Report of the Twentieth National Anti-Slavery BazaarWeston, A. W.
History
Report of the Twentieth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar
Weston, A. W.
Antislavery movements -- Massachusetts; Bazaars (Charities) -- Massachusetts -- Boston
Of one thing we can most sincerely assure our British friends: they
incur no shadow of responsibility for any belief or unbelief that may
prevail in this country. The sole results of the National Bazaar, with
exceptions too trifling to be enumerated, go to the support of the
_National Anti-Slavery Standard_, and the maintenance of the
Anti-Slavery Office in the city of New York. The Editors of the
_Anti-Slavery Standard_ are Messrs. Sydney H. Gay and Oliver Johnson;
Mr. Edmund Quincy, Corresponding Editor. Both as an Anti-Slavery and a
literary paper, it sustains a deservedly high character, and cannot,
we believe, be justly censured for any important departure from the
great principles of mutual respect and toleration on which the members
of the Society have bound themselves, in their associated capacity, to
proceed. We challenge investigation on this point, and we beg all
parties feeling themselves aggrieved, to state in the columns of the
paper the very words and phrases at which they take umbrage, and not
to dwell in generals.
Let us hurriedly present one other consideration. The religious tenets
professed by an overwhelming majority of the churches of the United
States, almost without an exception by the churches in the
slaveholding States, (leaving the Catholics entirely out of the
question,) are those denominated evangelical. Hence the increased
temptation to support Slavery under which members of those sects
labor. The liberal sects (to use popular phraseology) are small, and
comparatively insignificant bodies. There are not more than half a
dozen Unitarian congregations, to our knowledge, south of Mason and
Dixon’s line. When we take into account the difference of belief in
respect to church fellowship that exists between Orthodox and liberal
churches, it is very easy to see why the latter should find it much
easier than the former to coöperate with the Anti-Slavery Society. The
theory of the one sect is, that the church is a society of good men,
(of the regenerate,)――of the other, that it is a society of men
seeking to become such. With the one party, the sacrament is a seal of
their acceptance; with the other, only a means of grace. One is bound
to defend the personal Christianity of its communicants, the other not
at all. Hence the difficulty that an Orthodox man finds in acting with
us, unless he be prepared to take the great step of coming out, and
being separate from churches which we denounce as apostate. The
Unitarians and Universalists, holding very different views in regard
to church fellowship, have very little temptation, _religiously_, to
be untrue to the slave. It is from fashion, and commerce, and worldly
considerations, that their temptations arise.
We have said this, to show that it is not from any sympathy existing
between the Anti-Slavery Society and any one sect more than another,
that so many of its prominent members and agents are either members of
the liberal sects, or belong to none at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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