in the Bible for the sins of which they are guilty.  The other is, that infidels are multiplied by this perversion.  A respectable gentleman, who edits a newspaper in this neighborhood, and who, unhappily, is not established in the Christian faith, was asked, a few months since, to attend a meeting of a Bible Society.  “I am not willing,” said he, in reply, “to favor the circulation of a volume, which many of its friends claim to be on the side of slavery.”  Rely on it, Sir, that wherever your book produces the conviction that the Bible justifies slavery, it there weakens whatever of respect for that blessed volume previously existed.  Whoever is brought to associate slavery with the Bible, may, it is true, think better of slavery; but he will surely think worse of the Bible.  I hope, therefore, in mercy to yourself and the world, that the success of your undertaking will be small.

But oftentimes the same providence has a bright, as well as a gloomy, aspect.  It is so in the case before us.  The common attempt, in our day, to intrench great sins in the authority of the Bible, is a consoling and cheering evidence, that this volume is recognised as the public standard of right and wrong; and that, whatever may be their private opinions of it who are guilty of these sins, they cannot hope to justify themselves before the world, unless their lives are, apparently, at least, conformed, in some good degree, to this standard.  We may add, too, that, as surely as the Bible is against slavery, every pro-slavery writer, who like yourself appeals to it as the infallible and only admissible standard of right and wrong, will contribute to the overthrow of the iniquitous system.  His writings may not, uniformly, tend to this happy result.  In some instances, he may strengthen confidence in the system of slavery by producing conviction, that the Bible sanctions it;—­and then his success will be, as before remarked, at the expense of the claims and authority of the Bible:—­but these instances of the pernicious effects of his writings will be very rare, quite too rare we may hope, to counterbalance the more generally useful tendency of writings on the subject of slavery, which recognise the paramount authority of God’s law.

Having completed the examination of your book, I wish to hold up to you, in a single view, the substance of what you have done.  You have come forth, the unblushing advocate of American slavery;—­a system which, whether we study its nature in the deliberate and horrid enactments of its code, or in the heathenism and pollution and sweat and tears and blood, which prove, but too well, the agreement of its practical character with its theory—­is, beyond all doubt, more oppressive and wicked than any other, which the avaricious, sensual, cruel heart of man ever devised.  You have come forth, the unblushing advocate of a system under which parents are daily selling their children; brothers and sisters, their brothers and sisters; members of the Church of Christ,