Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and social and personal degradation that it brings with it ? of the sin and misery and wretchedness in which, with retributive justice, it involves all classes of the community in which it is found ? This, and more than this, is the common feeling of our New England population. Addressed to us, this glowing and exciting language is useless for conviction, and powerful only for excitement to useless anger or unjustifiable action. Addressed to the South, it is but a reiteration of the deep and powerful feeling which, to a very great extent, prevails among its best informed and well principled people. But to them it comes with all the bitter insult of intentional mockery. Suppose Slavery to be the dreadful evil which is represented. Suppose the impassioned eloquence of a virtuous indignation gathers the whole world in one simultaneous outcry of reprobation and disgust. There it is. There it remains. There, in spite of all this outcry, still rests and will rest, this entailed curse of their country. Suppose the pretended masters of more than two millions of human beings, warned by Dr. Channing's denunciations, as by another earthquake, awake out of their deep sleep of sin, and come running to this modern Paul, with the heart-breaking exclamation — Sir, sir, what shall we do to be saved ? Has our apostle of freedom one word of consolation or instruction to give them ? Has he devised the way of their escape from the moral guilt in which he tells them they are plunged ? Does he propose any remedy for this leprosy of their souls ? Is there any pool of Siloam in which, by his direction, they may wash and be clean ? None is known — nothing is proposed. No human security has been or can be suggested, that has the slightest practical efficiency. The Catholic priest, when he brings...