Doubtless, to have gone their way, to have done their duty, and not to have troubled themselves about the consequences, was the great rule of action.  I grant it; yet, notwithstanding, I refuse to stigmatize, as many have done, those men who have committed the fault of hesitating; I feel that to rank them among the champions of slavery is to pervert facts, and to fall into a blamable exaggeration.  Again, to-day, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, cannot citizens be cited in the North who are devoted to the cause of the negroes, but who refuse to participate in abolitionist demonstrations, because they fear (and the sentiments does them honor) to encourage the impending insurrections?

This said, I wish to prove by some too well-known facts, what has been this forbearance, or even this pretended hesitation of orthodox Christianity.  On regarding the churches, I see two, and the most considerable, which have openly declared themselves:  the Congregationalists and the Methodists.  About six months since, the General Conference of Methodists resolutely plunged into the current without suffering itself to be trammelled by the protests which came to it from the South.  I read in a report presented to one of the great divisions of this church:  “We believe that to sell or to hold in bondage human beings under the name of chattels, is in contradiction to the divine laws and to humanity; and that it conflicts with the golden rule and with the rule of our discipline.”  Last year, a numerous assemblage of delegates of the Congregational churches adopted the following resolution:  “Slaveholding is immoral, and slaveholders should not be admitted as members of Christian churches.  We ought to protest against it without ceasing, in the name of the Gospel, until it shall have entirely disappeared.”  And this resolution has not remained a dead letter:  a Congregational church of Ohio has expelled from its bosom one of its deacons, who had contributed in the capacity of magistrate to the extradition of a fugitive slave.

Other churches, without taking so decided a position, have at least manifested by their internal convulsions the profound interest excited among them by the question of slavery.  In this manner a secession has just rent the Presbyterian church in twain, because the declared adversaries of slavery were unwilling to remain responsible for a forbearance which appeared to them criminal.  These things are signs of life, and these signs are beginning to show themselves even in the midst of ecclesiastical bodies which have acted, until now, in the most unchristian manner.  A warm discussion has been thus called forth, and this signifies a great deal, among the members of the Episcopal church in New York.  The majority stifled the debate; will it be able to do this always?