“Ministers’ Meeting on the Sumner Outrage and Kansas Affairs.

“A ministers’ meeting was held Thursday afternoon, in the Meionaon, to consider the present position of affairs with relation to the outrage committed on Senator Sumner, and the condition of the country with reference to Kansas, &c. Rev. Mr. James, of Worcester, called the meeting to order, and nominated Rev. Prof. Stowe, of Andover, to take the chair. Prayer was then offered by Rev. Mr. Wallace, of Manchester, N. H. The meeting was very large and highly respectable.

Mr. Stowe expressed his thanks to the meeting for calling him to the chair. He thought there had been too much caution with reference to the slavery question. We are reaping the fruits of our own doing. Slavery is a national sin, and the work of our fathers is all to be done over again. Unless there is a different tone manifested in the churches and throughout the entire North, the outrages recently committed will prove only the beginning of troubles. The first work of the ministry is penitence for their past neglect, and the second is to see that that neglect shall exist no longer. There must be a determined resistance to the slave power. We are, said he, in just the beginning of our trials.

Rev. Mr. Dexter was appointed secretary.

On motion of Rev. Mr. Burrell, of Easton, a business committee of five was appointed to prepare resolutions for the meeting, consisting of Rev. Messrs. Russel, of Canton, James, of Worcester, Walcott, of Providence, Drummond, of Lewiston Falls, Me., and Rev. Mr. Wallace, of Manchester, N. H.

Mr. Branscomb, of Kansas, was called up by Rev. Mr. Dexter, and was received with applause. He left Lawrence on the 16th day of this month. There is no greater oppression to be heard of than that which now afflicts Kansas. He then gave a narrative of the atrocities committed in Kansas in connection with Gov. Reeder and others.

[During Mr. B.’s remarks the audience applauded; whereupon Rev. Dr. Worcester, of Salem, hoped that if any laymen had come into the meeting with the usages of political gatherings, they would remember that this was a meeting of ministers. Rev. Mr. Dexter remarked that the ministers had themselves applauded, and immediately the hall resounded with applause ten times greater than before.]

The Committee then reported, through Rev. Mr. James, the following resolutions:—

In view of the ceaseless aggression of the Slave Power in our land, and especially in view of the recent brutal attempts to extinguish free speech in the Congress of the United States, and take the lives of free men in Kansas;

We, Ministers of the Gospel, to the end that we may bear our united and efficient testimony before all men, do hereby calmly, prayerfully, and as in the sight of God, embody our deep religious convictions, and our unalterable purposes, in the following resolutions:

Resolved, That the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is the only antidote for sin, and the only secure basis either of personal character or of political institutions; adapted alike to the family, the church, and the state, and precisely fitted to work out in them all the highest and noblest ends.

Resolved, That we can entertain no hope that American slavery will be done away, or its countless usurpations peacefully cease, except as the result of a widely-increased conviction of its hatefulness in the sight of God, and its inherent and inevitable antagonism to the spirit of Christ. And we do therefore pledge to each other our mutual coöperation, sympathy, and aid, in the work of developing, through the pulpit, the church, and the press, an enlightened public sentiment on this whole subject.

Resolved, That the murderous assault upon our honored senator, Charles Sumner, is not only a dastardly assault upon his person, and through him upon the right of free speech, but also a wound which we individually feel, and by which our very hearts bleed; and whether he shall recover, or sink into a martyr’s grave,—which may God avert,—we will address ourselves unto prayer and effort that this sorrowful event may become the glorious resurrection of national virtue, and the triumph of freedom.

Resolved, In view of the present crisis in our national affairs, and especially the awful perils that impend over Kansas and the land, we see a new exhibition of the essentially corrupt and corrupting spirit of slavery, and a new necessity that we, as ministers of the gospel and lovers of liberty, should gird ourselves afresh to oppose its aggressions, and secure the final triumph of freedom.

The resolutions were then taken up seriatim, and discussed.

Rev. Dr. Worcester doubted about the preamble, and thought that some different action might be proper. He had been exceedingly pained at demonstrations of applause, and thought it did not become ministers to act like political men. It would be better to have a day of fasting and prayer.”

After a long debate, the preamble and resolutions were unanimously adopted, and it was also voted that they be signed by the officers of the meeting, and sent to the Massachusetts Senators and Representatives in Washington.

The meeting then adjourned.

Now let us consider what are the weight and significance of this transaction.

The Abolitionists have for twenty-three years been trying to arouse the people (and especially the clergy and the churches) to a consciousness of the fact that slavery is a heinous sin in the sight of God, requiring immediate repentance and reformation, not only in the slaveholders, but in those who are so politically and ecclesiastically connected with it and responsible for it as the people, and especially the religious people, of the North. If this proposition be true, the clergy should have taken the lead in preaching and enforcing it. They have not done this; they have constantly maligned and obstructed the Abolitionists, who did do it; and now, after the masses of the people have emphatically spoken, without the slightest confession of their long-continued sins of omission and commission in this matter, they pledge each other their mutual coöperation, sympathy, and aid in doing what every one of them ought long since individually to have done, ex officio, from the very fact that he assumes to be a minister of the gospel.

It remains to be seen whether they will discharge even this beginning of their duty; and I beg every reader of these pages to notice whether the ministers nearest to his observation fulfil this pledge any farther than they are crowded into it by their people, moving slowly and timidly in the direction indicated by the Abolitionists.

It is highly probable that a vivid sentiment of indignation against the outrageous assaults lately perpetrated upon Sumner in Washington, and the Free State people in Kansas, felt and expressed in public meetings by so large a portion of the people, may bring out a crop of sermons upon the same topics, expressed with a warmth so unusual in those compositions as to seem like spontaneous movement and progress. It is only seeming. The sermonizers follow, not lead, the movements of the people; and whenever Charles Sumner recovers from his wounds, (if Providence shall so ordain it,) and whenever the pending question concerning Kansas shall be settled, by her becoming, possibly a free, probably a slave State, if events do not widely vary from all the analogies of the last fifty years, this hastily aroused excitement of the people will subside, (as did the almost unparalleled interest aroused by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”) they will return to their farms and their merchandise, will yield impunity to the outrage upon their rights inflicted through Charles Sumner, as formerly to that inflicted through Samuel Hoar, and will take an established slavery in Kansas as quietly as they now do in South Carolina; and then, I say, if all analogies do not fail, the sermons will drop down to their ordinary level, and the clergy will continue to be followers, not leaders, of the people. Meantime, while the temporary fervor lasts, mark carefully to how much such sermons pledge the speakers, and to what kind and amount of action they urge the people. It is very easy to condemn a brutal and cowardly assault, but will those persons trace it to its source—slavery; condemn that system as a whole, confess their own past shortcomings in relation to it, cut off their own ecclesiastical connection with it, and urge their people to immediate action for its utter overthrow? It is very easy to condemn the violence of an armed banditti, who, in defiance of constitutional law as well as right, have controlled the freedom of elections in Kansas; but will they trace that to its source—slavery; confess their own guilt in having tacitly consented to it so long, and warn their people that, until every vestige of it is rooted out, from church and state, and social life, in every portion of our country, the like dangers will neither be prevented, nor their own duties discharged? Those who carefully note, examine, and compare in relation to these matters, will see whether I prophesy truly or not.

Another point which may be profitably noted for careful observation, during the coming year, as indicating the practical relation of the clergy to slavery, is, whether the prayers of those who pray at all for the slave, in public, are made as an appropriate and intended preliminary to action, and followed by earnest exhortations to their people, to do something, immediately, towards the overthrow of the slave power, or whether prayer is proposed merely as a substitute for action, and a means of preventing discussion. Before the mass of the people had begun to think or talk about slavery, Professor Stuart counselled his theological students not to pray about it publicly, lest “agitation,” and its follower, anti-slavery, should gain entrance into their churches; but if he were living now, as circumstances alter cases, he might pursue the same end by the very opposite means; just as Dr. Worcester, of Salem, (from whose church several members long since withdrew themselves, on account of his and its pro-slavery character,) after vainly trying to retain Dr. South-Side Adams on the Tract Society’s committee, and to frown down the applause raised for resistance to the aggressions of slavery in Kansas, at the ministers’ meeting, attempted to check even the feeble current of feeling manifested in their “Resolutions,” by proposing to substitute for them “a day of fasting and prayer.”

Perhaps we are now to find this policy practised by many of the clergy Perhaps the latest counsel of Dr. Gannett and Dr. Kirk, to wait and pray, may be found by many others the most effective means of averting Anti-Slavery action. Those who thus counsel, are blind guides in religion, not less than in Anti-Slavery. The prayer that “availeth much” is not such as the wagoner offered to Hercules, a lazy attempt to persuade God to do our duty, but is accompanied and followed by strenuous and persevering action. God helps those who help themselves.

Published for gratuitous distribution, at the Office of the American Anti-Slavery Society, No. 138 Nassau Street, New York. Also to be had at the Anti-Slavery Offices, No. 21 Cornhill, Boston, and No. 31 North Fifth Street, Philadelphia.