you have held, and do hold in slavery, at the awful bar of the impartial Judge of all who doeth right.  Then what will become of your own doubtful claims?  What will be done with those doubts that agitated your mind years ago; will you answer for threatening, swearing, and using the cowhide among your slaves?

What will become of those long groans and unsatisfied complaints of your slaves, for vexing them with insulting words, placing them in the power of dogish and abusive overseers, or under your stripling, misguided, hot-headed son, to drive and whip at pleasure, and for selling parts or whole families to Georgia?  They will all meet you at that bar.  Uncle James True, Charles Cooper, Aunt Jenny, and the native Africans; Jeremiah, London, and Donmore, have already gone a-head, and only wait your arrival—­Sir, I shall meet you there.  The account between us for the first twenty years of my life, will have a definite character upon which one or the other will be able to make out a case.

Upon such a review as this, sir, you will, I am quite sure, see the need of seriousness.  I assure you that the thought of meeting you in eternity, and before the dread tribunal of God, with a complaint in my mouth against you, is to me of most weighty and solemn character.  And you will see that the circumstances from which this thought arises are of equal moment to yourself.  Can the pride of leaving your children possessed of long slave states, or the policy of sustaining in the state the institution of slavery, justify you in overlooking a point of moment to your future happiness?

What excuse could you offer at the bar of God, favoured as you have been with the benefits of a refined education, and through a long life with the gospel of love, should you, when arraigned there, find that you have, all your life long, laboured under a great mistake in regard to slavery, and that in this mistake you had died, and only lifted up your eyes in the light of eternity to be corrected, when it was too late to be corrected in any other way.

I could wish to address you (being bred, born, and raised in your family) as a father in Israel, or as an elder brother in Christ, but I cannot; mockery is a sin. I can only say then, dear sir, farewell, till I meet you at the bar of God, where Jesus, who died for us, will judge between us.  Now his blood can wash out our stain, break down the middle wall of partition, and reconcile us not only to God but to each other, then the word of his mouth, the sentence will set us at one.  As for myself, I am quite ready to meet you face to face at the bar of God.  I have done you no wrong; I have nothing to fear when we both fall into the hands of the just God.

I beseech you, dear sir, to look well and consider this matter soundly.  In yonder world you can have no slaves—­you can be no man’s master—­you can neither sell, buy, or whip, or drive.  Are you then, by sustaining the relation of a slaveholder, forming a character to dwell with God in peace?

  With kind regards,