of which he was the editor, that Mr. D. had not laid himself liable to any punishment known to the laws.  Another instance is to be found in the conduct of the Rev. Wm. S. Plumer, of Virginia.  Having been absent from Richmond, when the ministers of the gospel assembled together formally to testify their abhorrence of the abolitionists, he addressed the chairman of the committee of correspondence a note, in which he uses this language:—­“If abolitionists will set the country in a blaze, it is but fair that they should have the first warming at the fire.”—­“Let them understand, that they will be caught, if they come among us, and they will take good heed to keep out of our way.”  Mr. P. has no doubtful standing in the Presbyterian church with which he is connected.  He has been regarded as one of its brightest ornaments.[A] To drive the slaveholding church and its members from the equivocal, the neutral position, from which they had so long successfully defended slavery—­to compel them to elevate their practice to an even height with their avowed principles, or to degrade their principles to the level of their known practice, was a preliminary, necessary in the view of abolitionists, either for bringing that part of the church into the common action against slavery, or as a ground for treating it as confederate with oppressors.  So far, then, as the action of the church, or of its individual members, is to be reckoned among the events of the last two or three years, the abolitionists find in it nothing to lessen their hopes or expectations.

[Footnote A:  In the division of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, that has just taken place, Mr. Plumer has been elected Moderator of the “Old School” portion.]

2.  The abolitionists believed, from the beginning, that the slaves of the South were (as slaves are everywhere) unhappy, because of their condition.  Their adversaries denied it, averring that, as a class, they were “contented and happy.”  The abolitionists thought that the argument against slavery could be made good, so far as this point was concerned, by either admitting or denying the assertion.

Admitting it, they insisted, that, nothing could demonstrate the turpitude of any system more surely than the fact, that MAN—­made in the image of God—­but a little lower than the angels—­crowned with glory and honor, and set over the works of God’s hands—­his mind sweeping in an instant from planet to planet, from the sun of one system to the sun of another, even to the great centre sun of them all—­contemplating the machinery of the universe “wheeling unshaken” in the awful and mysterious grandeur of its movements “through the void immense”—­with a spirit delighting in upward aspiration—­bounding from earth to heaven—­that seats itself fast by the throne of God, to drink in the instructions of Infinite Wisdom, or flies to execute the commands of Infinite Goodness;—­that such a being could be made “contented and happy” with “enough to eat, and drink, and wear,” and shelter from the weather—­with the base provision that satisfies the brutes, is (say the abolitionists) enough to render superfluous all other arguments for the instant abandonment of a system whose appropriate work is such infinite wrong.