against human slavery in this country would be enigmatical in the
extreme, utterly beyond apprehension, if it were not matter of history
that the representatives of the Christian Church, in conflicts with
every giant wrong, have always been the strongest supporters, the most
obsequious tools of money power and the political sharpers who have
imposed their vile tyrannies upon mankind. They have alternately
supplicated and domineered, crawled in the dust or mounted the
house-top, as occasion served, from Gregory to the Smiths and Joneses
of the present time. So that it has passed into a proverb, that the
ministers of the gospel may be always counted upon to take sides with
the strongest party--always seeking to conciliate "King Cotton," "King
Corporation," "King Monopoly," and all the other "Kings" of modern
growth--swaying, like the reed in the wind, to the powers that be,
whether of tyranny reared upon a thousand years of usurpation,
military despotism of a day's growth, or presumptuous wealth
accumulated by robbery, hypocrisy and insidious assassination. Instead
of leading in the reformation of leviathan wrongs, the ministry waits
for the rabble to applaud before it commends.[1] It was not in this
manner that the great Christ set the world in motion, sowed broadcast
the dynamite which uprooted long-established infamies, and prepared
the way for the ultimate redemption of the world from sin and error.

If the Christian ministry of the United States did at last recognize
the demoralization and iniquity of slavery, it was because the heroic
band, headed by William Lloyd Garrison, first fired the heart of the
people and forced the ministry to take sides with the righteous cause.
I speak not of the few heroic exceptions, but of the mass of the
American clergy. If in the evangelization of the black man since the
rebellion, the ministry have largely furthered the work, they have
done so because there were hundreds and thousands of brave men and