Report of the Twentieth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar

by A. W. Weston

Of one thing we can most sincerely assure our British friends: they incur no shadow of responsibility for any belief or unbelief that may prevail in this country. The sole results of the National Bazaar, with exceptions too trifling to be enumerated, go to the support of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the maintenance of the Anti-Slavery Office in the city of New York. The Editors of the Anti-Slavery Standard are Messrs. Sydney H. Gay and Oliver Johnson; Mr. Edmund Quincy, Corresponding Editor. Both as an Anti-Slavery and a literary paper, it sustains a deservedly high character, and cannot, we believe, be justly censured for any important departure from the great principles of mutual respect and toleration on which the members of the Society have bound themselves, in their associated capacity, to proceed. We challenge investigation on this point, and we beg all parties feeling themselves aggrieved, to state in the columns of the paper the very words and phrases at which they take umbrage, and not to dwell in generals.

Let us hurriedly present one other consideration. The religious tenets professed by an overwhelming majority of the churches of the United States, almost without an exception by the churches in the slaveholding States, (leaving the Catholics entirely out of the question,) are those denominated evangelical. Hence the increased temptation to support Slavery under which members of those sects labor. The liberal sects (to use popular phraseology) are small, and comparatively insignificant bodies. There are not more than half a dozen Unitarian congregations, to our knowledge, south of Mason and Dixon’s line. When we take into account the difference of belief in respect to church fellowship that exists between Orthodox and liberal churches, it is very easy to see why the latter should find it much easier than the former to coöperate with the Anti-Slavery Society. The theory of the one sect is, that the church is a society of good men, (of the regenerate,)—​of the other, that it is a society of men seeking to become such. With the one party, the sacrament is a seal of their acceptance; with the other, only a means of grace. One is bound to defend the personal Christianity of its communicants, the other not at all. Hence the difficulty that an Orthodox man finds in acting with us, unless he be prepared to take the great step of coming out, and being separate from churches which we denounce as apostate. The Unitarians and Universalists, holding very different views in regard to church fellowship, have very little temptation, religiously, to be untrue to the slave. It is from fashion, and commerce, and worldly considerations, that their temptations arise.

We have said this, to show that it is not from any sympathy existing between the Anti-Slavery Society and any one sect more than another, that so many of its prominent members and agents are either members of the liberal sects, or belong to none at all.

To remedy this evil in the eyes of the evangelical Anti-Slavery churches of Great Britain, we would respectfully urge it upon them to care not for the heresies of a portion of the Abolitionists of this country, but to concern themselves energetically, and at once, with that Practical Infidelity which is sapping the foundation of every Orthodox sect in this country. Christianity and slaveholding cannot exist together. Anti-Slavery as is the public sentiment of Great Britain, it must rise infinitely higher, before it can tell upon the churches of this country. An apostate Abolitionist from the pulpits of Boston, fresh from the defence of the Fugitive Slave Law, is welcome to the Anti-Slavery pulpits par excellence of Great Britain. Such Anti-Slavery as this can never accomplish the work.

The exclusion of Dr. Prime from the platform of the British Bible Society was a triumph of Anti-Slavery principle; but the rarity of such an event was shown by the strong feeling with which it was received by the religious public of this country, who really seemed to think it a cause for war between the two nations. We again repeat, it is for the churches of Great Britain to take strong and effective action on this subject, and that speedily. It is necessary to their own vitality, which must speedily perish before the blighting influence of pro-slavery fellowship. “What communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with Belial?”

We will add a few words more on the general question, and close a paper already too long.

The intellect of the civilized world is convinced as to the enormity of the system we are attacking. A new and unique mode of defence is beginning to obtain in some quarters. The sins and sufferings of Slavery are conceded, but Abolitionists are urged to patience—​by what consideration, think you? Because God is patient with the sins and sufferings He witnesses! “He is patient, because he is eternal,” says St. Augustine.

We must confess that, to speak of the Maker and Governor of all things, the self-existent and Omniscient, “whose kingdom is where time and space are not,” whose methods and sovereignty are in so many instances inscrutable, as waiting patiently for the evolution of His own all-perfect purposes, and thence inferring that it is the duty of His creatures to look with patience on scenes of wrong and outrage which they could not contemplate patiently as borne for one day by themselves, is a species of cant, the impiety of which is equalled only by its inhumanity.

With the heart of the nation, colder and harder than marble, and a mere handful of men awake to the Slave’s terrible wrongs, and striving to create some sympathy for them, this miserable talk of patience, and of judicial calmness in summing up the arguments on all sides of the question, and of scientific surveys of the whole field of conflict, appears to us extremely out of place.

“It is good to be always zealously affected in a good thing,” is a maxim eminently safe to follow. The best stand-point from which to consider this question is that which the Slave occupies. We can but imperfectly approach to that, but perplexities become easy of solution in proportion as we do so. If we will but remember how much education, and temperament, and the providential arrangements of life, have had to do with the formation of our own most cherished opinions, we shall be better able to exercise the virtue of a perfect toleration. We mean by this, the allowance of the same rights to others, in matters of religion, that we claim for ourselves. This sentiment is easily assented to, but it covers a great deal of ground. It implies that an individual has a perfect right, not only to believe, but to teach and promulgate as earnestly as he pleases, whatever he thinks true. It does not bind us to read or to hear, to give him one sixpence of our money nor one hour of our time, or to do otherwise than regret that he holds opinions we consider untrue. Further than this, an enlightened toleration forbids us to go. Earnest rebuke and moral indignation belong to wrong-doing, and not to erroneous opinion. It is a confusion of mind on these points that has led to all the persecution and religious hatred that the world has ever witnessed. A life devoted to the service of God and man, is the best testimony we can bring to the truth of our own creed, and the best rebuke to the errors of that of another.