now in session here, after discussing for days the validity of Roman Catholic baptism, threw out as inexpedient to be discussed, the subject of that great wrong which was flinging back into the agony of Slavery, a brother of one of their own ordained ministers, and could not so much as breathe a word of condemnation against the false and cruel deed which has just been consummated at the capitol of the nation.

When such facts are occurring in the midst of us, we cannot be guiltless concerning the lambs of Christ.  It is we, we who make up the public opinion of the North, we who consent that these free States shall be the hunting-ground, where these, our poor brothers and sisters, are the game; it is we that withhold from them the bread of life, the inalienable rights of man.  As we withhold these blessings, so is it in our power to bestow them.  The sheep then that Christ commands us, as we love Him, to feed, are those who are famishing for the lack of the food which it is in our power to supply.  And we can help to feed and relieve and liberate them, by giving our hearty sympathy to the blessed cause of their emancipation, to the abolition of the crying injustice with which they are treated, by uttering our earnest protest against the increasing and flagrant outrages of the oppressor, by withholding all aid and countenance from the work of oppression.”

To say that Dr. Furness, in his pleadings for the slave, was “instant in season and out of season,” is not to exaggerate.  So palpably was this true, that even some of his sympathizing friends intimated to him, that his zeal carried him beyond proper bounds, and that his discourses were needlessly reiterative.  To these friends,—­who, it is needless to say, did not fully comprehend the breadth and bearing of the question,—­he would reply as he did in the following extract from a sermon delivered soon after the one above quoted: 

“Again and again, I have had it said to me, with apparently the most perfect simplicity, ’Why do you keep saying so much about the slaves?  Do you imagine that there is one among your hearers who does not agree with you?  We all know that Slavery is very wrong.  What, is the use of harping upon this subject Sunday after Sunday?  We all feel about it just as you do.’  ’Feel about it just as I do,’ Very likely, my friends.  It is very possible that you all feel as much, and that many of you feel about it more than I do.  God knows that my regret always has been not that I feel so much, but that I do not feel more.  Would to Heaven that neither you nor I could eat or sleep for pity, pity for our poor down-trodden brothers and sisters.  But the thing to which I implore your attention now, is, not what we know and feel, but the delusion which we are under, in confounding knowing with doing, in fancying that we are working to abolish Slavery because we know that it is wrong.  This is what I would have you now