have been numerically and theologically stronger than in the Southern, and yet it may not have leavened the mass of their corruption. We have likewise, dealing as we are with mundane issues, to ask whether the influence which it has exercised on the body politic and body social is proportionately stronger in comparison with its numbers. The air in one place may be so much thicker than in another, that a gaslight in the one may not show the traveller his path half so well as a candle in the other. As in theology there are theological virtues, so in politics and in social life there are political and social virtues, which act upon as they are reacted on by Christ's Church, with all the advantage which the comparative strength of the Church gives to the mutual influence. The Northern States may or may not be the seat of all that spirit of the world which it is the object of religion to counteract. Old Rome was very civilized, but S. Paul did not go there to praise and to admire.
After long deliberation and an attentive study of the bearings of the controversy, we assume the responsibility of saying that the cause on whose side the substantial justice of the struggle preponderates, and that for whose success in the interests of religion, and also of our communion, we ought, as English Churchmen, to wish, is the cause of the Confederate States. We make the assertion with our eyes open to the existence in those States of that monstrous 'institution,' as Southerners are wont to term it, slavery. But we do so with our eyes open to the further facts that slavery is a colonial bequest, not a republican invention, introduced into regions where the white man is often as exotic by birth as the black, and more so by nature; that the South, while as yet blindly refusing to acknowledge its inherent indefensibility, has in many respects mitigated its practical evils, and that it has in the Confederate constitution prohibited the slave-trade as a portion of the constitution itself, instead of leaving the prohibition, as in the United States, to be a merely legislative provision. We do so, recollecting that the violence of the abolitionist section in the North has driven back the South from further measures tending to the gradual extinction of the system; such as the measure which was proposed in the Virginian Legislature in 1833, for gradual emancipation, and which, having then been lost, by only a single vote, has never since been renewed, thanks to the subsequent growth of the party of Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner. As little can we shut our eyes to the fact that, with the exception of this knot of sincere abolitionists, the North is in reality more deeply involved in all the guilt of which slavery may be the fount than South Carolina or Georgia. The North traffics in it, makes
