If the aim of the Society be only to convert men from sins they have no mind to, and to convince them of errors to which they have no temptation, they might as well be spending their money to persuade schoolmasters that two and two make four, or mathematicians that there cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle.  If this be their notion of the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of sleeping in church.

But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they unanimously adopted the following resolution:  “That those moral duties which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral evils and vices which it is known to promote, and which are condemned in Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly do fall within the province of this Society, and can and ought to be discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit.”  The Society saw clearly that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon’s line in the world of ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude.  The only line which Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that great horizon-line of the moral nature of man which is the boundary between light and darkness.  The Society, by yielding (as they have done in 1858) to what are pleasantly called the “objections” of the South, (objections of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs were “forced to flee,”) virtually exclude the black man, if born to the southward of a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God’s providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the Episcopal Church did to the artist when they published Ary Scheffer’s Christus Consolator with the figure of the slave left out.

The Society is not asked to disseminate antislavery doctrines, but simply to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they have recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to remind him in turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls of his bondmen.  But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at present the ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all appeals, that God in his good time will turn their hearts, and that then, and not till then, will be the fitting occasion to do something in the premises.  But if the Society is to await this golden opportunity with such exemplary patience in one case, why not in all?  If it is to decline any attempt at converting the sinner till after God has converted him, will there be any special necessity for a tract society at all?  Will it not be a little presumptuous, as well as superfluous, to undertake the doing over again of what He has already done?  We fear that the studies of Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue thus have entered in order to fit themselves for the legal and constitutional argument of the question, have confused their minds, and that they are misled by some fancied analogy between a tract and an action of trover, and conceive that the one, like the other, cannot be employed till after an actual conversion has taken place.