The clergy at the South were by this time generally united in the defense of slavery. At the North, there was great variety among them. Many ministers ignored slavery as apart from their province. Many spoke of it occasionally as a sin, but regarded it as little concerned with that daily life of their people which was their main concern. A few treated it as a great national wrong, speaking such denunciation as the Hebrew prophets gave to the national sins of their people; and of these some were driven from their pulpits. A few expressed open sympathy or apology for slavery,--such as Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, and Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont. The foremost preacher in America was Henry Ward Beecher. He was above all things a preacher,--charged with a great spiritual message; of extraordinary and various eloquence, dramatic, inspiring, thrilling; impelled and sometimes controlled by a wonderful imagination. He was taking a leading part in transforming the popular belief. Theology has radically altered under two influences,--the new view of facts given by science, and a higher ethical and spiritual feeling. It was under the ethical and spiritual impulse that Beecher so altered the emphasis of the traditional theology, so dwelt on the love of God, on Christ's character as the revelation of God, on the opportunities and incitements of daily life, on all the hopeful and joyful aspects of existence,--that in the minds of his hearers the harsher elements, not only of Calvinism, but of the whole traditional orthodoxy, melted as imperceptibly and steadily as icebergs melt when they drift southward. He always avoided any avowed or precipitate break with the old system of dogma,--partly from a personal sentiment associated with the faith of the fathers; partly from an instinctive preference of practical and emotional over intellectual methods; and partly from a studied regard to the most effective results,--a shrewdness which tempered his impetuosity.