ANSWER.—­The events of the last year, including the action of the present Congress, are of the same character with the events of the eighteen months which immediately preceded it.  In the question before us, they may be regarded as one series.  I would say, answering your interrogatory generally, that none of them, however unpropitious to the cause of the abolitionists they may appear, to those who look at the subject from an opposite point to the one they occupy, seem, thus far, in any degree to have lessened their hopes and expectations.  The events alluded to have not come altogether unexpected.  They are regarded as the legitimate manifestations of slavery—­necessary, perhaps, in the present dull and unapprehensive state of the public mind as to human rights, to be brought out and spread before the people, before they will sufficiently revolt against slavery itself.

1.  They are seen in the CHURCH, and in the practice of its individual members.  The southern portion of the American church may now be regarded as having admitted the dogma, that slavery is a Divine institution.  She has been forced by the anti-slavery discussion into this position—­either to cease from slaveholding, or formally to adopt the only alternative, that slaveholding is right.  She has chosen the alternative—­reluctantly, to be sure, but substantially, and, within the last year, almost unequivocally.  In defending what was dear to her, she has been forced to cast away her garments, and thus to reveal a deformity, of which she herself, before, was scarcely aware, and the existence of which others did not credit.  So much for the action of the southern church as a body.—­On the part of her MEMBERS, the revelation of a time-serving spirit, that not only yielded to the ferocity of the multitude, but fell in with it, may be reckoned among the events of the last three years.  Instances of this may be found in the attendance of the “clergy of all denominations,” at a tumultuous meeting of the citizens of Charleston, S.C., held in August, 1835, for the purpose of reducing to system their unlawful surveillance and control of the post-office and mail; and in the alacrity with which they obeyed the popular call to dissolve the Sunday-schools for the instruction of the colored people.  Also in the fact, that, throughout the whole South, church members are not only found on the Vigilance Committees, (tribunals organized in opposition to the laws of the states where they exist,) but uniting with the merciless and the profligate in passing sentence consigning to infamous and excruciating, if not extreme punishment, persons, by their own acknowledgment, innocent of any unlawful act.  Out of sixty persons that composed the vigilance committee which condemned Mr. Dresser to be scourged in the public square of Nashville, TWENTY-SEVEN were members of churches, and one of them a professed Teachers of Christianity.  A member of the committee stated afterward, in a newspaper