Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/408

 372 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

was mobbed, his types destroyed, and his press finally broken in pieces and plunged into the Ohio river. Large committees waited on him, majorities being church members, and warned him solemnly not only of loss of property, but peril of life ; and the newspapers of the city at the time show that the mobs were indeed of most frightful character and supported by " best citizens."

In connection with his newspaper, Mr. Birney published some tracts and pamphlets against the slave system, one of the first, entitled "The American Church the Buhvark of American Slavery." That little work, of scarcely forty pages, was a stunning argument from beginning to end, of the truth and just- ness of its title.

Mr. Foster's own encounters with the church and ministry, the frequency with which his meetings had been and were still broken up by brutal mobs, not unfrequently justified by the pulpit and religious press, had made him a disci- ple to the Birney doctrine, long before this startling tract had come before the public.

Mr. Birney's experiences with the same power suggested his title ; but a few years later, another pamphlet appeared from Foster's own pen, entitled, " The Brotherhood of Thieves ; or a True Picture of the American Church and Clergy." Mr. Birney had already proved the pertinence and propriety of such a title in his little work ; but in a ringing book, of more than seventy pages, Foster showed, by super-abundant testimony, and every single witness fur- nished by the church itself, that if slavery were man stealing, as the Presbyte- rian church had declared it forty years before, and " the highest kind of theft," then surely the v>'hole Southern church was indeed a vast " Brotherhood of Thieves.'" with their Northern baptized brethren, who fellovvshiped them as Christians, their not less guilty accomplices !

Mr. Foster therefore made the popular, prevailing religions his main point of attack. As why should he not? What could he have wisely done otherwise? The church and pulpit of the North were generally opened to Southern slave- breeders, slave-traders, slave-hunters, and slave-holders, if members of the same, and often even of widely different denominations, both for preaching, baptizing and sacramental supper occasions and purposes. There were a few tri- fling exceptions ; but not enough to in the least affect the general charge ; and Northern academies, colleges, universities, and tiieological seminaries, toned down their whole curriculum of moral and religious training and teaching to suit the depraved demand and taste of the whole brotherhood of Southern slave-hold- ers. And with most rare exceptions, the Northern press attuned itself to the same key.

The religious public soon learned to dread Mr. Foster's presence or ap- proach. Convicted of the most malignant proslaveryism, and by its own public records and reports of proceedings of ecclesiastical bodies and associations, from general assembhes, general conferences, and American bible, mission- ary and tract societies, to state and county conferences and consociations, they had good reason to fear such a judgment-day before the time.

So there was a conspiracy among all classes of the people to conquer the abolitionists, " ^j' letting them severely alone." And in some states the clergy went so far as to issue pastoral letters to the churches, declaring that anti-slavery lecturers had no right to invade a people who had chosen a pas- tor and regularly inducted him into office ; nor had such a people any right to permit it. A Massachusetts clerical mandate, duly published in the religious papers, signed by two congregational ministers, contained this paragraph :

•' When a people luive clioseu a i)a.stor, and lie lias been regular]\^ hiductecl into ofnce, the}^ have so I'ar surrendered up to him the right to diseliarge tlic appropri- ate duties of his ofUce in the parish over which he is settled, that they themselves

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