This low opinion was heartily reciprocated by the Northerner. He believed the very foundation of Southern society to be injustice,--the unpaid labor of the slave,--and the superstructure to correspond. He looked on the slave-holders as cruel to their slaves and arrogant toward the world at large, especially toward himself. The popular opinion of slavery fastened on its abuses and ignored its mitigations. On the average reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Legree made a deeper impression than St. Clare or Mrs. Shelby. Even the religious and intellectual life of the two sections had grown unsympathetic and often antagonistic. The South held tenaciously to the traditional orthodox theology. In the North there was free discussion and movement of thought. Even the conservative Presbyterian church had its New School and Old School; and in New England the Congregational body was divided by the birth and growth of Unitarianism. At all this turmoil the South looked askance, and was genuinely shocked by the disintegration of the old creed. The North in turn looked with something like suspicion, if not scorn, on a Christianity which used the Bible as an arsenal to fortify slavery. The Northern brood of reforms and isms,--wise, unwise, or fantastic,--moved the South to a hostility which made little discrimination between the idealism of Emerson, the iconoclasm of Parker, and the vagaries of "free love." The group of literary lights,--Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and their compeers,--won Southern dislike by their hostility to slavery. The South itself, singularly barren of original literature,--its prolific new births in our own day are one of the most conspicuous fruits of emancipation,--clung fondly to the classical and feudal traditions, and hardly admitted any literary sovereign later than Scott and Byron.