Judge Jay was an earnest and active member of the Episcopal Church, but he was never blind to its imperfections. He deplored as much as any man the countenance given by the church to slavery, but he believed that reformation must and would come from within. He had no sympathy with the "come-outers." Concerning them he wrote in 1846: "Infidelity is now vigorously availing itself of the conduct of the clergy in relation to this subject to assail the blessed religion of which they are the ministers. A sect is forming who profess to believe that the church is so corrupted by slavery that good men are required to separate from her. These people call themselves 'come-outers.' Lecturers are enlisted in their service, and the clergy, as identified with the cause of human bondage, are daily held up to public detestation as heartless hypocrites." Jay would not deny the justice with which the attacks on the clergy were made, and he laboured to place the church where it belonged, in the front rank of the great humanitarian movement. To his efforts were largely due the admission of coloured clergy to the conventions of the church, and the gradual abolition of that spirit of caste which prevented a white clergyman from recognizing a black one as fit to deliberate with him on matters relating to their common religion. To destroy this race hatred, so contrary to the spirit of Christianity, and to arouse the church to its duty of active opposition to slavery, were Jay's constant endeavours in the conventions of the church. His pen also was frequently occupied with the same subject. His "Letter to Bishop Ives" of North Carolina was a severe yet just arraignment of clergymen who justified slavery from the Scriptures, and it exposed the wickedness of their course in language and with arguments to which they and their sympathizers were unable to reply.