and not a citizen, and where he has no political rights. or functions, it will be best for him not to meddle with political questions at all. But if he is a free citizen of a republic, and as such shares in the responsibility of popular sovereignty, the example of the apostles in abstaining from questions of legislation and politics, is obviously no example for him. His duty as a citizen, and how it is modified by his duty as a minister of the gospel, he must ascertain for himself, by the light of general principles, in the exercise of his own common sense.

It is not to be supposed that the apostles, in their preaching, meddled at all with any political question, or any point of legislation. We have no reason to think that their oral discourses differed in this respect from their epistles. They required of masters, not kindness merely, but-what is of far more significancy-justice, toward their servants.* They required of servants fidelity towards their masters. But in respect to the abolition of slavery, and in respect to measures and arrangements tending towards that end, they said nothing. Are we, therefore, who are now ministers of the gospel in the United States, bound to keep silence on the subject of slavery, save as we reiterate the teachings of the apostles on the relative duties of masters and slaves? I think not. We are American citizens; and our hearers are American citizens. Not only do we stand in a different position from that in which the apostles stood,

* A man may be kind, as language is ordinarily used, toward his dog, or his horse; he can be just only toward his fellow-men; for justice implies rights.

but our hearers live, as it were, in another universe from that in which the hearers of the apostles lived. Our hearers are men to whom is entrusted the welfare of their country, and all coming generations; their moral and intellectual character as affected by the ministration of the Word of God, is one element of the power that controls laws and institutions, and determines all questions of public policy. So far as political questions are at the same time moral-questions of right and wrong, questions of the application of the law of love-so far it will be impossible for a free and faithful minister of Christ, rightly dividing the word of truth, entirely to avoid them. To keep such a question as that of slavery out of the pulpit, in such a country as this, must be impossible, as long as the pulpit is faithful to its trust in quickening the moral sensibilities, and in forming and guiding the moral judgments of those who sit under its influence. In a country where the question of war and peace, in a given emergency, is to be determined by the voices of the citizens, if the pulpit does not breathe into the minds of those who sit under it a just Christian abhorrence of war as a means of settling international disputes, the pulpit virtually defiles itself with blood. So in a country of free speech and thought, where millions of human beings are converted by law into chattels, and are treated as having no human rights, if the pulpit never, in any way, leads the hearers of the gospel to feel that, as citizens partaking in the sovereignty of the republic, they have something to do for the reformation of such injustice, it is so far recreant to the ends for which it exists; it abandons a great moral question

to be determined by the low influences of selfish partisan politics. The preaching is not worth much, which does not help men to understand and feel what God would have them do in all their moral relations.

It is not necessary for me here to remark the limitations which a sound discretion imposes on the discussion of such questions in the pulpit. The man who has not common sense enough to avoid, in the pulpit, the agitation of certain questions of mere policy, which the legitimate application of the law of love leaves undetermined-still more the man who has not common sense enough to avoid questions merely personal, such as the merit or demerit of particular candidates for office-the man who makes his pulpit a place for repeating on the Lord's day, the substance of what he has been reading through the week in a partisan newspaper-the man who has a political hobby-horse which he rides in every sermon—will hardly learn much from anything that I can say to set him right. What I am insisting upon is not that ministers shall make themselves leaders in the strifes of political partisanship -not that the people shall go to church on Sunday to learn which ticket they must vote on Mondaybut only that the absolute silence of the primitive preachers of the gospel, respecting the legislation and policy of the Roman empire, imposes no obligation on their successors in the United States, at the present day, to maintain the same silence respecting the legislation and policy of this country. We are not bound to follow even the apostles, blindly, but only as we see the principles on which they acted,

and the application of those principles to our duties, in our relations. Christianity is not a religion of forms, or of merely specific regulations, but a religion of affections and of principles.

How is it, then, in regard to the administration of church discipline? Is the example of the apostles, in this respect, obligatory upon us? I answer, The principles upon which the apostles, and the churches under their personal direction, acted in respect to the admission and exclusion of individuals asking to be recognized as Christians, are principles which we cannot refuse to follow without rejecting the authority of the apostles. What are those principles? And in particular, what are the principles on which they acted in respect to the admission of masters and slaves to membership in the church? If they acted upon the principle that the mere relation of a master to his slaves, without considering his conduct in that relation, is irreconcilable with a Christian profession, and is therefore to be renounced "at all hazards;" then we must adopt that principle and act accordingly, or else we must deny their authority. If, on the other hand, they evidently rejected that principle-if they recognize masters of slaves as believers-if when insisting on the duties of a master toward his slaves they never insist on an immediate legal emancipation—then it is quite plain to me that the master of a slave, simply for being such, if that is all that can be alleged against him, ought not to be excluded from communion in our churches, unless we can do better than the apostles did.

Can we, then, do better than they did? Setting aside their example, as not binding us to do likewise

-admitting that, through ignorance or inadvertence, or under the pressure of peculiar circumstances, the apostles and the churches under their personal direction may possibly have done that, in relation to slavery, which we ought not to do-let us inquire for ourselves, whether there is any sufficient reason, on what we recognize as Christian principles, for excommunicating every master of slaves, simply because he is a master.

At the risk of becoming wearisome by so much iteration, I must once more ask the reader not to misunderstand me, for I have the best reason to know that there are readers who have not yet apprehended the palpable distinction upon which I am insisting in all these articles. My doctrine is, that if the master of slaves refuses to recognize those slaves as his brethren of the human familyif he regards them and treats them not as his fellowmen, for whose welfare he is in God's providence responsible, but as his property merely, his chattels, which he has a right to use as he pleases-if he does not use his power over them conscientiously, as a trust committed to him for their good-he is to be rejected by the church, because he does not deal with his servants according to the spirit of the law of love, and the positive precepts of the New Testament. That my doctrine is sound, so far as it goes; that the church has a right-nay, that it is bound to act upon my doctrine-is not in dispute. The question is whether the church has a right to go farther, and to demand of the master, under pain of excommunication, that he shall "at all hazards" dissolve the connection between himself and his slaves, shall