Be undeceived-and cleanse from guilt and blood
Your crimson'd conscience and polluted hands.
Ye Gospel-Promulgators! why so dumb
Upon this solemn theme, to which each ray
Of Revelation points? And has the world
Such fascination, such corrupting power,
And vile intimidation's force, as thus
To paralyze the energies divine

Of Satan's combatants, that they will yield

To his blood-feasting hosts without one blow?
-But hark! whence rolls that thundering peal,
Which shakes astonish'd Mammon's glittering mounds,
And rouses all the fierce and clamorous ire

Of his tyrannic votaries? Lo! begirt
With the impervious mail of martyr'd zeal,
And golden truth, a little phalanx stands,
Upon the heaven defended batteries
Of Gospel-Law, and aims the artillery
Of holy eloquence, against the dark,
The massy battlements of tyranny.

Thence tis, that those convulsing thunders break,
Which fire the sons of Avarice with rage.
Persist, ye reverend Veterans! for the cause
In which your hallow'd banner is unfurl'd,
Embraces all that makes existence dear.
Undaunted band of Christian Patriots, hail!
May Victory's bays your honour'd temples crown,
And your reward be those delights supreme
Which store the magazines of heavenly bliss-
Whose melodies divine, no human ear

Has known; whose charms unmatch'd no earthly eye
Has seen; and whose exhaustless excellence,

The mind and heart of man have ne'er conceived.

NOTICE

THE first essay in this compend, is an amended reprint of a work formerly published under the title of "the Book and Slavery irreconcilable." It has not only been altered, but part of it has been written, since the contest with the kidnappers has assumed its existing, definite and tangible form. The engravings illustrate slavery as it may now be seen in its various degrees of turpitude, among all classes of American man-stealers, whether they are avowed infidels, or nominal Christians. If, however, any southern preaching slave driver, or his northern clerical accessory," who when he sees the thief consents with him" should exhibit sufficient effrontery to deny the graphical accuracy of the picture; they can have the names of their brethren, and all the other circumstances more minutely detailed. In that case, as some of the parties are yet living, they may hear in reply, the direct application of the truth, equally appropriate as that which Nathan enforced upon David, when the king having condemned the audacious criminal whose case was presented to his consideration, with prophetic authority the servant of Jehovah sternly said, "Thou art the man."

These pages emanate not from unchristian sensibilities. Gospel charity requires not that we should believe a lie to be truth, or injustice to be probity, or that he who stealeth his brother, makes merchandise of him, sells him, or if he be found in his hand, whom the word of God proclaims to be a thief, is an honest man and a Christian. Slavery is condemned; the uprightness of those pretences which oppressors offer, why they should be considered Christians, is the subject of investigation; and the melioration of the church and of our country is the motive which produced, and the object which is desired by this publication. The contest is for the sacred cause of truth: and however severe it may

be when individualised in its application, the sentiments are in full unison with the holy scriptures, and with every honest man's unsophisticated convictions; therefore, to temporize would be criminal. "A rough truth is better than a smooth falsehood." That delinquent is peculiarly guilty, who calls evil good, bitter sweet, darkness light; or who endeavours so to commingle them, that no difference is discernible between the requisitions of religion and the solicitations of vice.

No desire is felt to propitiate professing Christians, while they steal "souls and hands." Their guilt against God and man who hold slaves in Columbia, is equal to his criminality, who sails to Congo and kidnaps a cargo of Africans; and it is altogether a burlesque upon every thing sacred for a man-robber to pretend to Christianity; and far more dishonourable and injurious to the church, to permit him to preach, and rule in the spiritual affairs of immortals.

Many persons to whom the severest censures apply as slave-holders, possess other estimable qualities; but can that man be a Christian who enslaves his coloured neighbour, who unmercifully whips her, although far advanced in pregnancy, who gives her no comfort of any species for her services, and then sells her with her offspring for an increased price, on account of the children whom he had kidnapped? Such men would immure their white fellowcitizens in bondage, and ingulph them in similar misery.

No argument is requisite to justify a work which honestly defends the rights of man, and opposes "a licensed system of wholesale robbery and murder," and maintains the eternally paramount claims of equity and mercy; which develops the absurdity of all pretensions to pure and undefiled religion in him whose whole life is a ceaseless rotation of stealing and cruelty; points the path of duty to the upright inquirer; and which expostulates with those whose diurnal practice is a continual violation of the spirit and letter of the moral law, a flagrant departure from the steps of the Redeemer and his primitive servants, and an open disgrace to republicanism and Christianity.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE Corruption of the human heart and the deceitfulness which accompanies it are inconceivable. Among the various modes by which they are displayed, the detention of men in bondage indefinite, should receive unmitigated execration: and the principles upon which slave-holding is defended, with the characters of those who engage in its support, are most melancholy demonstrations of duplicity, and of that promptitude with which men can be deluded to change the truth of God into a lie. Is it not á fact too alarming to be recorded without the utmost dread, and will it not in futurity be deemed almost incredible, that a system which includes horrors tenfold more than Egyptian servitude is incorporated with most of the religious! and civil institutions, which are established in this land of boasted freedom? Will subsequent ages credit so monstrous a statement: that preachers of the gospel, eighteen hundred years after angels had sung, on earth, peace, good will to men, were characterized as proverbially devoted participants in all the enormities and iniquity of manstealing? and nearly sixty years after the promulgation of the Columbian Declaration of Independence, practicably reprobated its self-evident truths, as unsound propositions, because their covetousness, and their barbarous robbery of the rights of man would have been restrained.

That any persons should have imbibed effrontery sufficient to commence and persist in an infernal trade with the bodies and souls of men, where the illumination of the Gospel determines our duties, responsibility, and destiny, is proof more than ample, of the innate tendency of the human race to every moral obliquity. What apology shall be patiently heard, at the present era, for upholding a traffic which necessarily includes every species of iniquity, and which is the offspring of an unhallowed avarice that conducts to hell?

The cunning and pertinacity with which men, who have not the plea of ignorance to excuse their aberrations, maintain and justify their ungodly practices, is a most lamentable and irrefragable testimony of the vitiated propensities of the soul. But although, it is scarcely possible to discover an individual who will calmly palliate the evil nature of those more flagrant transgressions of the moral law, those plebeian violations of decency which are equally debasing and disgusting; yet, they who denounce these crimes and the perpetrators of them in terms of unqualified reprobation, with equal zeal will excuse more fashionable sins, especially if they are menaced with the consequences of their guilt.

The conduct of religious professors and rulers loudly demands the severest castigation. It requires more than Christian charity to allow many persons the characteristic of sincerity; for the contradiction is so vast, that if the highest interests of the human family were not connected, their discrepancy would excite ridicule. But as man's eternal doom is indissolubly combined with the rectitude of his present practice; the heart is filled with the keenest compassion for that obduracy which rejects truth, for that blindness which transmutes its individualising qualities, and for that hypocrisy, which, to evade scriptural censures, distorts the book into a sanction of the vices that it unequivocally condemns.

Human inconsistency and corruption cannot be developed in a stronger light, than by a dispassionate review of the multifarious artifices which are adopted to veil the horrors of slavery, and the evasions by which the charge that they are the most enormous sinners against God and man, is repelled. Had this compound of all ungodliness no connexion with the church of Christ, however deleterious are the effects of it in political society, however necessary is its immediate and total abolition, and however pregnant with danger to the Union is the promulgation of the system, to legislators the redress of the evil would have been committed. But slavery is the golden calf which has been elevated among the tribes, and before it the priests, and the elders, and the nominal sons of Israel,