¹ Genesis 17:12, 26–7 (New Revised Standard Version; hereafter NRSV). The biblical translation most popular among antebellum Protestants, the King James, incorrectly translates the Hebrew and Greek words for slave, substituting “servant” for “slave.” Although their biblical translation obscured the biblical record on slavery, most antebellum commentators were well aware of the proper translation, especially as the slavery debates progressed and proslavery commentators refuted antislavery uses of the King James mistranslation. On the biblical record on slavery see Lowance, Mason I. Jr, ed., A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776–1865 (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 51–61Google Scholar; and Noonan, John T., A Church that Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), 17–35Google Scholar.

² Exodus 20:17 (NRSV).

³ Exodus 21:7–11, 20–21, 26–7.

⁴ Matthew 8:5–13; Luke 7:2–10; Philemon 1–25; 1 Corinthians 7:21–2; Ephesians 6:5–9; 1 Timothy 6:2; 1 Peter 2:18–21.

⁵ In America's God, and, more recently, in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Mark Noll has argued that racism, along with a commonsense biblical hermeneutic, kept antislavery Protestants from developing an adequate biblical argument, and that their failure diminished the relevance of the Bible to the racial and economic challenges of the post-Civil War era. In The Mind of the Master Class, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese have argued that the biblical record supports slavery, at least in the abstract, and have suggested that antislavery Protestants had to resort to liberal evasions to make their case. Noll's focus on hermeneutical and moral failure, and the Genoveses’ disparaging characterization of the incipient liberalism of antislavery Protestants, do not account for the ways in which the slavery debates necessitated theological innovation. Noll, Mark A., The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar; idem, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002), 367–445; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Eugene D., The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, 2003), 494–504Google Scholar. On the slavery debates see also Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (New York, 1999), 523–56Google Scholar; Harrill, J. Albert, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture 10 (2000), 149–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis, 2006); Meeks, Wayne A., “The ‘Haustefeln’ and American Slavery: A Hermeneutical Challenge,” in Lovering, Eugene H. Jr. and Sumney, Jerry L., eds., Theology and Ethics in Paul and His Interpreters (Nashville, TN, 1996), 232–53Google Scholar; Mullin, Robert Bruce, “Biblical Critics and the Battle over Slavery,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61 (1983), 210–26Google Scholar; and Shanks, Caroline, “The Biblical Anti-slavery Argument of the Decade 1830–1840,” Journal of Negro History 16 (1931), 132–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Cashdollar, Charles D., The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar. On the development of liberal Protestant theology see also Averill, Lloyd J., American Theology in the Liberal Tradition (Philadelphia, 1967)Google Scholar; Cauthen, Kenneth, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Gary, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville, KY, 2001)Google Scholar; Welch, Claude, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1972–85)Google Scholar; and Williams, Daniel Day, The Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology (New York, 1970; first edition 1941)Google Scholar. Williams did include a brief mention of the theological impact of slavery in which he argued, at 22–6, that the slavery issue “sharpened the issues involved in the conception of the relation of Christianity to secular history and institutions.”

⁷ Frederick Douglass expressed a belief in the theologically benign form of moral progress in 1852, when he proclaimed that abolitionism would ultimately triumph despite widespread opposition, because “there are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.” Emerson expressed a similar idea in an 1844 speech commemorating British abolition: “one feels very sensibly in all this history that a great heart and soul are behind there, superior to any man, and making use of each, in turn, and infinitely attractive to every person according to the degree of reason in his own mind . . .” Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame et al., vol. 2 (New Haven, 1982), 386; Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Emerson's Antislavery Writings, ed. Gougeon, Len and Myerson, Joel (New Haven, 1995), 27Google Scholar. On Emerson and slavery see Garvey, T. Gregory, ed., The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform (Athens, GA, 2001), 139–217Google Scholar; Gougeon, Len, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens, GA, 1990)Google Scholar; and Frank, Albert J. Von, “Mrs. Brackett's Verdict: Magic and Means in Transcendental Antislavery Work,” in Capper, Charles and Wright, Conrad Edick, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and its Contexts (Boston, 1999), 385–407Google Scholar.

⁸ Garrison, William Lloyd, “Thomas Paine,” The Liberator 15 (1845), 186Google Scholar.

⁹ Parker, Theodore, The Slave Power (New York, 1969), 272Google Scholar. This quotation is from a speech delivered on 29 May 1850. Smith, Gerrit, “The One Test of Character, Peterboro, July 22, 1860,” in idem, Sermons And Speeches (New York, 1861), 81–102, 98Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Weld, Theodore Dwight, The Bible Against Slavery, or, An Inquiry into the Genius of the Mosaic System, and the Teachings of the Old Testament on the Subject of Human Rights (Pittsburgh, 1864; first edition 1837)Google Scholar. Cheever, George Barrell, God Against Slavery, And the Freedom and Duty of the Pulpit to Rebuke It, as a Sin against God (New York, 1857)Google Scholar. On Weld see Abzug, Robert H., Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. The antislavery minister William C. Wisner published a critique of Weld's tract in which he argued that Weld should have been content to demonstrate that the Old Testament does not justify modern-day southern slavery, rather than making the impossible case that slavery did not exist among the Hebrews. Wisner, William C., The Biblical Argument on Slavery, Being Principally a Review of T. D. Weld's “Bible Against Slavery” (New York, 1844)Google Scholar. Albert Barnes's biblical arguments were more circumspect than those of either Weld or Cheever, but he argued in a manner much like theirs that the words the King James translates as “servant” actually referred to many different varieties of labor and service, so that their meaning changed depending on historical circumstances. Barnes believed that the Mosaic Law's regulation of slavery, with its prohibition of kidnapping and its jubilee-year freeing of Hebrew slaves, was designed to eliminate slavery gradually, so that by the time of Jesus the Jews no longer held slaves. Barnes, Albert, An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (New York, 1969; first edition 1857), 67–70, 242–4, 321–31Google Scholar. Proslavery critics effectively demolished the argument that the Old Testament slaves were in fact servants. For example, see Bledsoe, Albert Taylor, Essay on Liberty and Slavery (Philadelphia, 1856), 188–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thornton Stringfellow, “A Brief Examination of the Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery” (New York, 1841), in Lowance, A House Divided, 67. For further instances of the rejection of this argument see Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, 508. According to Fox-Genovese and Genovese, the historical record clearly demonstrates that Israelites held both slaves and indentured servants. Ibid., 511.

¹¹ Daly, John Patrick, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington, KY, 2002)Google Scholar; Genovese, Eugene D., The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia, SC, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹² Hutson quoted in Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, 30.

¹³ Thornwell, James Henley, “Relation of the Church to Slavery,” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell, ed. Adger, John B. and Girardeau, John L. (Richmond, VA, 1873), 378–97, 384Google Scholar; original emphasis. Hodge, Charles, the conservative Old School Presbyterian leader of Princeton Theological Seminary, likewise argued that the only Christian method with regard to slavery was “to ascertain the scriptural rule of judgment and conduct in relation to it.” Charles Hodge, “Slavery,” Bibliotheca Sacra 8 (1836), 268–305, 275Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Garrison, William Lloyd, quoted in Hugh Davis, Leonard Bacon: New England Reformer and Antislavery Moderate (Baton Rouge, LA, 1998), 86Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Antislavery moderates also used the category of “social sin” to explain why their southern brethren failed to see the wrong of slavery. See Bacon, Leonard, The Jugglers Detected: A Discourse Delivered by Request in the Chapel Street Church, New Haven, December 30, 1860 (New Haven, 1861), 17Google Scholar; Channing, William E., Slavery (Boston, 1835), 11–12, 55, 58Google Scholar; Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution: In a Correspondence between The Rev. Richard Fuller of Beaufort, S.C., and The Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence R.I. (New York, 1845), 41.

¹⁶ Barrows, E. P., A View of the American Slavery Question (New York, 1836), 16–40Google Scholar.

¹⁷ A Debate on Slavery, Held in the City of Cincinnati, On the First, Second, Third, and Sixth Days of October, 1845, upon the Question: Is Slave-Holding in Itself Sinful, and the Relation between Master and Slave, a Sinful Relation? (Cincinnati, 1846), 300–9. Abolitionists and antislavery moderates often referred to the 1830 decision of North Carolina Supreme Court judge Thomas Ruffin in North Carolina v. Mann that slave-owners could not be prosecuted for beating their slaves to death, since the master's control over the slave ultimately depended on the threat of physical discipline. See, for instance, Lewis, Tayler, “Patriarchal and Jewish Servitude no Argument for American Slavery,” in Fast Day Sermons, or the Pulpit on the State of the Country (New York, 1861), 177–226, 181–2Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Domestic Slavery, 58. For other examples of this argument see also Lewis, “Patriarchal and Jewish Servitude no Argument for American Slavery,” 181–2, 204, 217; and E. P. Barrows, “Saalschütz on Hebrew Servitude,” Bibliotheca Sacra 19 (Jan. 1862), 32–75, 70–71.

¹⁹ Stuart, Moses, Conscience and the Constitution, with Remarks on the Recent Speech of the Hon. Daniel Webster in the Senate of the United States on the Subject of Slavery (Boston, 1850) 101–3Google Scholar. Stuart had made an even stronger statement against racism in 1827: “All men are neighbors to each other . . . all are one—one in respect to their native rights, and claims, and rank. There is no difference between the coloured and the white man, under the empire of gospel truth. God has not only made all nations of one blood; but he has permitted them all to claim the same relation to him; he permits them to share equally in the bounties of his providence and of his grace. If they are abridged of any of these privileges, it is not their creator who has abridged them, but those who have abused their power which was entrusted to them, and shown themselves unworthy of such a trust.” Moses Stuart, A Sermon Delivered before His Excellency Levi Lincoln, Esq., Governor . . . May 30, 1827, Being the Day of General Election (Boston, 1827), 20.

²⁰ Barrows, “Saalschütz on Hebrew Servitude,” 70–71.

²¹ Domestic Slavery, 237.

²² A Debate on Slavery, 16–17; original emphasis.

²³ Because proslavery leaders refused to respond directly to the abolitionists who considered them to be abject sinners, the great conversations of the slavery debates took place between the moderates and the defenders of slavery.

²⁴ A Debate on Slavery, 31.

²⁵ Domestic Slavery, 8.

²⁶ Thornwell, The Collected Writings, 415–16.

²⁷ As Fuller wrote to Wayland: “Recollect that when you tell us of certain laws, and customs, and moral evils, and gross crimes, which are often incidents of slavery in this country, we agree with you, and are most anxious for their removal, and deprecate the incendiary movements of abolitionists as tending only to retard and even arrest our success.” Domestic Slavery, 7.

²⁸ Radical abolitionists also focused on the sinfulness of slavery in the abstract. For Amos Phelps, slavery “as an individual practice is sinful and always so, in the same sense that gaming, drunkenness, falsehood, adultery, idolatry and the like are.” Garrison agreed with early abolitionist George Bourne that “moderation against sin is an absurdity.” Said Garrison, “I saw there was nothing to stand upon, if it could be granted that slavery was, for a moment, right.” If slavery were a sin in itself, then “immediate, unconditional emancipation . . . was the right of every slave, and could not be withheld by his master an hour without sin.” Amos Phelps, A., Letters to Prof. Stowe and Dr. Bacon, on God's Real Method with Great Social Wrongs in which the Bible is Vindicated from Grossly Erroneous Interpretation (New York, 1848), 4Google Scholar. Garrison, William Lloyd quoted in Mayer, Henry, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998), 70, 103Google Scholar.

²⁹ Barnes, Albert, The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia, 1857), 42Google Scholar. The Presbyterian Church had split into New School and Old School segments in 1837. Although theological and ecclesiastical disputes were the primary cause of the break, disagreement over slavery also played a role. Old School Presbyterians in the North and South tended not to believe slavery to be a sin, while most New School Presbyterians were at least moderately antislavery. As in most Protestant denominations, theological conservatives banded together across the Mason-Dixon line, while theological innovators, who tended to be antislavery, were almost entirely from the North.

³⁰ Channing, Slavery, 113. Because he believed that revelation was progressive, with the New Testament superseding the Old, Channing did not have to contend with the Old Testament record on slavery. However, because he held the New Testament to be the final and perfect revelation, he did have to account for the New Testament record on slavery. Channing, William Ellery, Unitarian Christianity: A Discourse at the Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, Baltimore, 1819 (Boston, 1877), 4Google Scholar.

³¹ Wayland, Francis, Elements of Moral Science (Boston, 1835), 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a later edition Wayland wrote, “while it is true that the New Testament does not prohibit slavery . . . it inculcates doctrines entirely subversive of it. It teaches us the doctrine of universal humanity—that the whole race of men are equal in the sight of God, and are brethren of each other . . . that we are under obligation to love our neighbor as ourselves.” Wayland, Elements of Moral Science (New York, 1865), 222.

³² Paley, William, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1817; first edition 1785), 161Google Scholar.

³³ Wayland, Francis, The Elements of Moral Science (Boston, 1837), 214Google Scholar.

³⁴ Channing, Slavery, 111.

³⁵ On Stuart's principles of biblical criticism, see Stuart, Moses, “Letter to the Editor, on the Study of the German Language,” Christian Review 6 (1841), 446–71Google Scholar; idem, Letters to the Rev. Wm. Channing, E., Containing Remarks on His Sermon, Recently Preached and Published at Baltimore (Andover, MA, 1819)Google Scholar; and Brown, Jerry Wayne, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT, 1969), 57Google Scholar.

³⁶ Stuart, Conscience and the Constitution, 46. In the same publication, Stuart expressed an even more shocking agreement with Channing. He argued that because “the Mosaic dispensation was a preparatory one . . . none can now claim liberty to proclaim slaves of the Gentile or Jews, on the ground of Mosaic permission.” Ibid., 36–7. On Stuart and slavery see Giltner, John H., Moses Stuart: The Father of Biblical Science in America (Atlanta, 1988)Google Scholar; Laura Mitchell, “‘Matters of Justice between Man and Man:’ Northern Divines, the Bible, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,” in McKivigan, John R. and Snay, Mitchell, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery (Athens, 1998), 139–53Google Scholar; Mullin, “Biblical Critics and the Battle Over Slavery”; and Thompson, J. Earl, “Abolition and Theological Education at Andover,” New England Quarterly 47 (1974), 238–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Hodge, “Slavery,” 283. On Hodge and slavery see Guelzo, Allen, “Charles Hodge's Antislavery Moment,” in Stewart, John W. and Moorhead, James H., eds., Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), 299–325Google Scholar.

³⁸ Quoted in Beecher, Charles, The God of the Bible Against Slavery (New York, 1855), 1Google Scholar.

³⁹ Domestic Slavery, 5–6. Many of Wayland's contemporaries were disappointed by his performance in his debate with Fuller. The writer of his obituary in the New Englander complained that although he was “generally a sound logician,” Wayland was not “specially wary in a logical conflict, as evinced in his controversy with a defender of slavery, Dr. Fuller, who profited by an occasional slip of his stronger adversary.” “The Late President Wayland,” New Englander 25 (1866), 135–42, 136. Two commentaries on the debate were published: Cyrus Grosvenor, A Review of the “Correspondence” of Messrs. Fuller and Wayland on the Subject of American Slavery (Utica, NY, 1847); and William Hague, Christianity and Slavery: A Review of the Correspondence between Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland on Domestic Slavery, Considered as a Scriptural Institution (Boston, 1847). On Wayland's role in the slavery debates see Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “Suffering with Slaveholders: The Limits of Francis Wayland's Antislavery Witness,” in McKivigan and Snay, Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, 196–220.

⁴⁰ Antislavery Protestants were not the first Christians to enunciate a theory of moral progress. In the previous century, various English divines, including Edmund Law, John Edwards, William Warburton, William Worthington, David Hartley, and Richard Watson, had described revelation as a series of progressive dispensations, with humankind receiving the revelation for which they were prepared by the gradual advancement of society. The notion of the progressive unfolding of revelation helped English divines to answer the deist objection that a universal and reasonable revelation would be true for all mankind, and therefore must have been knowable by all people in all times. The belief that Christian doctrine progressed (a milder form of belief in progress, but one often associated with a belief in the progress of revelation itself) helped English divines to make the case that Christian belief would and could keep abreast of progress in the arts and sciences. In the late eighteenth century the so-called Neologians in Germany, in particular Johann Salomo Semler, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Johann Philipp Gabler, offered another variant of the idea of progressive revelation, the notion of “accommodation,” according to which the literal biblical record was accommodated to the cultural limitations of the time and place of its writers. Also in the late eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that God revealed Himself to humankind through human history. In The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing expressed a more naturalistic version of the same idea, according to which there was no revelation apart from the religious history of humankind. The nineteenth-century American theologians of moral progress did not rely upon the earlier exponents of the idea. Rather than a continuation of an earlier debate, this nineteenth-century conversation was an independent rediscovery of the theological usefulness of moral progress. On the British and German development of the idea of progress in revelation see Chadwick, Owen, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (New York, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crane, Ronald S., “Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699–1745,” Modern Philology 31 (1943), 273–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frei, Hans, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar; and Spadafora, David, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Barrows, A View of the American Slavery Question, 50.

⁴² Barrows, E. P., “The Indivisible Nature of Revelation,” Bibliotheca Sacra 10 (1853), 764–88, 777Google Scholar.

⁴³ Barrows, E. P., “The Bible and Slavery,” Bibliotheca Sacra 19 (1862), 563–606, 579Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 594.

⁴⁵ Mullin, Robert Bruce, The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell, with a foreword by Guelzo, Allen C. (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Bushnell, Horace, A Discourse on the Moral Tendencies and Results of Human History, Delivered before the Society of Alumni, Yale College, on Wednesday, August 16th, 1843 (New York, 1843), 8, 12–14Google Scholar. In a later edition of this address, published in 1871 under the title “The Growth of the Law,” in his collection of essays entitled Work and Play: Or Literary Varieties (New York, 1871), 78–123, Bushnell added that the golden rule falls under the category of revelations which, in their “inherent beneficence,” stand for all time, while many of the statutes of the Mosaic code have “no permanent significance” (93–4).

⁴⁷ Bushnell, A Discourse on the Moral Tendencies and Results of Human History, 16.

⁴⁸ Bushnell, Horace, The Census and Slavery (Hartford, 1860), 16, 19Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Theodore Munger, “Extract from an Address on William Lloyd Garrison,” Theodore Munger Papers, series 2, box 9, folder 62, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. By contrast, Lyman Abbott believed that the Garrisonians’ beliefs had been “impracticable and a cowardly evasion of responsibility.” The Garrisonians, he felt, had demanded too much, too soon, and had failed to come to terms with the human suffering that would be necessary to accomplish their ends. However, Abbott also believed that moderate attempts at moral suasion and compromise had been futile. Abbott wrote, “the issue joined between North and South, union and secession, liberty and slavery, was one that could not be settled by any compromise, however sagaciously framed, but was a phase of the world-wide issue between a Christian and a pagan civilization.” Lyman Abbott, Reminiscences (Boston, 1915), 205.

⁵⁰ Samuel Harris's nephew, George Harris, called him “the great theologian of the nineteenth century in this country.” George Harris, “Samuel Harris,” The Congregationalist 13 (1899), 46. George Harris added that this was also the opinion of Bushnell.

⁵¹ Harris, Samuel, “The Demands of Infidelity Satisfied by Christianity,” Bibliotheca Sacra 13 (1856), 272–314Google Scholar.

⁵² Harris, Samuel, “The Progress of Christ's Kingdom in its Relation to Civilization,” Bibliotheca Sacra 29 (1872), 602–22, 608, 611–12Google Scholar.

⁵³ Harris, Samuel, “Characteristics of the Growth of Christ's Kingdom,” Bibliotheca Sacra 29 (1872), 459–79, 466, 468Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Harris, Samuel, “The Organic and Visible Manifestation of Christ's Kingdom, and the Human Agency in Its Advancement,” Bibliotheca Sacra 29 (1872), 114–56, 139Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Harris, “The Progress of Christ's Kingdom in its Relation to Civilization,” 610.

⁵⁶ Harris, Samuel, The Self-Revelation of God (New York, 1891), 149Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Harris, “The Progress of Christ's Kingdom in its Relation to Civilization,” 610–11.

⁵⁸ The boldest and most prominent liberal divines of the 1870s and 1880s tended to be pastors who were less subject to ecclesiastical discipline than were seminary professors. In the late 1880s, after Andover Seminary turned liberal and its professors had launched the Andover Review, Andover became an institutional center of Protestant liberalism. Still, liberal pastors like Smyth, Abbott, and Munger remained central to the development of liberal theology. Congregationalism remained the dominant source of liberal theology until the turn of the century. After the war, Unitarian leaders struggled to defend their commitments to revealed religion against the increasingly vociferous objections of Transcendentalists and scientific theists within the denomination. In the 1860s and 1870s, Unitarians Frederic Henry Hedge, Henry W. Bellows, and James Freeman Clarke continued to contribute to the development of liberal Protestant theology. However, during the 1880s the radicals overwhelmed the confessionalists, and by the 1890s Unitarianism had become a post-Christian form of religious humanism that owed far more to Theodore Parker than it did to Channing. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, 108–9; Hutchison, William R., The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven, 1959), 190–208Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Smyth, Newman, Old Faiths in New Light (New York, 1879), 105–6, 118Google Scholar. See also idem, The Religious Feeling (New York, 1877), 67–9, 165–6; idem, The Orthodox Theology of Today (New York, 1883), 40–41; and idem, The Morality of the Old Testament (New York, 1886), 10, 48–50, 54–7. In his Christian Ethics, published in 1892, Smyth again referred to slavery. He used the example of Paul's letter to Philemon to demonstrate how Christian theology and ethics progress in tandem. Smyth wrote, “The new conception of the relation of man and God in Christ—the theological truth underlying the epistle—passes at once into an ethical application to the relation of the slave and the master. The theology of Paul was the beginning of the abolition of slavery.” Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (New York, 1892), 70. In his 1879 discussion of slavery and revelation, Smyth referred to an 1877 lecture by James Bowling Mozley, a British theologian and participant in the Oxford movement. Mozley argued that because revelation is progressive, the true morality of revelation was its final morality rather than that of the Old Testament. James Bowling Mozley, “The End the Test of a Progressive Revelation,” in idem, Ruling Ideas in Early Ages and their Relation to Old Testament Faith (London, 1877), 222–53.

⁶⁰ Smyth, Old Faiths in New Light, 16, 153. Smyth was so interested in evolution that he took time off from his pastoral responsibilities to conduct his own experiments in the laboratories at Yale. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, 301.

⁶¹ Smyth, The Morality of the Old Testament, 63. On the various theological uses of evolution see David N. Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Edinburgh, 1987); Moore, James R., The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roberts, Jon H., Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison, WI, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁶² Like Smyth, Abbott credited the progress of Christianity with the abolition of slavery. Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (Boston, 1892), 7, 20, 25, 66, 199.

⁶³ Munger, Theodore, The Appeal to Life (Boston, 1887), 215–18Google Scholar. In his review of Munger's The Freedom of Faith, Todd, John E.complained that Munger's use of evolution replaced an immediate, personal communion with God with a system of laws and processes. John E. Todd, “New Theology,” Bibliotheca Sacra 43 (1886), 335–56, 352–4Google Scholar.