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Christianity and Statesmanship, with Kindred Topics.
HAGUE, D.D. 12mo., pp. 414. Boston: Gould & Lincoln.
Sheldon & Company. Cincinnati: George S. Blanchard.

By WILLIAM
New York:

The Conversion of the Roman Empire. The Boyle Lectures for the year
1864. Delivered at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, by CHARLES MERI-
VALE, B.D. 12mo., pp. 267. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
Reminiscences of Sixty-four Years in the Ministry. By Rev. HENRY
BоEнм, Bishop Asbury's traveling companion. Edited by Joseph B.
WAKELEY. 12mo., pp. 493. New York: Carlton & Porter. 1865.

METHODIST CHURCHES, NORTH AND SOUTH.

THE Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, have proceeded to reorganize their ecclesiastical institutions and restore their regular action. Suggestions of union, whether with the Episcopal Church or the Methodist Episcopal Church, as serving alike to distract and disintegrate, are rejected, and the policy is to concentrate their energies and reinaugurate their operations. The pastor returns to his flock, the periodical recommences its issues, and the annual conferences are to assemble and elect their delegates to their great sanhedrim.

This, we think, is a wise and righteous policy. The people of the South have a right to the pastorate of their own choice. They claim, with apparent truth, that the entire tiers of their Atlantic and their Gulf States, with nearly a perfect unanimity, prefer their ancient ministry and organization. Disastrous it would be, religiously, morally, and Methodistically, if that body were disintegrated, scattered, lost, and sent, to a great degree, to the world and to the devil. The southern bishops and ministry would be unjustifiable if they allowed such a result in their hands. And so, we say, we commend their course, and wish them abundant success, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and temporal, in their great work, as Christian pastors, of repairing the ruin of their flocks.

We have been carefully studying such of our southern Church papers as have come into our hands, in order to rightly appreciate their spirit. We cannot characterize that spirit as "bitter." A tone of subdued sadness there is, well calculated, though not intended, to touch our sympathies. 1. The desolation and destitution leak out in every paragraph. The home has been destroyed by war. The prospect for the winter's subsistence is gloomy. Perhaps, as there is no money, President Johnson may be induced to postpone the exaction FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVII.-40

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of taxes. The periodical, if no money can be obtained, may be paid for in poultry or produce. In one night the entire southern currency shrunk to paper scraps, but the ministry must be supported, etc., etc. 2. The situation, humiliating as it is, is quietly accepted. The oath of allegiance has been taken, and they consider as a deep insult the intimation that it is taken with other than perfect good faith. Nothing is to them more fixed than that slavery is at an end, that the most terrible of evils is war, that the national union is perpetual. They sneer at a cowardly few who boast what they will do when the Yankee troops are withdrawn, averring that the civil authorities in their own section would reduce the braggarts to quiet. 3. The purpose entertained, as they think, by a part of the Northern Church, to invade and destroy the Church, South, they hold to be cruel and despotic. They reject and defy it. They will treat the northern ministry with courtesy generally. The missionary who intrudes into their borders will meet with the coldest possible reception. We understand them as holding any minister who comes to establish a pastorate, or bishop who presides over a conference, in the former slave states as an aggressor. 4. There seems to be generally a significant silence in regard to the negro. In the "Episcopal Methodist" of Richmond alone do we find a single article treating his case. That paper sneers at all the efforts of northern philanthropy in the negro's behalf; claiming that the South alone understands the negro, and to the South alone belongs the right of taking care of his welfare. But what the South is doing, or purposes to do for him, the writer omits to mention. It is here, if we mistake not, that the dark streak in the southron's character becomes visible. We wish he could see himself as

civilized Christendom sees him.

On the third of the above four topics we offer a remark. It is very useless for any set of ecclesiastics, or for any ecclesiastical body, in this country, to assume to draw boundary lines within which they are to have exclusive jurisdiction. They have no power, and no moral right, to impose any obligation or law upon any other body to regard that line. If the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is able to send a missionary into New York to establish a Church of such as prefer his ministry, she has just the same right here, by law, by ethics, and by Christian courtesy, that our Methodist Episcopal Church has, and every New Yorker has a right to attend such ministry if he pleases. Upon such a missionary we would lay no ban, no taboo, no social or ecclesiastical exclusion. If the Church, South, will send us a hundred faithful missionaries, who will gain access to the dregs of our city population, black or white, and convert them to their own communion,

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we will give them a wide berth and a hearty auxiliary welcome. If we are unable, or too shiftless, to reach that population, we should mightily rejoice if they could or would. If they or any body else can make people better, here or elsewhere, right heartily will we accept them. And so, on the other hand, if we can reach the southern freedmen or the "mean whites" of the South, and convert and educate them, making them good, industrious Christian southern citizens, why should not our southern Christian brethren rejoice? Their state and their own Church would be bettered by the process and result. If indeed our missionary goes with a destructive, sectarian purpose, with a scheme to overthrow and not to build up, with a desire to demolish the Church that exists, rather than to construct anew, from the raw material of a sinful world, a Church that does not exist, then, and for such a project, we admit that he deserves not to be received with a welcome and a God-speed. And we do most earnestly and firmly deprecate any such unchristian destructivism, if it exists, in our own Church. If there be in the South any uncovered ground, or any neglected material, we have a perfect right to possess and to win it to Christ, and no man has a right to forbid us. If there be a people in the South who prefer a northern ministry it has a right to its own preference. Our brethren of the South, therefore, will put themselves sadly in the wrong if they attempt to engross a territory, and say that any other Church has not the same right to establish pastorates and to inaugurate synods and conferences there that they themselves possess. The General Conference of 1844 assumed to draw by compact an ecclesiastical dividing line; and with what result? If our northern reading of history be correct, the Church, South, was the first to cross the line, and with physical violence infringe the contract. Like the Congregational and Presbyterian bodies, or the Old and New School Presbyterian, the two Methodist Churches must fraternally concede to each other the right of occupying such territory as they respectively please. Though we think, as affirmed in our last Quarterly, that an immediate union of the two Churches is impossible, still the two General Conferences may, by joint committee of ministers or of ministers and eminent laymen, or by episcopal conferences, make such amicable arrangements, as that the two Churches may co-operate rather than antagonize, and so waste a vast amount of surplus force in their evangelizing labors. And in such way we trust that the collisions will be so adjusted, and the harmony will so strengthen, as to inaugurate in the most practicable form some sort of general reunion.

Upon the fourth of the above topics we make the following note.

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Our present belief is, that such are the temper and relations of the South to the negro, that it is his race which presents a great obligatory mission field in the South, which the North must speedily fill. The future treatment of the negro is indeed the test of our possible future recognition of and fraternization with the Southern Church. Upon this point we are not to be put off, hoodwinked, or excluded; especially under any pretense that "the South alone understands the negro." There is a negro which the South, at least the irreligious South, does very well know. The negro shut out from education in order to be brutified in mind; deprived of the right of judicial oath, in order that the chastity of woman and the safety of man may be exposed to unpunished outrage; excluded from the sacred rights of marriage in order to be reduced to a chance concubinage; bought and sold, as an article of commerce, on the auction block, to the highest bidder; chastised by the driver's whip while performing his task, and chased by the hired bloodhounds when he would escape from it this is the negro which some part at least of the irreligious South has hitherto known but too well. But a negro who is to possess rights which others are bound to respect, to be endowed with the privileges of education and mental development, with a sacred marriage, with enfranchisement, and with manhood, is a negro which our southern brethren are yet fully to learn. Civilized Christendom demands that the South shall learn that lesson; otherwise the nation and the Northern Churches are in duty bound to inculcate it. We cheerfully trust that our Southern Methodist Church will be the first in the South to appreciate and to teach that "young idea how to shoot." And we believe that all the humanity that has ever hitherto mitigated the southern slavery system, has come from Christianity and the Church. Our best information enables us to believe that the best friend of the negro in the South has been the Methodist Church, South. In the darkest hours of southern proslaveryism, Dr. M'Tyeire published for the South a book, issued from the Southern Concern, upon the subject of slavery, in which he manfully denied the right of property in man, affirmed the manhood of the negro, and maintained his claims to Christian mildness of treatment within the limits of his servile condition as a man. This was all the Southern Church could then do under the pressure of the State, and we have a faith she did it well. But now that the pressure of the State is withdrawn, we shall cheerfully believe, until forced to know the contrary, that she will rise to the dignity of this new position. She will, we would hope, exclude the interference of the North, not by fierce looks, and abortive efforts at lynch law, and icy shoulders,

but by so well performing her work as to render northern aid superfluous otherwise her inhumanity flings the negro on the philanthropy and Christianity of the North. The South needs the negro, and needs his highest MANHOOD. Every community, in order to its highest prosperity, needs that all her men be developed to their highest manhood, and her women to their highest womanhood. A degraded class, in some degree, degrades every other class, and degrades the whole. The ignorance, the idleness, the poverty of a pariah caste impoverish the state. And if the South would prosper, she must make the most of all the living humanity she possesses. Education, religion, development, industry, equality of rights, diffused through all her ranks, will, beneath her genial skies, spread a new civilization, a new wealth and prosperity upon her fertile soil, beyond the grandest hopes of any former era. A NEW SOUTH will arise, nobler, richer, prouder, than has ever entered her former vision. If, with her singular elements of wealth, she shall, by her policy of freedom, surpass in prosperity our free North, that free North will fraternally rejoice; for the richer the South, the richer the North. The prosperity of one is that much the prosperity of all. And in that southern prosperity none will rejoice more heartily than the old antislavery man, for the true antislavery man was never a "sectional " man. The true antislavery man has hated, not the South, but slavery; and that slavery was in the South was but an accident of history. He would have hated slavery in the North; he did hate the proslavery spirit in the North, and the infernal black laws of the North, as much as or more than he hated slavery in the South. And when slavery and the oppressive spirit are abolished, North and South are alike to him. New England and the Gulf States, Maine and Mississippi, are alike dear; and their prosperity are equally a joy, under the broad banner of freedom and the union.

Since writing the above we have read with no little regret the Pastoral Address of the Southern Bishops, and with equal regret some of the responses it has called forth from our own Church press. The bishops' indictment of northern Methodism was doubtless drawn up for the double purpose of foreclosing all discussion of immediate reunion, and of compacting their own Church into a separate unity by force of an external antagonism. It is therefore a brave attack for the purpose of self-defense. Some of the points may be subjects of future free discussion in our editorial pages. But as proof that our strictures upon the southern side are made in no unfriendly spirit, we will for the present suggest some defects that, in our humble view, we of the North may wisely correct. We need, it may be,

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