more surrenders.  The Missouri Compromise, the Annexation of Texas, and the Fugitive Slave Law, each extorted under threats of the “dissolution of the Union,” are examples.  But no compromise ever wrenched an inch of territory from the clutch of slavery and gave it to freedom.  Freedom held the whole Northwest, by the un-compromising requirement:  “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” there!

3.  Another strong plea for compromise is the hopelessness of gaining anything better.  This was the consideration urged so vehemently against the early Abolitionists.  It was said:  “Slavery is wrong—­that we all admit—­but it is a fixed fact, invulnerable, backed up by wealth, talent, pride and political influence, and all opposition is vain.  You Abolitionists are mere sentimentalists, visionaries, doctrinaires.”  This had great influence with the indifferent, the timid, and especially with those who vaunt themselves as “practical men,” who boast that they care nothing for abstractions, but take business views of things.  This plea and these men were largely influential in carrying forward some of the most iniquitous compromises preceding the war.

ECCLESIASTICAL COMPROMISES ABOUT SLAVERY.

This glance at the compromises in the political history of the nation prepares us to look at those in the Church.  Here, too, compromises on the subject of slavery were made as in the State, and generally from the same motives and always with the same disappointing results.

The Churches before and during the revolutionary period were emphatic in their utterances against slavery.  Their accredited leaders and official convocations used such terms as these:  Methodist, “The sum of all villanies;” Presbyterian, “Man stealers:  stealers of men are those who bring off slaves or freemen and keep, sell or buy them;” Baptist, “Slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature;” Congregational, “Slavery is in every instance wrong, unrighteous, oppressive, a great and crying sin, there being nothing equal to it on the face of the earth.”

But there were slaveholders in the churches, and as population increased they became more numerous and naturally chafed under such denunciations.  But their impatience reached its climax under the modern anti-slavery doctrine that immediate emancipation is the only remedy for the sin of slavery.  The South was alarmed and soon became imperious and exacting; the North was timid and yielding.  Then began the special era of ecclesiastical compromises.  Let me specify: 

1.  The utterances as to the guilt of slavery were modified, reaching at length the point where some of the most eminent doctors of divinity and the most learned professors in theological seminaries tried to vindicate from the Bible the toleration of slavery.