“As humble laborers in the cause of negro emancipation, we hail, with emotions more easily imagined than described, the appearance of that remarkable work, which has awakened a world-wide sympathy on behalf of the suffering negro, and called forth a burst of honest indignation against the atrocious system of slavery, which, we trust, under the divine blessing, will, at no distant period, accomplish its entire abolition.  We are not insensible to those extraordinary merits of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a merely literary production, which have procured for its talented authoress such universal commendation and enthusiastic applause; but we feel it to be our duty to refer rather to the Christian principles and earnest piety which pervade its interesting pages, and to express our warmest desire, we trust we may say heartfelt prayer, that He who bestowed upon you the power and the grace to write such a work may preserve and bless you amid all your honours, and enable you, under a grateful and humble sense of his abundant goodness, to give him all the glory.

“We rejoice to find that the great principles upon which our society is based are so fully and so cordially recognized by yourself and your beloved husband and brother—­First, that personal slavery, in all its varied forms, is a direct violation of the blessed, precepts of the gospel, and therefore a sin in the sight of God; and secondly, that every victim of this unjust and sinful system is entitled to immediate and unconditional freedom.  For, however we might acquiesce in the course of a nation which, under a sense of its participation in the guilt of slavery, should share the pecuniary loss, if such there were, of its immediate abolition, yet we repudiate the right to demand compensation for human flesh and blood, as (to employ the emphatic words of Lord Brougham) we repudiate and abhor ’the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man.’  And we do not hesitate to express our conviction, strengthened by the experience of emancipation in our own colonies, that on the mere ground of social or political expediency, the immediate termination of slavery would be far less dangerous and far less injurious than, any system of compromise, or any attempt at gradual emancipation.

“Let it be borne in mind, however,—­and we record it with peculiar interest on the present occasion,—­that it was the pen of a woman that first publicly enunciated the imperative duty of immediate emancipation.  Amid vituperation and ridicule, and, far worse, the cold rebuke of Christian friends, Mrs. Elizabeth Heyrick boldly sent forth the thrilling tract which taught the abolitionists of Great Britain this lesson of justice and truth; and we honor her memory for her deeds.  Again we are indebted to the pen of a woman for pleading yet more powerfully the cause of justice to the slave; and again we have to admire and honor the Christian heroism which has enabled you, dear madam, to brave the storm of public opinion, and to bear the frowns of the church in your own land, while you boldly sent forth your matchless volume to teach more widely and more attractively the same righteous lesson.