This page has been validated.
AFRICA'S REDEMPTION.
37

frothings of its orators; see its clerical advocates sparkling with fire—ministers of the meek and gentle Jesus, "breathing out threatenings and slaughter" against their fellow-men, multitudes of them their fellow Christians. See its demoniacal workings in our national councils, the bad passions which it stirs up, the disgraceful scenes which it occasions, and the chasm of destruction to the verge of which it has so often dragged the nation.

And still the catalogue of its crimes is not ended. It is the source and front, the active vanguard of infidelity. It runs its fiery abstraction into the leaves of the Bible with as daring a recklessness as into the frame-work of society If on the rack, the Bible testify not to their one idea, it must be burnt like a witch—it is evil-possessed. Almost any thorough abolitionist will say, "If the Bible sanctions slavery, down with the Bible." His human reason undertakes to judge God, contradict him, defy him, and dethrone him. That is abolitionism, and nothing less or more! Many good Christian men act with the party without seeing what others see, that pure abolitionism is but a fierce and arrogant form of rationalistic infidelity, and that really it is now doing more to spread abroad and infuse into the popular mind at the North, a Christ-hating, God-defying tone and temper, than any other evil influence that is at work in the land. In a word, here are the results at which the leaders of this party manifestly point. The slave being essentially his own man, he may and should not only lay every sort of tax