Other sects, notably the Presbyterians, had been energetic and efficient in demanding their own liberties; the Friends and the Baptists agreed in demanding liberty of conscience and worship, and equality before the law, for all alike.

But the active labor in this cause was mainly done by the Baptists.

It is to their consistency and constancy in the warfare against the privileges of the powerful "Standing Order" of New England, and of the moribund establishments of the South, that we are chiefly indebted for the final triumph, in this country, of that principle of the separation of church from state which is one of the largest contributions of the New World to civilization and to the church universal.
It is not surprising that a people so earnest as the Baptists showed themselves in the promotion of religious liberty should be forward in the condemnation of American slavery.

We have already seen the vigor with which the Methodists, having all their strength at the South, levied a spiritual warfare against this great wrong.

It was at the South that the Baptists, in 1789, "_Resolved_, That slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican government, and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of every legal measure to extirpate this horrid evil from the land."[222:1] At the North, Jonathan Edwards the Younger is conspicuous in the unbroken succession of antislavery churchmen.