A few years may be sufficient to make you repent of your unrelenting indifference, and give a stab to all your boasted honors; then may you, pitiable citizens, be taught wisdom, when it will be too late; then may you cry out, Abba Father, but mercy will not be found, where mercy was refused. Let all the social feelings of the soul, let honour, philanthropy, pity, humanity, and justice, unite to effect their emancipation. For eternal will be the disgrace of keeping them much longer in the iron fetters of slavery, but immortal the honour of accomplishing their FREEDOM. * * * * * _To the_ SOCIETY. Such were the sentiments, my friends, that first induced you to form yourselves into this Society. For seeing human nature debased in the most vile manner, and seeing also that your country deeply suffered from the iniquitous custom of holding man in slavery, you have justly concluded "that at this particular crisis, when Europe and America appear to pay some attention to this evil, the united endeavours of a few, might greatly influence the public opinion, and produce from the transient sentiment of the times, effects, extensive, lasting and useful."--But however great have been your exertions; however much they have been guided by the precepts of humanity and religion, your public reward has been censure and criticism; but let not such airy weapons damp your ardour for doing good; your _just reward_ is in Heaven, not on earth. Yours is the business of mercy and compassion, not of oppression. You forcibly rescue from the hands of no man his property, but by your examples and precepts you promote the Abolition of Slavery, and give relief to free Negroes, and others unlawfully held in bondage. You have shown an anxiety to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which GOD in his Providence hath extended unto you, and a release from that thraldom to which yourselves and your country were so lately tyrannically doomed, and from which you have been but recently delivered. You have evinced to the world your inclination to remove as much as possible the sorrows of those who have lived in undeserved bondage, and that your hearts are expanded with kindness toward men of all colours, conditions and nations; and if you did not interest yourselves in their behalf, how long might their situations remain hard and distressing. Numbers might passively remain for life in abject slavery from an ignorance of the mode of acquiring their emancipation, notwithstanding they may be justly entitled to their freedom by birth and by the law.