ery is concerned, has
always been of fatal augury. The concessions of the South have been
like the "With all my worldly goods I thee endow" of a bankrupt
bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his debts upon his wife,
and as a small return for his magnanimity consents to accept all her
personal and a life estate in all her real property. The South is
willing that the Tract Society should expend its money to convince the
slave that he has a soul to be saved so far as he is obedient to his
master, but not to persuade the master that he has a soul to undergo a
very different process so far as he is unmerciful to his slave.

We Americans are very fond of this glue of compromise. Like so many
quack cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel
stronger than those which have never been broken, but, like them, it
will not stand hot water,--and as the question of slavery is sure to
plunge all who approach it, even with the best intentions, into that
fatal element, the patched-up brotherhood, which but yesterday was
warranted to be better than new, falls once more into a heap of
incoherent fragments. The last trial of the virtues of the Patent
Redintegrator by the Special Committee of the Tract Society has ended
like all the rest, and as all attempts to buy peace at too dear a rate
must end. Peace is an excellent thing, but principle and pluck are
better; and the man who sacrifices them to gain it finds at last that
he has crouched under the Caudine yoke to purchase only a contemptuous
toleration, that leaves him at war with his own self-respect and the
invincible forces of his higher nature.

But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was
no sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience
and self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their
lost Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which
severs one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that
bind the soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from
family, from friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which
hovers before him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him,
not to crime, but to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and
self-sacrifice, to the freedom which is won only by surrender of the
will. Christianity has never been concession, never