and to break the fetters of those that are bound.  She is marching onward with accelerated step, and, wherever she leaves the true impress of her heavenly influence, the moral wilderness is changed into the garden of the Lord.  May it never be ours to do what may seem to be even the slightest obstacle to her universal sway.

“But I have already written more than I intended.  In bringing this communication to a close, allow me to express to you individually, and as a Board, my most sincere Christian attachment.  Whatever course any members may have taken in relation to this matter, I must believe that they have acted from what has seemed to them a sense of duty.  Far be it from me to impeach their motives.  Time, the great test of truth, may show them their course in a very different light from that in which they now view it.  I may, as a Christian, lament that their views of duty are not more in unison with my own.  I may, as a man, feel heart-sickened at the diseased, the deplorably diseased state of the public mind, in relation to two and a half millions of my fellow-men in bondage.  I may, as a citizen of a Free state, blush at the humiliating fact, that not only the tyranny, but the ubiquity of the slave power is everywhere so manifest; that it has insinuated itself into our free domain to such a degree that there seems to be as much mental Slavery in the Free states, as there is personal in the Slave states.  I may feel all this, but I must not impeach the motives by which others have been governed.”

There were twenty-one managers present at the reading of this letter, and, at its conclusion, a noble friend of the slave moved that the resignation be not accepted; the motion was lost by a vote of fourteen against seven.  It was then moved that it be accepted ‘with regret:’  this was carried by the same vote!  But ‘with regret’ was not an empty form for easing this action to its recipient; how much it meant is seen in the resolution that was added by unanimous acceptance:  “Resolved,—­That this Board are mainly indebted to Professor C.D.  Cleveland for the prominent and influential position it has attained in the regards of this Christian community, and that they bear an earnest testimony to the sound judgment and unwearied zeal which have ever characterized the discharge of his duties in his responsible office.”  Let this tribute, coming from the bitterest personal opposition that ever man encountered, measure the work that extorted it.  Looking at it, it will be difficult for the reader to believe that a sacrifice was made of the man to whom it refers by a representative Christian body, and merely to sate for a time the inhuman slave-greed; yet it is only one fact out of many that might be adduced, and I have brought it forward because it is, in my father’s words, “a fair exponent of the position of the Christian Church at that time upon the subject of Slavery.”  Henceforward, he ceased not to rain blows, not only at his own (the Presbyterian) denomination, but at all the organized expressions of Christian purpose,—­the Sunday-School Union, the Tract Society, etc.