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!”