Because such religious instruction as the Negroes received after the enactment and the enforcement of the reactionary legislation of the South failed to secure to them that mental development necessary to understand the Christian doctrine and to connect it with the practical problems of life, northern friends of the Negroes forced a change in their religious instruction by exposing the unchristian policy of preventing a people from learning of God through the only source of revelation, the Bible. Abolitionists like William Jay and many northern ministers who did not consider themselves anti-slavery, fearlessly branded as sinners the so-called southern Christians who were thus preventing the coming of the kingdom of God. Southerners eloquently retorted on the defensive, of course, but believed in their hearts that the deplorable situation should be remedied. Much effort was made thereafter to render more thorough the oral instruction of slaves, but without very much success. Nearer the middle of the nineteenth century, however, there appeared among the clergy and sympathetic whites in the South some inclination to disregard the custom and laws of that section that the necessary foundation for the instruction of the Negroes in the Christian doctrine might be given. In this work the evangelical denominations participated more freely than others. From the Episcopal Church to which most of the richest slaveholders belonged, not very much help came because that church never considered slavery a sin and never made it a matter of discipline. That the bodies of the Negroes were made miserable in this world and that their souls might be damned were of little concern to some persons, who were not especially interested in monopolizing heaven even for poor whites. The gospel, moreover, as some saw it, had little to do with the settlement of differences between the races in this world, since it was rather concerned with the adjustment of affairs in the kingdom to come.