Discussions (Vol 2) - Dabney - XXI - Pan-Presbyterian Alliance (II)

Required reading
Discussions (Vol 2) by Robert L. Dabney (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read 'Pan-Presbyterian Alliance' (Same title as the last chapter).

My summary
Today Dabney continues giving us his opinion of the Pan-Presbyterian alliance.

He objects to the alliance as it is:
(i) broad-church;
(ii) costly;
(iii) unconstitutional.

What grabbed me
Dabney continues to make statements that Christians should not respect: 'Every constituent body to the Alliance, save one or two of the smaller, have bitterly, and even contemptuously denounced the position actually and still held by the Southern church as to slave-holding, and have made it a ground for refusing to us communion and alliance. Meanwhile slavery in the United States has been destroyed by violence, so that no Christian among us is now formally a slaveholder. But, as a matter of doctrine and morals, our church really holds identically the position these proposing allies have always anathematized. Thus both candor and common honesty towards them and decent respect for ourselves and our fathers obviously require that we shall come to an understanding with our new comrades how it is that they now propose to embrace us, whom they lately rejected. Will any one say. No ! because slavery is now a thing of the past? The resistless answer is that with us, as a church, IT IS NOT, for we to-day refuse to confess and retract as to our doctrine ; and it is for this doctrine touching slavery we are, as a church, responsible. The only solution of this knot which had ever been spoken ''out aloud" was one of so offensive a nature that it seemed amazing any gentleman in the South could fail to regard it as a positive affront.'

I'm saddened that so much of this material concerning slavery is being reprinted by the Banner of Truth.  This is not truth.

Surely such chapters could have been omitted from the volume.

Next week's reading
Read 'The Southern Church and the Presbyterian Alliance'.

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.