and spirit.  Nothing gives me such an idea of the world of despair as when I read ultra anti-slavery speeches.  I see how the lost will hate God’s mysterious providence, and revile it; and how they will fight with each other, and pour out their furious invective and sarcasm and vituperation, and scourge one another with their fiery tongues, as they now do, when some one of the party appears to falter.  If there were not something truly good in connection with slavery amid all its evils, I think such men would not oppose it.

Pray, who are these gentlemen, and who are their extremely zealous anti-slavery friends of more respectable standing, that they should have such immense instalments of sympathy and pity for the “poor slave”?  Their neighbors are as susceptible as they to every form of human sorrow; they know as much, their judgments are as sound, their motives are as good as theirs.  Had these zealous people made new discoveries, or, were the subject of slavery new, we might give them credit for being on the hill-tops, while we were in the vales.  This passionate sympathy, on the part of some, for “the down-trodden,” as they call the negroes, is not like zeal for a theological, or a political, or a scientific, doctrine, which would justify its adherents in rebuking the error and indifference of others; for if slavery be as they represent it, the proofs of it must be as self-evident as starvation.  What if a class of men among us should rage against those who do not contribute largely to the Syrian sufferers, as the zealous anti-slavery people reproach and even revile those who do not see slavery with their eyes?  We should then say, “Friends, who are you, that you should claim to have all the virtuous sensibility?”

But more than this,—­I doubt, I venture to deny, and that on philosophical grounds, the true philanthropy of these people.  For true love and kindness always create something of their own kind where they have full power.  Are there any words or acts of love, kindness, gentleness, mercy, toward others, in the speeches and doings of the zealous anti-slavery people?

I wish that you had been with me, one evening, in a corner of the Methodist meeting-house, where I sat and enjoyed the slaves’ prayer-meeting.  I had been filled with distress that day by reading, in Northern papers, the doings and speeches at excited meetings called to sympathize with servile insurrection.  In this prayer-meeting the slaves rose one after another, went in front, and repeated each a hymn, then resumed their seats, while some one, moved by the sentiments of the hymn, would lead in prayer.  A white gentleman presided, according to custom, and I was the only other white person present.  Going to that meeting with the impressions upon my heart of the terrible excitements which you were witnessing at home, and saying to myself, “O my soul, thou hast heard the sound of the trumpet and the alarm of war!” you cannot imagine what my feelings were when the largest negro that I ever saw rose and stood before the desk, and repeated the following hymn by Rev. Charles Wesley.  The first lines, you may well suppose, startled me, and made me think that the insurrection had reached even here.