270 Evolution and Social Reform: 



was the most conspicuous inaugurator of slavery in tlie new- 

 world. It must be confessed that the Christianity which 

 supported slavery in the United States was much inferior 

 to that which weakened and destroyed it in the early church, 

 and, notwithstanding frightful instances of cruelty in ancient 

 slavery, our own of yesterday was much more debasing. 

 But though the American churches were^ as James G. Birney 

 said, the bulwark of slavery, the bulwark was one from be- 

 hind which the Anti-Slavery party drew its noblest strength, 

 from Garrison and Whittier and Green and May and Chan- 

 ning and Parker, down to the humblest of the rank and file. 

 The bible strength of the Pro-Slavery party was an Old- 

 Testament custom ; the bible strength of the Anti-Slavery 

 party was the spirit of compassion and humanity which 

 warmed the heart of Jesus with a pure and heavenly flame. 

 There can be no doubt, I think, that Garrison was a better 

 interpreter of Christianity than Wilbur Fisk, finding an 

 argument for slavery in the Golden Rule; for should we 

 wish our neighbor to seek our liberty at the risk of endanger- 

 ing the safety of the Union and of the Methodist church ! 

 For all the Wilbur Fisks, and there were many, it was the 

 Puritan conscience of the North, which the Bible and Chris- 

 tianity had nourished, that broke the axe in the destroyer's 

 hands. 



"The poor ye have always with you," Jesus said, a 

 prophecy that has had complete fulfillment from his time to 

 ours; but when he added, "And whenever you Avill you can 

 do them good," there was a mocking echo from the experi- 

 ence of nineteen Christian centuries "Good?" "Alms- 

 giving no charity," wrote Daniel Defoe, almost the first to 

 see that this was so. And perhaps it was not so in the 

 order of society in which Jesus lived. Alms-giving may 

 then have been the only possible charity. It is certainly 

 the charity of the New Testament, and of the early and 

 the later chxirch to our own time. And there can be no 

 doubt that the Christiini charity which provoked the Em- 

 peror Julian to stir up the pagan lieart to something like it, 

 saying, "It is o\itrageous that tlie Christians should support 

 not only their own destitute but ours," there can be no 

 doubt that this charity was very sweet and beautiful in 

 c()m])arison with the hard indifference of the pagan world 

 to suffering and misery. In the ages before organized char- 

 ity we nnist honor the spontaneous charity of men. But of 

 one thing we may be sure : It never yet diminished ])Overty. 

 Especially when the church elevated mendicancy to a virtue, 



