made their peace with it, working to improve conditions of the institution. Ministers (and their congregants) often cited Old Testament scriptures as justification, which they interpreted as representing slavery as a part of the natural order of things. Eventually the Methodist Church split into two regional associations over the issue of slavery before the Civil War. Those looking for Biblical support cited Leviticus Chapter 25, verses 44–46, which state as follows: New Testament writings were sometimes used to support the case for slavery as well. Some of the writings of Paul, especially in Ephesians, instruct slaves to remain obedient to their masters. Southern ideology after the Revolution developed to argue a paternalistic point of view, that slavery was beneficial for enslaved people as well as the people who held them in slavery. They said that Christian planters could concentrate on improving treatment of slaves and that the people in bondage were offered protections from many ills, and treated better than industrial workers in the North. In the mid-1790s the Methodists and the Quakers drew together to form the Maryland Society of the Abolition of Slavery. Together they lobbied the legislature. In 1796 they gained repeal of the 1753 law that had prohibited individual manumissions by a slaveholder. Responding to Methodist and Quaker persuasion, as well as revolutionary ideals and lower labor needs, in the first two decades after the war, a number of slaveholders freed their slaves. In 1815 the Methodists and Quakers formed the Protection Society of Maryland, a group which sought protection for the increasing number of free blacks living in the state. By the time of the Civil War, 49.1% of Maryland blacks were free, including most of the large black population of Baltimore. Roman Catholic Church Other churches in Maryland were more equivocal. The Roman Catholic Church in Maryland and its members had long tolerated slavery. Despite a firm stand for the spiritual equality of black people, Jesuit missioners also continued to own slaves on their plantations. The Catholic Church in Maryland had supported slaveholding interests. The Jesuits controlled six plantations totaling nearly 12,000 acres, some of which had been donated to the church. In 1838 they ended slaveholding with a mass sale of their 272 slaves to sugar cane plantations in Louisiana in the Deep South. This was historically one of the largest single slave sales in colonial Maryland. The Jesuits' plantations had not been