did not contain one tenth part of the Presbyterian church. Nothing, therefore, could have been more easy, than to have fulfilled the claims of christian equity, and to have told the slaveholders-We cannot conscientiously, we dare not scripturally acknowledge you to be christians and Presbyterians. You must quit man-stealing, or we cannot hold gospel fellowship with you. Instead of this plain, honest dealing, the people of that day entered upon a course of expediency, prudence, and carnal policy. They first denied their own principles, by acknowledging that a person is not born free; and then, by holding out in practice the atrocious error, that a slaveholder is an acceptable follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, they opened the flood-gates of all possible iniquity: because this topic is decided, not by the standard of truth revealed in the scriptures, but according to the ever-shifting principles of "men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, who suppose that gain is godliness."

Will slaveholding professors of religion, and preachers, hear with any degree of patience and candor, a just application of the principles of natural justice and of the great law of love, to the crime of slaveholding? Like all other persevering sinners, they hate the light, neither come to the light, lest their deeds should be reproved. And can christian charity receive men who are thus persisting in the highest kind of theft, as true disciples of Jesus the Son of God?

All persons acquainted with the southern states well know that slavery is there the grand source of infidelity; that slaveholding professors of religion are an insuperable stumbling-block to men of reflection and conscience, who are opposed to slavery; and that slavery constitutes an almost impassable barrier to the progress of the light and the truth as it is in Jesus. It is in vain any longer to palliate or conceal the enormity of this sin—a sin which renders callous the hearts of all who apologize for it, and sears as with a hot iron, the consciences of those who are guilty of this impious practice.

From our Confession of Faith, we deduce these principles :

1. Slaveholding, under every possible modification, is man-stealing. 2. Man-stealing, as combining impiety in principle, falsehood in claim, injustice and cruelty without intermission and without end, is the most flagrant iniquity which a sinner can perpetrate.

3. All profession of religion, by a man who thus acts, is a gross deception.

4. The tolerance of such men as preachers and christian profesfessors, is a direct insult to Him who searcheth the hearts and trieth the reins of the children of men.

5. All the pleas of expediency which are offered for this perversion of God's truth are not less criminal than they are destructive.

6. Slavery in the United States can never be abolished as long as it is sanctioned and approved by the various denominations of christians.

7. Therefore it is the incumbent duty of every church to excommunicate, without delay, all those persons who will not cease to "steal, buy, sell, and enslave their fellow-citizens."

We, as a body of people, stand convicted before the world of rank and constant hypocrisy. On several occasions, the questions connected with slavery have been introduced into the General Assembly; and uniformly the heart-rending subject has been evaded; or a cold, unmeaning, or Jesuistical minute has been recorded, instead of an efficient testimony and pungent resolution against sin. Conscientious men have asked for a fish, and the temporisers have given us a serpent -we have begged gospel bread, and they have given us the stone of mammon- -we have solicited the egg of truth for our nourishment, and they have given us the slaveholder's scorpion to poison our morals and benumb our consciences. Forty-four years have passed away; men have pretended to lament the evil, to deplore the national guilt, to reprehend the inconsistency of professing gospel honesty, and constantly performing the villainy of kidnappers; and nevertheless, the crime increases, the hypocrisy extends, and the men-stealers augment in the most fearful manner.

It is one of the remarkable characters of our age, that the principle of liberality extends itself to the greater obliquities, while it denounces the lesser sin. No design is formed to institute a comparison between the degrees of particular sins; but surely in ecclesiastical discipline, it is evidently unjust to permit the grosser offence to escape with impunity, or to be honored, while the inferior transgression receives the pouring out of the full vial of indignant censure.

The Temperance cause is justly eulogized as one of the noblest efforts of modern times to redeem the character of mankind from debasement; but it will not be asserted that there is any justice in excluding from the church a sober man, otherwise irreproachable, because he has not adopted the principle of total abstinence from spirituous liquors, and at the same time to recognize the christian profession of a man-stealer. It is presumed that no christian community would admit the profession of religion by an avowed gambler, or a person habitually profane-why then, it may be asked, are slaveholders tolerated in the christian church, who are constantly manifesting an irreconcilable contradiction against all that is righteous, true, and merciful?

We are told that all the practitioners of slavery are enemies to slaveholding, in the abstract! This assertion is not true; as is manifest from two undeniable facts; the first is this; that the slave-drivers make no effort to extirpate slavery, and pertinaciously resist every attempt to meliorate not only the condition of the slave, but also to elevate the character and capacities of the free people of color: and the second proof that all professions of dislike to slavery, in the abstract, are deceptive, is derived from an every day occurrence;-when a slave has providentially been enabled to escape from the house of bondage, the slaveholder, who, contrary to the word of God, the natural conscience of man, and the laws of christianity, claims the human being as his property, instead of permitting the slave thus to liberate himself, in person, and by his hired kidnappers, will ransack every portion of our country, from Eastport to New Orleans, and from Boston to the Missouri, expressly to recover possession of the slave, that the victim may be tortured to satiate his revenge. To talk, therefore, of such persons being opponents of slavery is most insulting prevarication: and yet this abhorrent violation of the divine precept is committed in open day, and boasted of and defended by preachers of the gospel, as if it was the very cap-stone of christian philanthropy and righteousness. Therefore, let us hear the word of the Lord. Mark the solemn prohibition! Deuteronomy xxviii. 15, 16: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant who is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall

choose, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." Remember the illustration. 1 Samuel, xxx. 11-15. "They found an Egyptian in the field.And David said unto him, whence art thou? And he said, I am a young man of Egypt, servant to an Amalekite, and my master left me, because three days ago I fell sick. And David said, canst thou bring me down to this company? And he said, swear unto me by God, that thou wilt neither kill me, nor deliver me into the hands of my master." Well may all these enemies of slavery in the abstract, but who are practical kidnappers, tremble at the divine denunciation! Obadiah 14, 15. "Neither shouldest thou have stood in

the crossway, to cut off those who did escape; neither shouldest thou have delivered up those that did remain in the day of distress; as thou hast done it shall be done unto thee; thy reward shall return upon thine own head."

Our Presbyterian church is unequivocally to be numbered among those friends of truth and enemies of ungodliness in the abstract. At the period of their present organization in 1788, as appears from the extract already quoted, they were theoretical opponents of man-stealing, but they recognized the men-stealers as their christian brethren. What followed? The pungent truth remained in the confession a dead letter; and like the book of the law in Josiah's time, when it was discovered in 1815, it excited universal consternation among the slave-holders who never would rest until by their clamors and menaces they intimidated the northern brethren in 1818, to consent that it should be expunged. On several intermediate occasions, when the subject was presented to the General Assembly, and some minute was obliged to be made of the reference, to pacify them who desired to "do justly and to love mercy" -the Assembly recorded a condemnation of slavery in the abstract, and coldly urged the necessity of adopting the means to effect a gradual abolition of slavery. The consequence was this; that the slave-holders professed to admit the theory, but the time was not come for a simultaneous movement-and the hardships, the fetters, the degradation, the irreligion, the ignorance and the anguish of the slaves have increased, “grown with their growth, and strengthened with their strength:" and now, at the end of forty-five years, there are undoubtedly forty-five times the number of slaveholding preachers and elders and members in the Presbyterian

church to those who could have been enumerated in the month of May, 1788. This is the result of hating slavery in the abstract, and loving it in the practice; and according to the present system, did not the divine proclamation, as proved by the signs of the times, plainly declare to that grim man-stealing monster; Thou shalt die; thy days are nearly ended -it might be safely affirmed, that before the lapse of another 45 years, the colored people from their vast disproportionate increase would have possession of the whole southern section of the Republic; and this would be the effect principally of the sanction given to slavery by those temporizing christians, who, when they see a man-thief consent with him, because they hate instruction and cast the words of the Lord behind them. Psalm 1. 16-21.

There is yet a much more alarming view of this subject in its christian reference. Many colored persons are acknowledged and believed to be subjects of converting grace, and yet they are property, debased as slaves, and even bought and sold as beasts by their nominal fellowchristians, probably even menbers of the same society of professed believers. This is the climax of all the atrocities connected with the system of slavery. A man or woman whose principles are settled by the oracles of God, and whose consciences are directed by the gospel, will command a much larger sum of money on account of the spiritual gifts with which they are endowed; and the owner of this property, as he is scandalously termed, can safely calculate upon a large additional bonus for the faithfulness and integrity of a slave actuated by the heavenborn feelings of a genuine disciple of the Friend of sinners. These christians are tortured, and trafficked, and deprived of all comfort, religious instruction and earthly hope, by their professed fellow-christians, with equal indifference as if they were worn out horses, and as if no human sensibility and no gospel emotion had ever quickened their souls; and thus these slaveholding professors exhibit their hatred of slavery in the abstract.

This deceivableness is rendered more repulsive, and the iniquity more flagrant, by the continuous implied or actual promises which are made by all parties, to desist from their ungodly course. The last minute of the General Assembly was made, I believe, in the year 1818. It professes to be a full exposition of the sentiments of that ecclesias