If we go farther into this question, we shall commonly find that the facts and events to which we give the name of Providence are the acts of human wills divinely overruled.  There is iniquity and wrong in these facts and events, because they are the work of free human wills.  But when these free human wills organize falsehood, institute injustice, and establish oppression, they have passed into that mental state where will has been perverted into wilfulness, and self-direction has been exaggerated into self-worship.  It is the essence of wilfulness that it exalts the impulses of its pride above the intuitions of conscience and intelligence, and puts force in the place of reason and right.  The person has thus emancipated himself from all restraints of a law higher than his personality, and acts from self, for self, and in sole obedience to self.  But this is personality in its Satanic form; yet it is just here that some of our theologians have discovered in a person’s actions the purposes of Providence, and discerned the Divine intention in the fact of guilt instead of in the certainty of retribution.  The tyrant element in man is found in this Satanic form of his individuality.  His will, self-released from restraint, preys upon and crushes other wills.  He asserts himself by enslaving others, and mimics Divinity on the stilts of diabolism.  Like the barbarian who thought himself enriched by the powers and gifts of the enemy he slew, he aggrandizes his own personality, and heightens his own sense of freedom, through the subjection of feebler natures.  Ruthless, rapacious, greedy of power, greedy of gain, it is in Slavery that he wantons in all the luxury of injustice, for it is here that he tastes the exquisite pleasure of depriving others of that which he most values in himself.

Thus, whether we examine this system in the light of conscience and intelligence, or in the light of history and experience, we come to but one result,—­that it has its source and sustenance in Satanic energy, in Satanic pride, and in Satanic greed.  This is Slavery in itself, detached from the ameliorations it may receive from individual slaveholders.  Now a bad system is not continued or extended by the virtues of any individuals who are but partially corrupted by it, but by those who work in the spirit and with the implements of its originators.  Every amelioration is a confession of the essential injustice of the thing ameliorated, and a step towards its abolition; and the humane and Christian slaveholders owe their safety, and the security of what they are pleased to call their property, to the vices of the hard and stern spirits whom they profess to abhor.  If they invest in stock of the Devil’s corporation, they ought not to be severe on those who look out that they punctually receive their dividends.  The true slaveholder feels that he is encamped among his slaves, that he holds them by the right of conquest, that the relation