency as the rule, then you have to compare opposing probabilities; and the probability is that a greater injury will be produced by the sanction of iniquity, the corruption of conscience and of morals, and the diminution of the sacredness and power of God's word through such a course of purchased silence and omission, and consequent shielding of sin, than could be balanced by all the good of all the Tract publications. The Tract Society becomes a merchant, and the balances of deceit are in its hands. It is a frightful example of compromise with sin, all over the country, and of exalting expediency to a supremacy over conscience and God's word. It is sanctioning evil that good may come; and we cannot see why this is not the same thing as doing evil that good may come.

If you shield and sanctify one sin, you neutralize your own resistance against every other. Your testimony in every direction becomes suspicious. The whole Decalogue is violated, if you break one of the commandments, and justify others in doing the same thing. He that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, the Lord Jesus declared shall be least in the kingdom of heaven. If you were charged with the care of a dyke against the sea, in vain would you justify the neglect and wickedness of keeping one breach open, by stationing guards over every other floodgate, every embankment, and affirming that if you did not let in the water at that breach, you would not be suffered to protect any other portion against it. Just so, all your tracts are bootless, while you give admission to one reigning sin. The conscience is corrupted, is defiled, to such a degree, by that one sin maintained, that all the virtues practiced partake of that corruption.—Independent.