yielding to the dictates of his conscience. Rev. Dr. Southron opened the meeting with prayer, which consisted more in a statement of its objects than an approach to the throne of Grace for wisdom to be guided in an impartial verdict, after which he made a short address, taking for his text, "The powers that be are ordained of God," inculcating the principle that governments are divine, and resistance to them a crime against God and man. Then he proceeded to show what constitutes rebellion against a government, and what course should be pursued toward those who stirred up sedition and revolt. "If we let them go on," said he, "what anarchy and confusion will follow, divisions in the church, dissensions in society, and the overthrow of all law." He closed with an argument in defence of slavery based on the Bible, beginning with the patriarch Abraham and the Mosaic law, and ending with the since threadbare tale of Paul and Onesimus under the new dispensation.
This was going rather farther than most of the audience were ready to endorse, not being yet quite enough indoctrinated into the southern catechism to answer in the affirmative: "Is not the chief end of man to glorify God by enslaving his brother so that he may also teach him to glorify him?"
They believed in submission to the laws whether good or bad, in standing by the country, whether right or wrong, but it was a bitter pill to swallow on the soil of the Pilgrims, concocted of the alien idea that a ten-fold worse oppression than that they sought to escape should promote the very end they had in
