“It is vain to tell us that hundreds of thousands of slaves are church-members; does that save women from the lust of their owners? does it save their children from being sold? does it save parents from separation? In the shameless processions every week made from the Atlantic to the Gulf are to be found slaves ordained to preach the Gospel, members of churches, baptized children, Sunday-school scholars carefully catechised, full of Gospel texts, fat and plump for market. What is religion worth to a slave, except as a consolation from despair when the hand that breaks to him the bread of communion on Sunday takes the price of his blood and bones on Monday, and bids him God-speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco-fields to the cotton-plantations of Alabama? “What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church instruction worth if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as little loved, just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as coolly sold, as if he were without God and without hope? What motive is there to the slave to strive for Christian graces, when, if they make him a real man, they are threshed out of him; or, if they make him a more obedient and faithful man, raise his market price and only make him a more merchantable disciple of Christ? It is the religious phase of slave-life that reveals the darkest features of that all-perverting system.” Ridiculing the idea that it takes _distance_ to make a topic fit for the pulpit, and upbraiding the ministry, who are engaged in snatching here and there a child from the Ganges, and have no words for those children that, here at home, every year are snatched from the parents’ bosom and sold everywhither, he says: “It requires _distance_, it seems, to make a topic right for the pulpit. Send it to Greenland or to Nootka Sound, and you may then practise at the far-away target. And the reason of such discrimination seems to be that preaching against foreign sins does not hurt the feelings nor disturb the quiet of your congregation; whereas, if the identical evils at home which we deplore upon the Indus or along the Burampootra are preached about, the _Journal_ says that it will risk the minister’s place and bread and butter; and it plainly tells all Northern ministers that if they meddle with such politics they will have their coats rolled in the dirt. Will the _Journal_ tell us how many leagues off a sin must be before it is prudent and safe for courageous ministers to preach against it?