this conveys to the hearts of our Christian friends at the South.  “Let us go out of the Union!” they cry, in their blind grief; but where will they go? for while our Northern people write and publish and sing and teach their children to sing such things, we can have nothing but mutual hatred, and perhaps exterminating wars.  We must change.  If our Northern people would discriminate, and, while retaining all their natural feelings against oppression and man-stealing, would admit that “ownership in man” is not necessarily oppression nor man-stealing, they would do themselves justice and contribute to the peace of the country.  “But O!” they say, “look at the iniquitous system.  If separating families, and destroying marriage, and liberty to chastise at pleasure, and to kill, are not sin, what is sin?” So they impute the system, and everything in it, to the people who live under it.  How a system can be a sin, it would puzzle some of them, who say that all sin consists in action, to explain.  And when they came to look into the system itself, they would find, that if slavery is to exist, some laws regulating it are, of necessity, self-protective, and must be coercive.  Even in Illinois, it is enacted that a black man shall not be a witness against a white man.  But if the slaves could swear in court, every one sees that the whites must be at the mercy of their servants.  The testimony of the honest among them is procured, though indirectly, and it has weight with juries; but it is a wise provision to exclude them as sworn witnesses.  So of other things, which theoretically are oppressive, but practically right; while many things in the system which are rigorous are as little used as the equipments in an arsenal in times of peace.

When you quote John Wesley’s words and apply them to the South:  “Slavery is the sum of all villanies,” you unconsciously utter a fearful slander.  Whatever may have been true of British slavery, in foreign plantations, in Wesley’s day, the good man never would utter such words about our Southern people could he see and enjoy that which gladdens every Christian heart.  If slavery be, necessarily, “the sum of all villanies,” as you and many use the expression, the relation cannot exist without making each slave-holder a villain, in all the degrees of villany.  You will do well to look into the cant phrases of “freedom,” before you indulge in the use of them.  The bishops and clergy of the noble army of Methodists in the South would not sustain their great chief in applying the phrase in question to the actual state of things in the Southern country.  Wesley used those words concerning slavery in foreign colonies; he had not seen it mixed up with society in England, as it is in the South.