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SKETCHES OF NORTH CAROLINA.

CHAPTER XXX.
POPLAR TENT AND ITS PASTORS.

IT has ever been an acknowledged rule of propriety, that in political discussions and excitements which relate to persons and affairs rather than principles of constitutional right and natural justice, the ministers of the gospel should keep themselves uncommitted, and, in the exercise of unalienable rights as citizens, maintain the character of ministers of the King of kings, who bring the offers of mercy alike to all. There are, however, times when the excitements in society involve the greatest interests and the most valuable and dear privileges; when truth and justice, liberty and morality, are struggling against power and oppression; when the spirits that are thirsting for a better state of things, require all the support that can be brought to their aid from the seen and the unseen world, from the succors of things temporal, and the powerful influence of things eternal. Then the ministers of the gospel must mingle in the strife, bringing from the treasury of the Lord the all-sustaining truths of revelation; drinking deep of the fountains of life to keep their own spirits pure, and putting to the lips of the brave and the weak-hearted, in the fierce struggle, the pure water of the living stream. No strength is so abiding and resistless, no courage so daring and yet so cool, as that which rests for its help on the unchanged truth and government of the eternal God. Such a time and such a conjuncture was the American Revolution. And many ministers of the gospel went down into the struggle. Some sat in the councils of deliberation and resolve, and others bore the fatigues of the camp, partaking of the trials of their fellow-citizens in their bloody contests. In Carolina, Hall and McCaule encouraged their fellow-citizens, their flocks particularly, as soldiers; Balch, and Pattillo, and Caldwell, aided in the councils and high resolves of Convention and Provincial Congress, and others endured the miseries of an invaded people, plundered but not subdued.

In the convention that met in Charlotte, May 19th, 1775, there was one minister of the gospel, Hezekiah James Balch, of Poplar Tent. That he was active in the preparatory steps for that convention