Slavery and the Church.
NON-FELLOWSHIP WITH SLAVEHOLDERS.
We shall now proceed to show what we conceive to be the true position
of a Christian church in relation to slavery. It has been demonstrated
that slavery is a complicated and monstrous iniquity involving a
direct violation of the whole second table of the Decalogue. This being
an established position it will not be difficult to determine the
relation which the church should sustain to this sin, and to those who
commit it.
The scriptural position of a Christian and a Christian society in
relation to sin, may be ascertained from the following quotations: "But
I have written unto you not to keep company--if any man that is called
a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or railer, or
drunkard, or extortioner, with such an one, no, not to eat."
"Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the
Lord; and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you."
"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but
rather reprove them."
"Now we command you brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly."
In these passages the duty of open and decided non-fellowship with
sinners is unequivocally asserted. 1. Do not "keep company" with
covetous persons and extortioners. Do not "eat" with them at the
sacramental table, for this would imply a sanction of their sin. 2.
"Come out from among them." Let there be between you a plain line of
demarcation so that the whole world will know that you are not in favor
with their sin, and are not a party to it. "Have NO FELLOWSHIP." Be not
united in any associations which require it. Go not with them to the
sacramental board. Unite not with them in benevolent efforts for the
conversion of the world, for this would require fellowship. Have _no_
fellowship. 4. "In the name of the Lord Jesus withdraw yourselves"--cut
off all ties which imply fellowship. Do this solemnly--do it in the
name of the blessed Jesus--do it for the glory of God--do it as an act
of discipline--withdraw yourselves from _every_ disorderly walker--from
every "darkness worker,"--let them be unto you "as a heathen man and a
publican."
Now how are these scriptures to be obeyed respecting the great sin of
slavery? We answer: 1. The church should debar slaveholders from its
communion. While they remain impenitent in relation to the monstrous
sin of slavery and refuse to emancipate their slaves, they should be
peremptorily refused admittance into the fellowship of saints. At the
_door_ they ought to be met by an emphatic "No sirs; your hands are red
with blood, your purses are filled with unjust gains, you rob the widow
and the fatherless, you make merchandise of men, repent, reform, do
justly, love mercy, or away ye men-stealers!"
2. If by any means slaveholders have obtained a place in the church,
they should be plainly dealt with, according to the directions given
in such cases by the sacred writers, and in case of a refusal on
their part to "hear the church," they should be immediately thrust
out--accounted as "heathen"--"delivered unto Satan for the destruction
of the flesh."
3. But in case a church refuses to discipline slaveholders, as
it disciplines other offenders against God, and on the contrary
persistently retains them in its communion and officially recognizes
them as members of the household of faith,--as holy persons,--as good
christians, then a christian can do no better than to withdraw from
that church. He cannot remain in it without giving an expressed or
implied sanction to a slaveholding christianity. The whole force of
his piety and influence will go abroad to create the conviction that
slavery is right and quite consistent with holiness.
In support of this view of the true position of a church and
of christians in relation to slavery, the following additional
considerations are submitted:
1. The church is required to be holy. But it cannot approximate to
holiness while welcoming into its pale sinners such as slaveholders
are, and sanctioning such an impurity as is slavery.
2. The Church is required to be the "pillar and ground of the truth."
But a slaveholding church wofully perverts and corrupts the truth in
many important particulars. The truth that God hates oppression and
robbery for instance, is corrupted by it, for it pronounces the very
chief oppressors and robbers the true children of God, and assures
the world that He approbates their conduct. It corrupts the truth in
relation to the true idea of a christian. It denies that justice,
mercy and love, are essential attributes of a christian character, by
passing off upon a deluded world a class of persons as christians who
are pre-eminently unjust, unmerciful, and full of hate to the human
brotherhood.
3. The church should honor the holy scriptures. But a slaveholding
church necessarily dishonors them. The church is presumed to be a
faithful and competent expounder of the doctrines and moral precepts
of the Bible, and hence what it approves, it is supposed, the Bible
sanctions, and as it approves of slavery, it gives currency to the
idea that the Bible is a pro-slavery book,--that Christianity is
favorable to oppression, and an enemy to equality and fraternity.
Thus a slaveholding church dishonors the Word of Truth and is an
infidel-making organization. Non-fellowship with slaveholding is
demanded as a condition of faithfulness to the Bible.
4. The church is expected to convert the world to righteousness. But
it can never do this while shielding the Leviathan of sins. Slavery is
a system of barbarism which must necessarily be destroyed in order to
the evangelization of America and of the world. The tyranny, injustice
and cruelty of masters, and the ignorance, servility and general
degradation of slaves are inconsistent with christianity, and to
sanction these is to sanction and sustain sin, and interpose a barrier
to the progress of truth and righteousness. And in addition to this, a
church must have a character to give it influence with men. A church
without character for disinterestedness, benevolence and truth, will be
despised by men and forsaken of God. A slaveholding church is without
a good moral character, and hence lacks moral power. Men will be slow
to believe that, while fiercely defending a monstrous national sin, it
is in earnest in its opposition to lesser crimes and trivial wrongs.
How powerless is a body of christians whose virtue gives way under the
temptation of a popular and lucrative vice! How justly branded with
cowardice and hypocrisy!
5. Duty to slaveholders demands non-fellowship with slaveholding.
The course pursued by the popular churches involves the souls of
slaveholders in imminent peril. Their consciences are lulled into
quietude or narcoticized by deadly moral nostrums, skillfully prepared
and treacherously administered by time-serving, fleece-seeking
hirelings, who assume the sacred office of shepherds. Many of them are
not aware of their sin and danger, and how can they be aroused while
honored in the church and flattered as good christians, and imitators
in the slaveholding business, of the good old patriarchs? To save these
men the church must be plain with them, and require repentance of _all_
their sins, and _especially_ of the sin of slaveholding, as a condition
of a place in the temple of God.
6. Duty to the slave demands non-fellowship with slaveholding. The
oppressed have a claim upon the church, because Christ died for them,
and they are, while enslaved, in such a situation that they can neither
love him with all their powers, nor do much to establish his church
and publish his name in the earth. Hence it is the duty of christians
and christian societies to break off the fetters which bind not only
their limbs but their minds. THE AMERICAN CHURCH IS ABLE TO EMANCIPATE
EVERY SLAVE IN THE LAND. Who doubts that it is its duty? But in order
to do this glorious work, the principle of strict non-fellowship with
slaveholders must be adopted. Let every church in America declare
slavery to be a sin and exclude slaveholders from its communion, and
the doom of slavery will be sealed. All the laws and compromises and
compacts which the ingenuity of the prince of darkness could invent
would not preserve it. It is the church which is the bulwark of
slavery. Not one day could it stand up in this country without the
strength imparted to it by a powerful but awfully corrupted church.
"Let all the evangelical denominations," says _Albert Barnes_, "but
follow the simple example of the Quakers in this country, and slavery
would soon come to an end. There is not vital energy enough; there
is not power of numbers and influence enough, out of the church, to
sustain it. Let every religious denomination in the land _detach
itself_ from all connection with slavery, without saying a word against
others; let the time come when, in all the mighty denominations of
Christians, it can be announced that the evil has ceased _with
them_ FOREVER, and let the voice from each denomination be lifted up
in kind, but firm and solemn testimony against the system--with no
'mealy' words; with no attempt at apology; with no wish to blink it,
with no effort to throw the sacred shield of religion over so great
an evil--and the work is done. There is no power _out_ of the church
that could sustain slavery an hour if it were not sustained _in_ it."
Hence the reasons for non-fellowship with slaveholding are as vast
as the interests temporal and eternal of millions and millions of
our fellow-creatures, and as vast as the treachery which leaves them
in chains! Depend upon it the curse of God will come down upon the
American church in a storm of fiery vengeance if it arise not and do
justice to the slave!
7. If slaveholders are admitted to church-fellowship _no class of
sinners on earth should be excluded_. The church cannot consistently
expel from its communion the rich man who grinds the face of the poor
laborer that reaps down his fields, and at the same time retain the
slaveholder who lives _entirely_ upon the unpaid labor of the poor.
He who _occasionally_ cheats his neighbor out of a few dollars cannot
consistently be censured by the church while the man who cheats whole
families out of domestic comfort, home, education, and their all,
passes without reproof. The occasional adulterer cannot receive church
discipline in the presence of him who compels his slaves to live
together without the sanction, and without the protection of the law.
He who steals a sheep cannot be cast out from a church in which he
who steals men occupies a high seat. As slaveholding is a violation
directly or indirectly of every commandment of the Decalogue, if it
cannot and must not be disciplined, then church discipline is useless;
and all classes of sinners should be admitted and retained in this
Holy Temple, unless the principle be established that he who commits
a _petty_ offense shall be cast out, but he who has the heart and
courage to commit a high offense, a daring crime, shall remain in full
fellowship. I have wondered how slaveholding church members could try
and expel from a religious society a poor negro who, in addition to
his peck of corn per week, had stolen a little meat, while they were
conscious of robbing that same negro of the products of his daily toil,
and of his own soul and body.
8. To maintain its _independence_ the church must discard fellowship
with slaveholders.--In no case have slaveholders been willing to
occupy an humble position in a religious body long. They assume to
be pre-eminently _the_ members of the church, and the press, pulpit,
and General Assembly or General Conference, _must_, unequivocally,
endorse, or patriarchalize their slaveholding. The history of all
the pro-slavery churches in America is proof of this remark. A few
slaveholders are able to change entirely the action of a powerful
ecclesiastical body--to range it on the side of oppression, to silence
or subborn its witnesses, to shut up its sympathies and take away the
bow of hope from the slave. How many of the hundreds of ministers in
the whole south are free to utter their convictions on slavery to
day? How many religious presses are unfettered? If then the church
would stand upon the solid rock of truth, unawed by the popular will,
uncorrupted with gold, the immutable friend of _man_, proclaiming
and enforcing the _whole_ truth, it must keep out of her communion
legalized and practiced tyrants.
9. Regard for decency, refined sensibility and common humanity, urges
non-fellowship with slaveholders. The members of a slaveholding church
become insensible to the grossest outrages upon the better feelings
of slaves, and they habitually commit acts, without a blush, which,
one should think, would pale the cheek of a demon. For illustration
take a well authenticated fact: "A runaway slave in 1841, assigned the
following as the reason why he refused to commune with a church of
which he was a member. 'The church,' said he, 'had silver furniture
for the administration of the Lord's supper, to procure which they
sold _my brother!_ and I could not bear the feelings it produced to
go forward and receive the sacrament from the vessels which were the
purchase of my brother's blood!'" But the members of that church,
generally, were altogether without feeling upon the subject, and were
as little disturbed in selling a slave to purchase silver ware for the
sacramental table, or to pay a parson, or to support a missionary, as
in selling a mule for the same purposes.
10. If slavery be fellowshiped in the church, then _slaveholding
preachers_ will be coming around and preaching the gospel to us!
A dealer in human flesh will undertake to teach us to be just and
merciful. We will be expected to receive the elements of the holy
sacrament from hands that use the cowskin occasionally on the backs
of slaves! It is notorious that churches which fellowship slavery
have an exceedingly dumb and callous ministry on the subject of
oppression. Frederick Douglass, I think it was, who said that the
hardest master he ever served was a Methodist Protestant preacher.
The following incident will illustrate this thought: "A minister of
the gospel owned a female slave, whose husband was owned by another
man in the same neighborhood. The husband did something supposed to
be an offense sufficient to justify his master in selling him for the
southern market. As he started, his wife obtained leave to visit him.
She took her final leave of him, and started to return to her master's
house. She went a few steps and returned and embraced him again, and
started a second time to go to her master's house; but the feelings of
her heart again overcame her, and she turned about and embraced him
the third time. Again she endeavored to bear up under the heavy trial,
and return; but it was too much for her--she had a woman's heart. She
returned the fourth time, embraced her husband--and turned about,--A
MANIAC!"--(Anti-slavery Record.)
Good God! can any one plead for the admission of such cruelty into the
bosom of the church and into the ministry?
And let it be remembered that this preacher simply did what the legal
relation authorized, and what all slaveholding ministers may do without
ecclesiastical censure.
11. If slavery be fellowshiped in the church, then we shall be
compelled to sit in religious meetings, class-meetings and conference
meetings, and hear a good experience told by one who lives on the
toil of wretched slaves, and who would sell at public sale one of our
own brethren in the Lord, yea, even ourselves, if the _laws_ would
allow it. Take the following specimen of a Methodist _sister_, and ask
yourselves how you would like to attend class with her.
"A poor woman was put in jail about a week since. It is the jail that
cost the people of the United States nearly, or quite, $60,000. Had
this woman committed crime? Not the least in the world. Her mistress
wants to sell her, and pocket the money--that's all. She puts her into
jail simply to know where she is when she finds a customer. This poor
woman, offered for sale, expects to be _confined_ in a few weeks. She
has a husband and mother, but neither of them are allowed to go into
the jail to visit her. The husband tried to talk with her through
the grated window, the other day, but was driven off by some menial
of the establishment. Amanda, the slave-woman, is a member of the
Methodist Church, which takes the name of Bethlehem. I hear she is in
good standing in the Church, and sustains a fair and good character
generally. The mistress--the owner--the trader--who is she? She is
Miss A. B., a venerable spinster, a few years ago from Virginia,
and now residing in this city. She brought with her this woman, her
mother, and two or three children, upon whose wages she has lived for
years past, and now proposes to put Amanda in her pocket. She (Miss
A. B.) is a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, belongs to the
M'Kendree Chapel congregation, and attends _class_ regularly. I am
glad to say some of the brethren are a little _stirred_ about this
transaction."--_Elliott_, _page 73._
"A _little stirred_!" Indeed! One would think they would have stirred
that villainous woman out of the Church in short metre, or stirred out
of it themselves. But no, they were _only_ "_a little_ stirred!"