moral awakening.  They were continued during nine evenings and turned the seminary at their close, so far as the students went, into an anti-slavery society.  This is not the place to go at length into the history of that anti-slavery debate, which, in its consequences, proved one of the events of the anti-slavery conflict.  Its leader was Theodore D. Weld, who was until Wendell Phillips appeared upon the scene, the great orator of the agitation.

Dr. Beecher had no notion of raising such a ghost when he said, “Go ahead, boys, I’ll go in and discuss with you.”  It was such an apparition of independence and righteousness as neither the power of the trustees nor the authority of the faculty was ever able to dismiss.  The virtue of a gag rule was tried to suppress Abolition among the students, but instead of suppressing Abolition, it well-nigh suppressed the seminary; for, rather than wear a gag on the obnoxious subject, the students—­to between seventy and eighty, comprising nearly the whole muster-roll of the school—­withdrew from an institution where the exercise of the right of free inquiry and free speech on a great moral question was denied and repressed.  The same spirit of repression arose later in the Theological School at Andover, Mass.  There the gag was effectively applied by the faculty, and all inquiry and discussion relating to slavery disappeared among the students.  But the attempt to impose silence upon the students of Phillips’s Academy near-by was followed by the secession of forty or fifty of the students.

Ah! the Abolitionists had undertaken to achieve the impossible, when they undertook to enlist the pulpit in the cause of the slaves, and to purify the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery.  For the average man, whether within or without the church, is not controlled in his conduct toward his brother man by the principles and precepts of Jesus, but by the laws of social and individual selfishness.  These selfish forces may at epochal moments align themselves with justice and liberty, and they not infrequently do, otherwise human progress must be at an end.  In advancing themselves, they perforce advance justice and liberty.  Thus do men love their neighbors as themselves, and move forward to fraternity and equality in kingdoms and commonwealths.  The special province of moral reformers, like Garrison and the Abolitionists, seems to be to set these egoistic and altruistic elements of human society at war, the one against the other, thereby compelling its members and classes, willy nilly, to choose between the belligerents.  Some will enlist on one side, some on the other, but in the furnace heat of the passions which ensues, an ancient evil, or a bad custom or institution, gets the vitality burned out of it, which in due time falls as slag out of the new order that arises at the close of the conflict.

CHAPTER X.

BETWEEN THE ACTS.