“You will see in your church one excellent brother, whose heart is filled with anguish at the thought of the ‘poor slave.’  One sits by him who knows full as much on this and on all subjects as he, who feels that the people at the South are perfectly qualified to manage this subject, and that we have no need to interpose.  He thinks that if one wishes to be excited with compassion at the sorrows and woes of men, a short walk will bring him to certain abodes such as no Southern slave would be allowed by any human master to inhabit.  If he would benefit men as a class, our own sailors need all his philanthropy.  But the good anti-slavery brother is possessed with the idea that the Southern slave is the impersonation of injustice and misery, and that those who stand in the relation of masters are guilty of crimes, daily, which ought to shut them out of the Church.

“I have often thought that the most appropriate prayers in our public assemblies, with regard to slavery, would be petitions against Northern ignorance and passion with respect to Southern Christians.  It is we who most need to be prayed for.  When I think of those assemblies of Christians of all denominations in the South, with a clergy at their head who have no superiors in the world, and then hear a Northern preacher indicting them before God in his prayers, what shall I say?  The verdict of a coroner’s inquest, if it were held over some of his hearers at such a time, might almost be, Died of disgust.”

“Now I desire to know,” said Mr. North, “if we are never to pray in public about slavery?  Is it not the great subject before the country, and are not all our interests in Church and State deeply involved in it?”

“While we believe,” said I, “that holding slaves is a sin, I take the ground that praying for the Southerners is a false impeachment.  When we are rid of this error, we do not feel their need of being prayed for any more than ‘all men,’ for whom Paul says, ’I will that men pray everywhere,’—­’lifting up holy hands without wrath or doubting.’  Our ‘hands’ must be ‘holy’ when we lift them up for ‘all men,’ including Southerners; there must be no ‘wrath’ in our prayers,—­which I am sorry to say is too easily discerned in prayers against the South; and there must be no ‘doubting’ in the petitioners whether their feelings and motives are right before God.  There is as much in the relation of officers and crews in our merchant vessels, to say the least, to enlist the prayers of ministers, as in slavery.  But this relates to ourselves, and has not the enchantment of a distant sin.

“You must bring yourself to believe, Mr. North, that Southern hearts are in general as humane and cultivated as ours.  This, it is true, is a great demand upon a Northerner.”

“But oh,” said he, (we happening to be alone just then,) “the cruelty of compelling virtuous people, members of Churches, to commit sin, under pain of being sold.”

“Mr. North,” said I, “how do you dare to open your lips on that subject,—­you, with myself, a member of a denomination in which men, eminent in our pulpits, have—­so many of them of late years—­fallen.  One would think that we would never cast a stone at the South on that subject.