THE CHURCH TAKES THE LEAD IN SLAVERY.
In a "Tract for the Times," by Henry T. Cheever, we find the following facts which it would be well to remember. "In the year 1833, the Presbytery of Chillicothe, Ohio, adopted a strong paper, reprobating the system of slavery, and setting forth its intrinsic, inherent, and inexcusable wrongs. A copy was sent to the Stated Clerk of the Synod of Mississippi, embracing at that time the States of Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Alabama. At the meeting of the Synod in the Fall of 1834, at Port Gibson, in the church of which Rev. Zebulon Butler, D.D., was then and still is the pastor, Rev. James Smiley preached the opening sermon, in which he argued the righteousness of slavery from the Bible. . . . This was the beginning of Bible slavery in this country. The year after, Mr. Smiley amplified his sermon into a book, now famous as 'Smiley on Slavery.' . . . To Dr. Smiley belongs the honor, or dishonor, of first endorsing and defending Slavery from the Bible. Rev. Dr. Fuller, an eminent Baptist clergyman, then of Charleston, South Carolina, next followed; then Dr. William Winans, of the Methodist Church; then, and not till then, politicians chimed in, and made the welkin ring with the 'God-ward side' of slavery." Although this defense of Slavery was at first strongly condemned by the churches generally, yet it reveals to us the fact that the attempted justification of Slavery by the Bible, originated in the church; and this the church South have now generally adopted. We find in this enough to justify the remark of Albert Barnes, that "there is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it."