But the worst thing in the Dr.'s tissue of false statements is representing those who have gone off from the Old School as "ruined." Suppose the foregoing statements about two individuals were as true as they are false, and what a monstrous conclusion is it, that the whole Free Presbyterian Church has gone to "ruin" in consequence. The Free Presbyterian Church numbers about fifty ministers. Suppose two of them had gone to moral ruin, which is not the fact, what then? With far more propriety might an old Pharisee have represented the church and cause of Jesus Christ as gone to ruin, because out of a ministry of twelve one did prove a vile traitor, whereas, according to Dr. McGill's own showing, only two out of fifty, or one out of every twenty-five, of our ministers, has proved recreant to his high calling. This mode of judging and pronouncing sentence is monstrous. From time to time ministers of the O. S. Pres. Church are tried and excommunicated for heresy, for dishonesty, for adultery, fornication and other crimes. We could name more than a dozen such, within our own limited range of observation. Shall we, therefore, say that the whole body is ruined? Such cases occur in all churches, and it is the grossest injustice to charge their guilt upon the whole church, unless the church retains them in fellowship, after their guilt is brought to light.

There is another fact which renders the statements of Dr. McGill still more inexcusable. He represents Free Presbyterians as having gone to ruin, because they seceded from a church which proclaims that its own organization is based on the conceded principle, that slavery, as it exists at the South, is no bar to Christian communion, and because they have formed a church which denies Christian fellowship to slaveholders. This position he represents as the cause of their "ruin." Now what will the reader think, when he is told that Dr. McGill was baptized, reared, educated, studied theology, was licensed and ordained to preach, and actually did preach several years in a church which, as long ago as 1832, took the very same ground of non-fellowship with slavery, which our church occupies; and has maintained it ever since? Yet such is the fact. Dr. McGill had all his training, and spent the first years of his ministry, in the Associate Presbyterian (Seceder) Church; and he knows full well that the position of that church, of the Covenanters and Associate Reformed, all of which exclude slaveholders from fellowship, has not been their ruin. They have grown as rapidly in pro

portion to their numbers at first, as other churches; and they are distinguished above others for their steadfast adherence to the doctrines of the Bible, and to the Presbyterian form of church government. And, yet, with these facts before him, Dr. McGill can represent a church as going, or gone to ruin, because it refuses Christian fellowship to slaveholders. So saying, he reproaches and "repudiates the church of his fathers."

Dr. McGill is a man of powerful and brilliant intellect. The fact, therefore, that he can bring no better reasons than the foregoing misstatements, to prove that his church "is in the right," is the strongest possible presumptive proof, that on the question of slavery it is wholly in the wrong.

CANT.

In the course of a sermon, preached before the Old School General Assembly, at St. Louis, by Dr. Humphrey, of Louisville, on the subject of Domestic Missions, occurs this passage:

"In brief, ours is both historically and constitutionally, a free church in the bosom of a free people-a republic within a republic. It is identified at once, with all that is glorious in the history of the country, and with all that is far more exceedingly glorious in the hopes of another and better country, even an heavenly. For this reason it has a precise adaptation to the work of spreading the gospel throughout the land. It is in sympathy with the common people, with all their patriotic sentiments, their passionate love of liberty, their most cherished institutions. Our missionary on the most distant frontier, or in the remote wilderness, where a few hardy settlers are just letting in the sun upon the soil, may captivate at once their understanding and republican sympathies, by laying open the principles of our ecclesiastical policy; thus demonstrating that Presbyterianism, though so long maligned, is but another name for truth and liberty."

These sentences are found in the midst of an eloquent disquisition on the sympathy of Presbyterianism, in past times, with civil and religious liberty. It is true of every form of Presbyterianism, except that represented by the two General Assemblies of this country, that it is the fast friend of the largest liberty. It is true that it was in the days of the

Westminster Assembly, and in the time of the American Revolution, "in sympathy with the people's passionate love of liberty." It is one of the glories of Presbyterianism, that it has in past times been the foe of tyranny, and the stern advocate of the rights of man. In the mouth of an old Covenanter, in the days of Cromwell, or in the mouth of any of their legitimate descendants, in this day, the language of Dr. Humphrey would be appropriate. But in the mouth of their author, and before the Assembly he was addressing, they are words of canting hypocrisy. Look at it.

The speaker himself, if we are not mistaken, is an Eastern man by birth and education, now a slaveholder in Louisville, Ky. The Assembly to which he was speaking, has adopted as her deliberate testimony, that she originally organized, and has since continued the bond of union on the conceded principle that domestic slavery, in the circumstances in which it exists in the southern portion of this country, is no bar to Christian communion. They affirm, moreover, that among the duties enjoined by Christ and his apostles upon slaveholders, that of emancipation is not enumerated; and that for them to pronounce the holding of slaves a heinous sin, demanding the discipline of the Church, would be virtually to dissolve their Assembly, and abandon the organization under which by the Divine blessing they have so long prospered. The practice of the church, taking the testimony of their own Synods, and Presbyteries and churches as evidence, is even worse than this declaration of sentiment. About eighty thousand immortal beings are held by her ministers and members in a state of bondage, the most absolute and unmitigated that exists on the face of the globe. They are without legal protection for a single right, and completely subject to the irresponsible will of their owners, however cruel and capricious that will may be. Their treatment in this condition by members and ministers of the Presbyterian Church is often infernally cruel. Take a few items of testimony. Says the O. S. Synod, of Kentucky: "Cases occur in our own denomination in which professors of the religion of mercy sell the mother from her children, and send her into merciless and returnless exile, and yet discipline rarely follows." The Rev. Francis Hawley, pastor of a Baptist Church in Colebrook, Litchfield County, Connecticut, resided fourteen years in North and South Carolina. His standing and character may be judged from the fact that the Baptist State Conven*ion of North Carolina, appointed him a few years since their

general agent to visit the Baptist churches within their bounds, and to secure their co-operation in the objects of the Convention. In the course of a narrative, published under his own signature, he relates this incident:

"I will now give a few facts showing the workings of the system. Some years since a Presbyterian minister moved from North Carolina to Georgia. He had a negro man of an uncommon mind. For some cause, I know not what, this master whipped him most unmercifully. He next nearly drowned him; he then put him in the fence. This is done by lifting up the corner of a 'worm' fence, and then putting the feet through. The rails serve as stocks. He kept him there some time, how long I was not informed, but the poor slave died in a few days; and if I was rightly informed, nothing was done about it, either in Church or State. After some time he moved back to North Carolina, and is now a member of Presbytery. I have heard him preach, and have been in the pulpit with him. May God forgive me!"

The same witness relates the following:

"One of my neighbors sold a speculator a negro boy about fourteen years old. It was more than his poor mother could bear. Her reason fled, and she became a perfect maniac, and had to be kept in close confinement. She would occasionally get out and run off to the neighbors. On one of these occasions she came to my house. She was, indeed, a pitiable object. With tears rolling down her cheeks, and her frame shaking with agony, she would cry out, Dont you hear him, they are whipping him now, and he is calling for me.' This neighbor of mine, who tore the boy away from his poor mother, and thus broke her heart, was a member of the Presbyterian Church."

The Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, embracing all the clergy of those States, give this testimony:

"Those only who have the management of servants know what the hardening effect of it is upon their own feelings toward them. There is no necessity to dwell on this point, as all owners and managers fully understand it. He who commences to manage them with tenderness and with a willingness to favor them in every way, must be watchful, otherwise he will settle down in indifference, if not severity.

We add but one other item, from a volume of the same sort in our possession, all of the most unquestionable character. The Rev. Charles S. Renshaw, of Quincy, Illinois, formerly a

resident of Kentucky, testifies as follows, in speaking of the Presbyterian minister and church where he resided:

"The minister and all the church-members held slaves. Some were treated kindly-others harshly. There was not a shade of difference between their slaves and those of their infidel neighbors, either in their physical, intellectual or moral state; in some cases they would suffer in the comparison.

"In the kitchen of the minister of the church a slave was living in open adultery with a slave woman who was a member of the church, with an assured hope' of heaven, while the man's wife was on the minister's farm in Fayette County. The minister had to bring a cook down from his farm to the place in which he was preaching. The choice was between the wife of the man and this church-member. He left the wife and brought the church-member to the adulterer's bed."

We present these as mere specimens of the actual condition of the slave. These facts exhibits his treatment by Presbyterians in the South-the ministers, and elders, and members of that church which Dr. Humphrey boasts is in sympathy with the people's passionate love of liberty! We present one other fact illustrative of the spirit of the General Assembly itself. A member of the Assembly of 1849, which sat in Pittsburg, relates the following:

"There is a fact that occurred in connection with the Assembly of 1849, which sat in the city of Pittsburg, that is worthy of notice. In the providence of God, a poor African female slave presented herself at the door of the Assembly, with a paper certified by a number of respectable ministers, begging some pecuniary aid to help her to purchase herself, her husband and her children, who were all owned by a master in Virginia. I, being a member of the Assembly, endeavored to do what I was able for her by my own contributions, and by circulating her paper. Among other means the thought occurred to me that it might do good to have her papers read before the Assembly; and, accordingly, I suggested it to a number of the members and the moderator, but they all disapproved of the suggestion, and her papers were not read."

Here, a poor suppliant, begging the means to secure herself and family from this worse than Algerine bondage, is denied even a hearing. Jesus Christ always received kindly and listened tenderly to the petition of the very poorest. Yet this General Assembly, boasting through Dr. Humphrey of