“A minister of Virginia, still living, and whose name must not be mentioned for fear of Nero Preston and his confederate-hanging myrmidons, informed me of this fact in 1815, in his own house.  ’A member of my church, said he, lately whipped a colored youth to death.  What shall I do?’ I answered, ’I hope you do not mean to continue him in your church.’  That minister replied, ‘How can we help it’ We dare not call him to an account.  We have no legal testimony.’  Their communion season was then approaching.  I addressed his wife,—­’Mrs. ——­ do you mean to sit at the Lord’s table with that murderer?’—­,’Not I,’ she answered:  ’I would as soon commune with the devil himself.’  The slave killer was equally unnoticed by the civil and ecclesiastical authority.

“John Baxter, a Presbyterian elder, the brother of that slaveholding doctor in divinity, George A. Baxter, held as a slave the wife of a Baptist colored preacher, familiarly called ‘Uncle Jack.’  In a late period of pregnancy he scourged her so that the lives of herself and her unborn child were considered in jeopardy.  Uncle Jack was advised to obtain the liberation of his wife.  Baxter finally agreed, I think, to sell the woman and her children, three of them, I believe for six hundred dollars, and an additional hundred if the unborn child survived a certain period after its birth.  Uncle Jack was to pay one hundred dollars per annum for his wife and children for seven years, and Baxter held a sort of mortgage upon them for the payment.  Uncle Jack showed me his back in furrows like a ploughed field.  His master used to whip up the flesh, then beat it downwards, and then apply the ‘negro plaster,’ salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar, until all Jack’s back was almost as hard and unimpressible as the bones.  There is slaveholding religion!  A Presbyterian elder receiving from a Baptist preacher seven hundred dollars for his wife and children.  James Kyle and uncle Jack used to tell that story with great Christian sensibility; and uncle Jack would weep tears of anguish over his wife’s piteous tale, and tears of ecstasy at the same moment that he was free, and that soon, by the grace of God, his wife and children, as he said, ‘would be all free together.’”

Rev. JAMES NOURSE, a Presbyterian clergyman of Mifflia co.  Penn., whose father is, we believe, a slaveholder in Washington City, says,—­

“The Rev. Mr. M——­, now of the Huntingdon Presbytery, after an absence of many months, was about visiting his old friends on what is commonly called the ‘Eastern Shore.’  Late in the afternoon, on his journey, he called at the house of Rev. A.C. of P——­town, Md.  With this brother he had been long acquainted.  Just at that juncture Mr. C. was about proceeding to whip a colored female, who was his slave.  She was firmly tied to a post in FRONT of his dwelling-house.  The arrival of a clerical visitor at such a time, occasioned a temporary delay in the execution of Mr. C’s purpose.  But the delay was only temporary;