the vigorous prosecution of the war by which alone peace, union, and liberty could be secured.

Then it was that these men came together for purposes the real meaning of which is not expressed in the direct terms, and is not concealed by the fine professions, of the second article of the Constitution of the Society.

"The objects of the Society," says that article, "shall be to disseminate a knowledge of the principles of American constitutional liberty; to inculcate correct views of the Constitution of the United States, of the powers and rights of the Federal Government, and of the powers and rights reserved to the States and the people; and generally to promote a sound political education of the public mind; to the end that usurpations may be prevented, that arbitrary and unconstitutional measures may be checked, that the Constitution may be preserved, that the Union may be restored, and that the blessings of free institutions and public order may be kept by ourselves, and be transmitted to our posterity."

Each clause of the foregoing article is a covert charge against the existing government. And the plain object of those who wrote and adopted it was the weakening of the power of Mr. Lincoln's administration. At the meeting, on the 13th of February, at which the constitution, of which this article forms a part, was adopted, Professor Morse, the President of the Society, made a speech. It was a curious performance. "Fanaticism," he declared, "rules the hour." Venturing on prophecy, he asserted, with an amusing defiance of reason and disregard of the logic of speech: "History, ever repeating itself, as time completes its cycles, has not yet closed its sad volume of disastrous hallucinations. It is preparing its pages and reddening its pen to record the story of the foulest tragedy of earth, the most frightful that is yet to deform the annals of the past. Can patriotic men, persuaded of such an issue, be silent, be idle?" "It is our own purpose," he goes on to say, "if possible, to exorcise that reckless, unprincipled spirit which is so rife in the ranks of fanaticism." "The heresies of

the state can be and must be reached in a constitutional way by the intellects of the country."

President Morse, one of "the intellects of the country," seems to have been uncommonly successful in reaching the

heresies of the state. In this very speech he reached the heresy of State Rights, and sneered at "the Declaration of Independence, with its mixture of truths, qualified truths, and fallacious maxims."

It is not surprising that, after such an opening, the Society having fairly started on its career of enlightenment of the public mind in regard to political duties, and in its attempt to exorcise the reckless spirit of fanaticism, one of its earliest publications was a letter of Professor Morse, in which he declares, with a pleasing mixture of metaphor, that "on Bible truth, therefore, I am ready to plant every position I take," and then proceeds to rave against the government, the Abolitionists, and the Republicans with harmless zeal, to attack the policy of emancipation, and to defend slavery by supporting Mr. Stephens's famous corner-stone doctrine. We must give some extracts from this remarkable performance, to show the character of the language used and of the thought expressed by the President of this Society. Here is his description of Abolitionists, in which the peculiar felicities of his rhetoric and grammar, and the not less peculiar felicities of his moral condition, are charmingly displayed.

"Look at that dark conclave of conspirators, freedom-shriekers, Bible-spurners, fierce, implacable, headstrong, denunciatory Constitution-and-Union-haters, noisy, factious, breathing forth threatenings and slaughter against all who venture a difference of opinion from them; murderous, passionate advocates of imprisonments and hangings, bloodthirsty, and, if there is any other epithet of atrocity found in the vocabulary of wickedness, do they not every one fitly designate some phase of radical abolitionism?" Letter to a Republican, p. 6.

Such language might appear to be that of a fanatic, were not President Morse engaged in putting down fanaticism. And it is not to be wondered at that, having such uncommon epithets to apply to men whose main fault in his eyes is their zeal against slavery, he should himself be found vehemently upholding and defending that "sum of all villanies." But it should be remembered that he speaks as the authorized expounder of the views of a society supported by prominent individuals in the so-called Democratic party, that his words are thus invested with a factitious force, and that they have

been industriously circulated throughout the Northern and Border States. The following passage is a characteristic specimen of intellectual demoralization:

"Who has constituted the two races physically different? There can be but one answer, it is God. To attempt, therefore, a removal of this corner-stone, which Infinite Wisdom has laid in the fabric of human society, is of so presumptuous a character, that few should be rash enough to undertake it. The physical inequality of the races, then, is this corner-stone, and not slavery. Slavery, which is a government, must be, in some form, the necessary resultant of this fact; and if you can remove the corner-stone, - to wit, the physical inequality of the races, you may thus destroy slavery; but, since the Ethiopian cannot change his skin,' nor can any earthly power do it for him, so long as the two races exist together in the same community, you may change the master, or the relative position of the races, but one or the other will still be dominant. Slavery in America can only be abolished by separating the races. Is it worth while to attempt to remove a corner

stone which God has laid?

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Slavery is not the cause of the sectional war, but a blind and mad resistance to a physical condition which God has ordained, and which man is in vain attempting to subvert.” — p. 8.

On this logic comment is needless.

But worse publications than this Letter were to follow. Having adopted such principles, the Society must go all lengths; the public must be taught that slavery was the sum of all blessings; the reckless spirit of fanatical humanity, of rash Christianity, must be checked at all hazards; the new creed of political pro-slavery salvation must be preached, and a bishop was called in to head the new crusade against the antislavery infidels. No. 8 of the Papers from the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge is entitled "Bible View of Slavery." It is signed "John H. Hopkins, Bishop of the Diocese of Vermont." This tract was written in 1861, as a letter to certain gentlemen in New York. It was originally published at that time; but its fitness for the purposes of the Diffusion Society was so great, that now, two years later, it was adopted for republication and wide distribution. It is an attempt to justify slavery as sanctioned by the word of God, and as, consequently, an institution that must be es

teemed divinely ordained for the government of a large part of the human race. It is not our purpose to attack the argument by which these conclusions are reached, otherwise than by exhibiting a portion of it in the Bishop's own words. There are some truths which may be regarded as established. It is not necessary to enter upon their defence. If a bishop declares that the Bible sanctions slavery, it is so much the worse for the bishop, not for the Bible. The Bible is, indeed, often greatly misused; its claims to authority are strangely misunderstood, its real authority abused; but that Christianity should be invoked as a defence and protection of persecution, of tyranny, or of slavery, is simply evidence that those thus invoking it have never understood what it is, and have never conceived the meaning of that new commandment by which its founder declared that all men should know his disciples.

There is a striking passage in Mill's essay on Liberty, in which those men are described whose "creed remains, as it were, outside the mind, encrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant." To this class the author of the "Bible View of Slavery" belongs. The patronage of a bad cause is not necessarily a proof of a corrupt heart, but it is certainly evidence of a feeble or a confused intellect. "The kingdom of heaven," said John Foster," is no more a place for fools than it is for villains." The force of Bishop Hopkins's intellect may be measured by that of his argument against the Bible and in favor of slavery. It will not be matter of doubt to any one who will take the trouble to read the following extracts.

Here is his account of the ordaining of the black race to slavery, the stale argument becomes humorous in his hands. “The first appearance of slavery in the Bible is the wonderful prediction of the patriarch Noah: Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.

and Canaan shall be his servant.

Blessed be the Lord God of Shem,
God shall enlarge Japhet, and he

shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.' (Gen. ix. 25.)

"The heartless irreverence which Ham, the father of Canaan, displayed toward his eminent parent, whose piety had just saved him from the deluge, presented the immediate occasion for this remarkable prophecy; but the actual fulfilment was reserved for his posterity, after they had lost the knowledge of God, and become utterly polluted by the abominations of heathen idolatry. The Almighty, foreseeing this total degradation of the race, ordained them to servitude or slavery under the descendants of Shem and Japhet, doubtless because he judged it to be their fittest condition. And all history proves how accurately the prediction has been accomplished, even to the present day." - p. 2.

But is the learned Bishop right in thus assuming that "the first appearance of slavery in the Bible is the wonderful prediction of the patriarch Noah"? In De Bow's Review, for August, 1860,- a review well known as the organ of the extreme Southern principles and opinions, there is an article in which the author, Dr. Cartwright of New Orleans, maintains that the creature which beguiled Eve was not a serpent, nor an orang-outang, as Dr. Adam Clarke was led to believe, but a negro, the black gardener of the Garden of Eden. If this were so, ought we not, with this writer, to regard the curse pronounced upon the serpent as unquestionably the first appearance and original establishment of slavery?

The plan of Bishop Hopkins's argument from the Old Testament is to show that slavery existed among the Jews, was regulated by their laws, and then to assume that consequently "the institution of slavery" (we use his own words) "was laid down by the Lord God of Israel for his chosen people." Coming to the New Testament, he publishes the fact that the Redeemer did not allude to slavery at all, and that he came. to fulfil the old law, that law which the Bishop would assert, in St. Paul's phrase, but with a strictly literal sense, to be the law of bondage.

Then he continues with the following passage, in which logic is not more violated than humane and natural feeling: :

"It is said by some, however, that the great principle of the Gospel, love to God and love to man, necessarily involved the condemnation of slavery. Yet how should it have any such result, when we remember that this was no new principle, but, on the contrary, was laid down