they would consent to be fellow-members in the Tract Society with him who sold their fellow-members in Christ on the auction-block, if he agreed with them in condemning Transubstantiation, (and it would not be difficult for a gentleman who ignored the real presence of God in his brother man to deny it in the sacramental wafer,)—­ if those excellent men had been told this, they would have shrunk in horror, and exclaimed, “Are thy servants dogs, that they should do these things?”

Yet this is precisely the present position of the Society.

There are two ways of evading the responsibility of such inconsistency.  The first is by an appeal to the Society’s Constitution, and by claiming to interpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of law as applied to contracts, whether between individuals or States.  The second is by denying that Slavery is opposed to the genius of Christianity, and that any moral wrongs are the necessary results of it.  We will not be so unjust to the Society as to suppose that any of its members would rely on this latter plea, and shall therefore confine ourselves to a brief consideration of the other.

In order that the same rules of interpretation should be considered applicable to the Constitution of the Society and to that of the United States, we must attribute to the former a solemnity and importance which involve a palpable absurdity.  To claim for it the verbal accuracy and the legal wariness of a mere contract is equally at war with common sense and the facts of the case; and even were it not so, the party to a bond who should attempt to escape its ethical obligation by a legal quibble of construction would be put in Coventry by all honest men.  In point of fact, the Constitution was simply the minutes of an agreement among certain gentlemen, to define the limits within which they would accept trust-funds, and the objects for which they should expend them.

But if we accept the alternative offered by the advocates of strict construction, we shall not find that their case is strengthened.  Claiming that where the meaning of an instrument is doubtful, it should be interpreted according to the contemporary understanding of its framers, they argue that it would be absurd to suppose that gentlemen from the Southern States would have united to form a society that included in its objects any discussion of the moral duties arising from the institution of Slavery.  Admitting the first part of their proposition, we deny the conclusion they seek to draw from it.  They are guilty of a glaring anachronism in assuming the same opinions and prejudices to have existed in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in 1858.  The Antislavery agitation did not begin until 1831, and the debates in the Virginia Convention prove conclusively that six years after the foundation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of