"which may be regarded as the compensation rendered by "the slave for his support. The residue of the day is at "his own disposal, and may be employed for his own profit." But he never informs us, that in this bargain of a daily task on the one part, for a "support" of a weekly peck of meal on the other, the slave is not permitted to open his mouth! He never informs us that this "residue of the day," together with the Sabbath itself, must be devoted by the slave to unremitting toil, or himself and his naked little ones will lack the very necessaries of life. And again, he solemnly admonishes those slaveholders, "IF there are any such," who break up families, and refuse to teach their slaves the will of God as if it was no crime at all to hold men slaves under laws which constantly expose them to the disruption of all family ties, and to be compelled to violate the will of God! Such is a sample of the depravity and hypocrisy which the Presbyterian General Assembly welcomes to the support of a darling lust, in which it deeply and practically participates. And this general Assembly is a fair sample of the great body of the American church!

God forbid that we should say there is nothing good in any one of the great religious demoninations in our country! We feel assured that the salt of the earth is in them; but we are equally sure that as bodies they are too corrupt to do any thing else by their natural action on the subject of slavery than to hasten the General putrefaction. To do any good, the salt must concentrate itself. The friends of human rights must unite and organize themselves for the reformation both of the church and the world. It is the

and Georgia, to be about the third of a day's work for a northern laborer. According to this, a northern laborer will cut in a day three cords of fire-wood, split three hundred rails, or dig an acre and a half of potatoes.-(See Quarterly, A. S. Mag. No. 1 page 95.) Doubtless a southern slave does less than a northern laborer, and one reason is, he is not so well fed. "Meat, when given," says R. J. Turnbull, Esq., planter of S. C., " is only by way of indulgence and favor." If any hody wonders why the sharp-sighted southerners should be so thriftless as to get half day's works for the want of a little meat, let them understand that starvelings are more easily managed than stout men, well fed on bacon. It is easy to rule a man, if you can have the key of his stomach. But Dr. Wisner made other discoveries besides that which the reviewer is careful to quote. Among the abominations with which his soul was sickened, he related to a friend of ours, that he saw on one occasion, an old, gray-headed, toothless man, brought out before the tavern where he stopped, placed upon a stand, and cried up to the highest bidder, while the gentlemen buyers amused themselves with making him open his mouth to show his teeth, and other unfeeling, brutal jokes upon his

person.

height of absurdity to suppose that a sin which has flourished for two hundred years under a given action of a given church, shall be abolished by a continuence of the same action of the same church. Our reply to the remedy which the reviewer, with so much professional consequence proposes, is, that it has been tried for two hundred years, and been found to aggravate the disease.

Finally, what by a fair analogy, may we think would have been the course of Christ and his apostles if placed in our circumstances. They stand on the soil of Christian America, with hearts all alive to that cause of human salvation which has now been battling with the hosts of hell for eighteen hundred years. That monstrous system of idolatry which once frowned against them on every side, is prostrate. Licentiousness lurks in the dark corners. The Anti Christian beast is wounded in the head. But slavery sways its iron sceptre over the land, scoffing at all law, human and divine, making merchandise of millions of souls for whom Christ died. It is now the prominent evil, the sin of sins, the very Prætorian cohort of Satan. And the visible church itself is in the sad predicament which we have been able but faintly to describe. Now in these circumstances what course would the Savior and his faithful apostles pursue? Would they not wage war with the prominent evil of this day as they did with that of their own? Would they deal any more softly or delicately with it because it has nestled in the church; because it counts among its patrons, many of the 'holiest and best of men? Would they spare the devourers of widows' houses, because they make long prayers? We think not. Our reviewer himself, in demolishing the miserable argument which Wayland and Channing have borrowed from the sage Paley, has so exactly described the course which we conceive the pioneers of Christianity would pursue in the present state of the church and the world, that we quote him a length "Let us, however, consider the force of the argument as "stated above. It amounts to this. Christ and his apostles "thought slaveholding a great crime, but they abstained "from saying so for fear of the consequences. The very statement of the argument, in its naked form, is its refutation. These holy men did not refrain from condemning "sin from a regard to consequences, They did not hesitate

"

"to array against the religion which they taught, the strong"est passions of men. Nor did they content themselves "with denying the general principles of evil; they con"demned its special manifestations, They did not simply "forbid intemperate sensual indulgence, and leave it to their "hearers to decide what did and what did not come under "that name. They declared that no fornicator, no adulte"rer, no drunkard* could be admitted into the kingdom of "heaven. They did not hesitate, even when a little band, "a hundred and twenty souls, to place themselves in direct. "and irreconcileable opposition to the whole polity, civil and "religious, of the Jewish state. It will hardly be main"tained that slavery was, at that time, more intimately in"terwoven with the institutions of society, than idolatry "was. It entered into the arrangements of every family, "of every city and province, and of the whole Roman em"pire. The emperor was Pontifex Maximus; every depart"ment of the state, civil and military, was pervaded by it. "It was so united with the fabric of the government, that it "could not be removed without effecting a revolution in all "its parts. The apostles knew this. They knew that to "denounce polytheism, was to array against them the "whole power of the state. Their divine Master had dis"tinctly apprized them of the result. He told them that it "would set the father against the son, and the son against "the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daugh"ter against the mother, and that a man's enemies should "be those of his own household. He said that he came not "to bring peace, but a sword, and that such would be the "opposition to his followers, that whosoever killed them, "would think he did God service. Yet in view of these "certain consequences, the apostles did denounce idolatry, "not merely in principle, but by name. The result was "precisely what Christ had foretold. The Romans, tolerant "of every other religion, bent the whole force of their wis"dom and arms to extirpate Christianity. The scenes of "bloodshed which century after century followed the intro"duction of the Gospel, did not induce the followers of "Christ to keep back, or modify the truth. They adhered "to their declaration that idolatry was a heinous crime.

The reviewer seems to have omitted the "no extortioner" (omag, the word which probably corresponds more nearly to our modern term slaveholder, than any other in the Greek language,) lest it should spoil his argument!

"And they were right. We expect similar conduct of our "missionaries. We do not expect them to refrain from de"nouncing the institutions of the heathen as sinful, because "they are popular, or intimately interwoven with society. "The Jesuits, who adopted this plan, forfeited the confi"dence of Christendom, without making converts of the "heathen."

For this eloquent passage, we thank the pro-slavery reviewer, and commend it to the special attention of all those who, without any reference to the right or wrong of slavery, condemn the whole course of the abolitionists, as totally unphilosophical, and ill adapted to the removal of any evil ---we commend it to all those who have a holy horror of all denunciation, and of every thing which may occasion disunion in church or state. And moreover, we maintain that it describes the very course in which every christian-every man-yes, every man, woman, and child, ought immediately to embark, inasmuch as SLAVERY is the IDOLATRY of this nation. Yes, let them embark in it, and hold on to it, though it should occasion strife in every family, though it should shatter every church, though it should sunder the nation, though it should pour out the blood of martyrs in the streets of every city and village, and scatter their ashes on every wind. The proclaimers of eternal, changeless truth are not responsible for the mischief of wicked men in opposing it. It is to the proclamation of that truth, fearless of consequences, that we owe all the glorious things that we this day possess over and above the lot of naked and brutal savages, trembling before the bloodthirsty priests of Woden and Thor. And to the like proclamation of that truth, we must owe our deliverance from that righteous and terrible turn of the tables, to which the Almighty God ever dooms the proud oppressors of the poor.

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF A FUGITIVE SLAVE.

SLAVERY in the United States: A narrative of the life and adventures of Charles Ball, a black man, who lived forty years in Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia, as a slave, under various masters, and was one year in the navy with Commodore Barney, during the late war. Containing an account of the manners and usages of the planters and slaveholders of the South, a description of the condition and treatment of the slaves, with observations upon the state of morals amongst the cotton planters, and the perils and sufferings of a fugitive slave, who twice escaped from the cotton country. Lewistown, Pa. Printed and published by JOHN W. SHUGERT, 1836 12mo. pp. 400.

It has sometimes been made a question whether more truth can be communicated in real or fictitious narrative. The latter, certainly, has the advantage of selecting from a wider field of incident, and though its facts may none of them have ever actually occurred, yet they may be more strictly analogous to the great body of those which do actually occur, than the events in the life of almost any one individual. Sometimes, however, an individual is found whose history, unaided by fiction, correctly illustrates the history of his class. Through the well written life of such an individual, we can look in upon the character, condition and habits of his class with as much clearness and confidence as through a window. The fictitious narrative may afford us a view of the same objects, equally distinct and vivid, but after all it is only a mirror, and may leave upon the mind a doubt whether it has not practiced some distortion as well as reflection upon the direct rays of truth. Whether the narrative, whose very prolix title we have placed above, is real or fictitious, we think its reader will not retain, through many pages, a doubt of the perfect accuracy of its picture of slavery. If it is a mirror, it is of the very best plate glass, in which objects appear so clear and "natural" that the beholder is perpetually mistaking it for an open window without any glass at all. We are led to this remark, not because we feel ourselves at liberty to doubt the genuineness and reality of the whole, but because the book itself does not answer a number of preliminary questions which the public will not fail to ask.

Of the plan of the work we cannot give the reader a better idea than by quoting from its preface.

"The narrative is taken from the mouth of the adven"turer himself; and if the copy does not contain the iden