FRATERNITY-ANOTHER VIEW.

BY D. C. KELLEY, D.D.

DR. MILLER, in the leading article in the QUARTERLY REVIEW for October, announces his conviction that "a stand-point has been gained in the fraternal movement from which a truthful survey of the history of Methodism on this continent may be intelligently and justly made." This sentence has been made up, unavoidably, of fragments from several sentences, as no sentence could be found in which the author states his ob

ject in definite form. In pursuing his purpose, he says: "Neither 'Slavery,' nor the Harding Case,' nor yet Bishop Andrew's status, was the cause of the division. The cause lay deeper than all these, and the oft-repeated assertion that any of these things brought about the separation of 1844 is an instance of unmitigated stupidity on the part of those who are really candid in making the affirmation, and of intolerable knavery on the part of the better informed." We are to have, at a calm, philosophic distance from the excitement of the affray, a just, truthful, and candid history, not only of events, but estimate of causes and effects. Such a work, from so able a hand, would certainly be a consummation to be devoutly desired. Does the execution equal the promise, or our hope? Dr. Miller we hold to be a broad-minded and large-hearted man; like some other men who see and feel intensely, his intensity betrays him into unconscious narrowness. When we had read the last sentence quoted, we saw at once that he was in too fierce a mood to write the philosophy of our history; yet the hope remained that in his earnestness he might have discovered some hidden facts, and would offer some new light by which to read those days of struggle and disaster-especially as he purposed to take his stand-point on the line of the "fraternal movement." If regret followed the exhibition of fierce feeling, deep disappointment came as we read the arti

cle, to find that not only had no new fact been unearthed, but the theory propounded was the unvaried one to which the Southern reader of Methodist history has been treated with monotonous exactness by almost every writer or speaker since 1844. Those of us who were born in the Methodist Church, and whose parents chanced to be active participants in these scenes, learned with our earlier catechetical lessons that the English conscience, "morbid on the slavery question, and under the workings of that perverse psychological law, which makes us feel other people's sins more keenly than our own," so affected the "Northern wing of the Church . . . . until its great energies were definitely turned in the direction of abolition fanaticism. For sixty years the silent, almost unseen, current flowed on . . . until in 1844 it incontinently swept away all the laws, usages, and guarantees, of the Church." Southern Methodists in the meantime "saw slavery as a civil question lying within the domain of the State. The Church, being constituted for the edification of religious life, had no jurisdiction of matters belonging to the State. . . . Northern Methodism was, therefore, the revolutionary element in American Methodism. Her attitude in 1844 was a violent abandonment of the settled course of the Church;" while, on the other hand, "a casual glance over the history of the Church from the beginning will satisfy any unprejudiced man that the position of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, on every fundamental question at issue, was the position of the Methodist Church from the first." Finally, "Time has vindicated the Methodist Episcopal Church, South."

Is it not certain that any unprejudiced reader who was aware that this contention, disruption, and fraternity, had taken place between two large bodies of Christians, with many wise and good men as actors through the whole drama, would set down any philosophy of the facts as partial and partisan which regards one party as always right, and the other always wrong? Had the disruption been from a single incident, this might have been credible; but who, claiming to occupy the standpoint of future and fraternal historian, dare affirm this of multiplied facts through a series of almost one hundred years?

The theory of Dr. Miller is that the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, has always occupied a position consistent with that of original and united American Methodism, and that this position not only was, but is now to be regarded as, right. Therefore, we must hold by it in all time to come as the condition of autonomy and success.

It is well known that there is a large number of men, both North and South, who say of all these references to the past, We want none of them-we believe in the Christian character of both Churches in the present, and are willing to fraternize, and with fraternity we are satisfied, not deeming organic union desirable. There is, as we know from contact with them, another class of men in the South, at least-who belong to the educated, professional, commercial, and eminently successful men in all departments of trade-who go much farther than this. Neither of these classes of men have written, so far as we know, any thing on this question.. A few speeches were made in Louisville, at the General Conference, by men of the first class mentioned. These speeches Dr. Miller and other intense partisans have always denominated "gush"whatever they may mean by that word. Both of these classes insist that Cape May was an official confession on the part of the Methodist Episcopal Church that they no longer approved such statements of history as those which mark the "Great Secession" by Dr. Elliott, as some of them are now doing; that at the same time it forbids by every token the reopening of this question on the line of Dr. Miller; that to repeat either line is at war with the spirit of the settlement then made. We do not propose to speak for the first class now, but, as clearly as we may, to put in print the sentiments. heard from nine out of ten laymen of the second class—sentiments which seem at last to have reached not a few of our preachers. It is freely confessed that we wish some abler pen had undertaken this task; perhaps, however, it is better that it should be attempted just now, if done at all, by one who stands at a point in life at which he has nothing to hope or fear of a personal nature from the feeling which may be engendered. The eye, at least, is single. We speak only for the good of the

Church, which has from childhood been dearer to us than life itself, and for which we expect soon to lay down that life. It is freely allowed that in the battle of the past both parties thought they were in the right, and deserve the praise which belongs to honest, earnest men; that in the history of these years much has been done on both sides which illustrates the weakness of good men; that slavery has come to be recognized so universally as a great moral wrong that the effort to relegate it to the State as a purely civil institution can only be regarded now as a temporary parallax in the vision of good men under great trial; that God in his providence used the cupidity of the English and Northern slave-trader to bring the negro to America, as he did the cupidity of Joseph's brethren to bring him into Egypt; that he used the surroundings of the slave-owner to retain him in contact with the superior race through years of needed tutelage, which tutelage was to him a necessity as a preparation for future growth, as was Israel's stay in Egypt; that this temporary need of the negro many good men mistook as indicative of a permanent divine purpose; that these were good men we affirm now and forever; that God used the "fanatical abolition" sentiment of the North for the emancipation of the negro as surely as that he called Moses to the work of Israelitish deliverance from Egypt; that, so far from continuing to hold the doctrine that the Church must abstain from all teaching on civil questions, the true doctrine is, that wherever a moral question has been adversely acted upon by the State, the necessity for fearless, outspoken truth becomes the more urgent upon the part of the Church. This is no approval of all that Abolitionists have done in Church judicatures, nor of all that temperance and Sunday-law advocates have done; but it is a protest against the idea that because some of our fathers-good and wise men-should have, in great pressure, in the midst of the smoke and confusion of battle, declared that slavery was a civil institution, and drawn therefrom the false conclusion that the Church must maintain toward it a perpetual silence, that we at this late day shall be held bound to regard their declaration as the lamp of truth. God in history has vindicated the great fact that Christ gives freedom to

the slave, and the Church must under all proper circumstances so teach; that the question having a civil side can never take from it the moral feature which inheres not only in its accidents, but in itself. Our fathers sincerely believed that they occupied the ground concerning slavery which was occupied by the Apostolic and Primitive Church, and the Church in every age, including the British Wesleyans and the Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Yet the Southern writer who supposes for one moment that the Christian heart and mind of the world, or of that great Methodism which recently took us by the hand in fraternity, in City-road Chapel, proposes thereby to indorse the position that slavery was a question on which the Church might for all time be silent, is blind to the most brilliant light of the historic present. Most of our brethren from without seek to forget that we were silent; others kindly remember our labor of love for the slave; the rest look at it as a large stretch of Christian charity to take us by the hand with the thought that "the times of this ignorance God winked at." What ought we then to do? Go to work to prove to them that we have been consistent with a position announced by their own Richard Watson, with the declarations of bishops in pastoral letters and General Conferences, in fraternal addresses, as Dr. Miller attempts to do? Such an attempt is but to bring upon us the pitying gaze of men who would smile at the idea of consistency, if the consistency was thus to mean blindness to the sunlight of the present that we might be true to the starlight of the past. To prove to them that you occupy the positions announced by some of their leading men a hundred years ago, is only to write yourself down in the estimation of Christendom as having learned nothing by the grand movements of Providence in the last quarter of a century. We are unwilling to be written down as longer blind by any such narrow and obsolete partisanship. They have changed under larger light; we have changed too. We are not ashamed of our past-we thought we were right. our silence to bring many to Christ. sults-both of the gospel we preached the freedom which has come to each.

God made use of We rejoice in the reto slave and master, and Many of us mistook a