Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/68

56 tianity, as taught in New England, has modifications unknown in Old England. The great national and peculiar ideas of America—of which I shall soon speak—are among the truths of Christianity. We began our national career by declaring all men born with equal rights. In such a people we might look for a better and more universal development of Christianity, than in a nation which knows no unalienable rights, or equality of all men, but robs the many of their rights, to squander privileges on the few.

In some lands monarchy, aristocracy, prelacy, appear in the public teaching as parts of Christianity. In America it is not so. But it is taught that slavery is an ordinance of God,—justified by Christianity. Thus as the public religion is elsewhere made to subserve the private purposes of kings, nobles, priests—so here is it made to prove the justice of holding men in bondage. There are no claims like those wrought in the name of God, and welded upon their victim by the teachers of religion.

Most of the churches in the United States exercise the power of excluding a man from their communion for such offences as they see fit; for any unpopular breach of the moral law;—for murder, robbery, theft, public drunkenness, seduction, licentiousness, for heresy. Even dancing is an offence for which the churches sometimes deal with their children. But, with the exception of the Quakers and the United Brethren, no religious bodies in the United States now regard slave-holding or slave-dealing as an ecclesiastical offence. Church-members and clergymen are owners of slaves. Even churches themselves in some instances have, in their corporate capacity, been owners of men. In Turkey, when a man becomes a Mahometan, he ceases to be a slave. But in America a clergymen may own a member of his own church, beat him, sell him, and grow rich on "the increase of his female slaves." Few productions of the Southern clergy find their way to the North. Conspicuous among those few are sermons in defence of slavery; attempts to show that if Christ were now on earth he might consistently hold property in men !

The teachings of the Southern pulpit become more and more favourable to slavery. Oppressed, America promulgated the theory of freedom;—free, she established the practice of oppression. In 1780 the Methodist Episcopal