denying that the African has a soul to be saved, or of consenting to
the terrible mockery of assuring him that the way of life is to be
found only by searching a book which he is forbidden to open.

If we carry out this doctrine of strict construction to its legitimate
results, we shall find that it involves a logical absurdity. What is
the number of men whose outraged sensibilities may claim the
suppression of a tract? Is the _taboo_ of a thousand valid? Of a
hundred? Of ten? Or are tracts to be distributed only to those who will
find their doctrine agreeable, and are the Society's colporteurs to be
instructed that a Temperance essay is the proper thing for a
total-abstinent infidel, and a sermon on the Atonement for a distilling
deacon? If the aim of the Society be only to convert men from sins they
have no mind to, and to convince them of errors to which they have no
temptation, they might as well be spending their money to persuade
schoolmasters that two and two make four, or geometricians that there
cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle. If this be their notion of
the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that
they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of
sleeping in church.

But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they
unanimously adopted the following resolution: "That those moral duties
which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral
evils and vices which it is known to promote and which are condemned in
Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly
do fall within the province of this Society, and can and ought to be
discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit." The Society saw clearly
that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line in the world of
ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude. The only line which
Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that great
horizon-line of the moral nature of man, which is the boundary between
light and darkness. The Society, by yielding (as they have done in
1858) to what are pleasantly called the "objections" of the South
(objections of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs
were "forced to flee") virtually exclude the black man, if born to the
southward of a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's
providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the
Episcopal Church did to the artist