“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
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The Abolition Church! If there was any one denomination of Christians in this country, north of Mason and Dixon’s Line, that was anathematized beyond another, declared by many in the South one of the most forward instigators and abettors of the late Civil War, it was the “Northern” or “Abolition Methodist Church,” as they called our Church. Well do I remember the “yarns” told by the soldiers of General Sterling Price’s army on a preacher they captured from the Union soldiers in Missouri. The preacher was a noble specimen, and looked more like a Norman king than any of those about him. This minister of the Lord Jesus was terribly abused by his captors. Not so much, as they said, because he was a Union soldier—that was bad enough—but he belonged to the “Northern” or “Abolition Methodist Church.” “The Methodist Episcopal Church, South”—or as it is, and was, better known as “The Southern Methodist Episcopal Church”—is a relative term or name. It was natural, therefore, for the Southern Confederacy to adopt it, and grant it a kind of supremacy above every other denomination. Did it not lead the secession movement in favor of slavery? It is no stretch of imagination to say some people united with it for that very reason. It was to have been expected that the two Churches, wherever they met, would sustain the same relations that the Jews and Samaritans used to sustain to each other. It was impossible to expect anything less than bitter opposition to the “Northern Church.” There was a time in the South when he who spoke favorably of our Church was not only suspected as a “lover of niggers,” but one to be “let alone,” for all intents and purposes, as a traitor. That times have changed but very little in the South along these lines, but few doubt.
If there never comes another time and cause when the Methodist Episcopal Church will interest herself in the politics of this country, no sane person will deny the fact that she was so interested when the question of the abolition of human slavery was being discussed, and while the Civil War was being waged. If there has never been a time when “the two branches of Methodism” hung on exactly opposite sides of the parent tree with about equal weight since the secession of 1844 until the Civil War began, they occupied the above-named attitude during the bloody scenes of those four years. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as such, supported the Confederacy, while the Methodist Episcopal Church supported the Union. And now if the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, closed her doors that the pastor might lead his official lay members into the war—praying, preaching, singing, and fighting every day of the week and Sunday, too—the Methodist Episcopal Church did as much to counteract this. The evidence of this is found in the fact that for upwards of twenty years—ever since the secession of 1844 to 1864—the Methodist Episcopal Church had been practically excluded from the South, and only ventured to plant outposts along the border States, where she found admittance by some compromises to the conservative element that came to her there. Not only so, but President Lincoln declared it “no fault of other denominations that the Methodist Episcopal Church furnished more money and men to suppress the Rebellion.” As a rule our bishops and ministers and membership, wherever they went, preached, lectured, exhorted, and prayed for the overthrow of the terrible slavery that bound hand and foot four and a half million human beings in a bondage more terrible than that of Pharaoh and more demoralizing than that of the Russian empire. It was said of one of our bishops: “Throughout the late war Bishop Simpson did much to strengthen the hands of President Lincoln, and to nerve the spirit of the nation to endure any sacrifice for the cause of the Union.”