and the
debates in the Virginia Convention prove conclusively that six years
after the foundation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that
State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been
tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all
during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such
distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the
conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing
either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded
them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and
slave less demoralizing to the one and less imbruting to the other.

Again, it is claimed that the words of the Constitution are conclusive,
and that the declaration that the publications of the Society shall be
such as are "satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians" forbids by
implication the issuing of any tract which could possibly offend the
brethren in Slave States. The Society, it is argued, can publish only
on topics about which all Evangelical Christians are agreed, and must,
therefore, avoid everything in which the question of politics is
involved. But what are the facts about matters other than Slavery?
Tracts have been issued and circulated in which Dancing is condemned as
sinful; are all Evangelical Christians agreed about this? On the
Temperance question, against Catholicism,--have these topics never
entered into our politics? The simple truth is that Slavery is the only
subject about which the Publishing Committee have felt Constitutional
scruples. Till this question arose, they were like men in perfect
health, never suspecting that they had any constitution at all; but
now, like hypochondriacs, they feel it in every pore, at the least
breath from the eastward.

If a strict construction of the words "all Evangelical Christians" be
insisted on, we are at a loss to see where the committee could draw the
dividing line between what might be offensive and what allowable. The
Society publish tracts in which the study of the Scriptures is enforced
and their denial to the laity by Romanists assailed. But throughout the
South it is criminal to teach a slave to read; throughout the South no
book could be distributed among the servile population more incendiary
than the Bible, if they could only read it. Will not our Southern
brethren take alarm? The Society is reduced to the dilemma of either