Sad?
yes, but alas! natural, too.

These men were not better nor worse than the average man.

They were the average men of their generation, selfish, narrow, material, encrusted in their prejudices like snails in their shells, struggling upward at a snail's pace to the larger life, with its added sweetness and humanities, but experiencing many a discomfiture by the way from those foul and triple fiends, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
Nowhere in the churches was their opposition to the Abolition movement more persistent and illiberal than in the theological seminaries, whence the pulpits drew their supplies of preachers.

Like master, like servant, these institutions were indentured to the public, and reflected as in a mirror the body and pressure of its life and sentiment.

That a stream cannot rise higher than its source, although a theological stream, found remarkable demonstration in the case of Lane Seminary.