It is a cheap way to gain applause in these days, to denounce the
Prussian system; my only purpose is to show that Bible-worship,
precisely as saint-worship or totem-worship, delivers the
worshipper up to the Slavers. This truth has held in America,
precisely as in Prussia. During the middle of the last century
there was fought out a mighty issue in our free republic; and
what was the part played in this struggle by the Bible-cults?
Hear the testimony of William Lloyd Garrison: "American
Christianity is the main pillar of American slavery." Hear Parker
Pillsbury: "We had almost to abolish the Church before we could
reach the dreadful institution at all."
In the year 1818 the Presbyterian General Assembly, which
represented the churches of the South as well as of the North,
passed by a unanimous vote a resolution to the effect that
"Slavery is utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which
requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But in a
generation the views of the entire South, including the
Presbyterian Church, had changed entirely. What was the reason?
Had the "law of God" been altered? Had some new "revelation" been
handed down? Nothing of the kind; it was merely that a Yankee by
the name of Eli Whitney had perfected a machine to take the seeds
out of short staple cotton. The cotton crop of the South
increased from four thousand bales in 1791 to four hundred and
fifty thousand in 1820 and five million, four hundred thousand in
1860.
There was a new monarch, King Cotton, and his empire depended
upon slaves. According to the custom of monarchs since the dawn
of history, he hired the ministers of God to teach that what he
wanted was right and holy. From one end of the South to the other
the pulpits rang with the text: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant to
servants shall he be to his brethren." The learned Bishop
Hopkins, in his "Bible View of Slavery", gave the standard
interpretation of this text:
The Almighty, forseeing the total degredation of the Negro race,
ordained them to servitude or slavery under the descendants of
Shem and Japheth, doubtless because he judged it to be their
fittest condition.
I might fill the balance of this volume with citations from
defenses of the "peculiar institution" in the name of Jesus
Christ--and not only from the South, but from the North. For it
must be understood that leading families of Massachusetts and New
York owed their power to Slavery; their fathers had brought
molasses from New Orleans and made it into rum, and taken it to
the coast of Africa to be exchanged for slaves for the Southern
planters. And after this trade was outlawed, the slave-grown
cotton had still to be shipped to the North and spun; so the
traders of the North must have divine sanction for the Fugitive
Slave law. Here is the Bishop of Vermont declaring: "The slavery
of the negro race appears to me to be fully authorized both in
the Old and New Testaments." Here in the "True Presbyterian", of
New York, giving the decision of a clerical man of the world:
"There is no debasement in it. It might have existed in Paradise,
and it may continue through the Millenium."
And when the slave-holding oligarchy of the South rose in arms
against those who presumed to interfere with this divine
institution, the men of God of the South called down blessings
upon their armies in words which, with the proper change of
names, might have been spoken in Berlin in August, 1914. Thus Dr.
Thornwell, one of the leading Presbyterian divines of the South:
"The triumph of Lincoln's principles is the death-knell of
slavery...... Let us crush the serpent in the egg." And the
Reverend Dr. Smythe of Charleston: "The war is a war against
slavery, and is therefore treasonable rebellion against the Word,
Providence and Government of God." I read in the papers, as I am
writing, how the clergy of Germany are thundering against
President Wilson's declaration that that country must become
democratic. Here is a manifesto of the German Evangelical League,
made public on the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation:
We especially warn against the heresy, promulgated from America,
that Christianity enjoins democratic institutions, and that they
are an essential condition of the kingdom of God on earth.
In exactly the same way the religious bodies of the entire South
united in an address to Christians throughout the world, early in
the year 1863:
The recent proclamation of the President of the United States,
seeking the emancipation of the slaves of the South, is in our
judgment occasion of solemn protest on the part of the people of
God.