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diate emancipation" by individual masters, "at all hazards," and without regard to consequences; the doctrine that slavery is a sin on the part of the master, always and in all circumstances, and that he must immediately renounce his authority without asking what is expedient for the commonwealth, or what for the welfare of the slave. All who refused to receive that doctrine and its corollaries, were denounced as "pro-slavery," and as sacrificing duty to expediency.

Such was the occasion on which I felt myself called to publish the first of the following essays. A critical examination of the subject in the light of the Scriptures, seemed to be necessary at that time; and I did what I could. The two or three years that followed, were years of great excitement in respect to slavery. The most extravagant views were presented on both sides. On the one hand, the Anti-Slavery party, including the no-government element from which it has now in some measure disengaged itself, seemed to aim at irritating public opinion into phrenzy. On the other hand, the southern people were demanding that the discussion of slavery in the free States should be put down by mobs; and there were found northern men base enough to lend themselves to such a demand. The dates of several of these essays, will show that they were written during that period of excitement.

Ten years ago, I thought that I had done all that it was my duty to do in this way. But within a few months past, a sort of necessity seems to be laid upon me. The subject came up, last summer, in the General Association of the Congregational Pastors of Connecticut. And there, as I have always been wont to do wherever an opportunity has arisen, I expressed very freely the same views which I had formerly uttered through the press. What I said, in the freedom of fraternal debate, was reported, not very accurately, in several newspapers; and some of those reports were commented upon with severity in the "Christian Observer," a Presbyterian newspaper, which, though published in Philadelphia, seems to be designed chiefly for a southern circulation. Thus summoned before the public, I could not well refuse to answer for myself. Then came the proceedings in the American Board of Foreign Missions; and the extent to which I found myself involved in that debate, and in the newspaper discussions which followed, seemed to require that I should not excuse myself from one more attempt to vindicate what is manifest to my mind as truth.

Nothing is more likely, than that some differences may be discovered between the earlier essays and the later, for the Author has intended to regard truth rather than his own consistency, and he will not

undertake to maintain that, in thirteen years he has learned nothing. The only changes made, besides the removal of some verbal inaccuracies, incident to the haste of writing for a periodical publication, are the correction of one passage which when first published, gave unintentional offence, and the omission of two or three allusions, in the earlier essays, to the controversy which the Anti-Slavery Society was then maintaining with the friends of African colonization. That controversy, since our Anti-Slavery friends have done so much at colonization in Canada, seems to be at rest; and I have no wish to revive it.

Some of my friends have expected that I would reply to the address issued against the American Board of Missions, by a convention lately held at Syracuse. That address, I doubt not, is capable of most abundant refutation, but I do not conceive that it devolves on me to reply to it. In the details of such a reply, and the numberless questions of fact which it would be necessary to consider, the original question of principle, the question of the relations of Christianity to slavery, the question whether a master of slaves may in any instance be recognized as a Christian, would be quite forgotten.

It is no part of the object, in any of these essays, to prove that the slavery which exists in these American States is wrong. To me it seems that the man who needs argument on that point, cannot be argued with.

What elementary idea of right and wrong can that man have? If that form of government, that system. of social order is not wrong-if those laws of the southern states, by virtue of which slavery exists there, and is what it is, are not wrong-nothing is wrong. Such a book as Wheeler's "Law of Slavery," leaves no room for any argument to prove that our southern slavery is wrong, if only the reader is gifted with a moral sense. It is, therefore, taken for granted in these essays, from first to last, that every man has rights, and that our American slavery -which denies all rights to some two millions of human beings, and decrees that they shall always be held at the lowest point of degradation-is too palpably wrong to be argued about. The wrong of that slavery, however, is one thing, and the way to rectify that wrong, is another thing. The wrongfulness of that entire body of laws, opinions and practices is one thing; and the criminality of the individual master, who tries to do right, is another thing. These essays, therefore, treat chiefly of the way in which the wrong can be set right.

New Haven, April 24th, 1846.

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