When the General Assembly condemned this utterance, the entire southern part of the church seceded and set up a separate jurisdiction.[346:1] There seems no reason to doubt the entire sincerity with which the southern church, in all its sects, had consecrated itself with religious devotion to the maintenance of that horrible and inhuman form of slavery which had drawn upon itself the condemnation of the civilized world. The earnest antislavery convictions which had characterized it only twenty-five years before, violently suppressed from utterance, seem to have perished by suffocation. The common sentiment of southern Christianity was expressed in that serious declaration of the Southern Presbyterian Church, during the war, of its "deep conviction of the divine appointment of domestic servitude," and of the "peculiar mission of the southern church to conserve the institution of slavery."[346:2] At the North, on the other hand, with larger liberty, there was wider diversity of opinion. In general, the effect of continued discussion, of larger knowledge of facts, and of the enforcement on the common conscience, by the course of public events, of a sense of responsibility and duty in the matter, had been to make more intelligent, sober, and discriminating, and therefore more strong and steadfast, the resolution to keep clear of all complicity with slavery. There were few to assume the defense of that odious system, though there were some. There were many to object to scores of objectionable things in the conduct of abolitionists. And there were a very great number of honest, conscientious men who were appalled as they looked forward to the boldly threatened consequences of even the mildest action in opposition to slavery--the rending of the church, the ruin of the country, the horrors of civil war, and its uncertain event, issuing perhaps in the wider extension and firmer establishment of slavery itself. It was an immense power that the bold, resolute, rule-or-ruin supporters of the divine right of slavery held over the Christian public of the whole country, so long as they could keep these threats suspended in the air. It seemed to hold in the balance against a simple demand to execute righteousness toward a poor, oppressed, and helpless race, immense interests of patriotism, of humanity, of the kingdom of God itself. Presently the time came when these threats could no longer be kept aloft. The compliance demanded was clearly, decisively refused. The threats must either be executed or must fall to the ground amid general derision. But the moment that the threat was put in execution its power as a threat had ceased. With the first stroke against the life of the nation all great and noble motives, instead of being balanced against each other, were drawing together in the same direction. It ought not to have been a surprise to the religious leaders of disunion, ecclesiastical and political, to find that those who had most anxiously deprecated the