4. To set up between parents and their children an authority higher than the impulse of nature and the laws of God; which breaks up the authority of the father over his own offspring, and, at pleasure, separates the mother at a returnless distance from her child; thus abrogating the clearest laws of nature; thus outraging all decency and justice, and degrading and oppressing thousands upon thousands of beings, created like themselves, in the image of the most high God! This is slavery as it is daily exhibited in every slave state. Here, continued Mr. T., is slavery acknowledged to be clear robbery, and yet it is not to be instantly abolished! Universal concubinage and prostitution, which must not immediately be put an end to! Oh, these wicked abolitionists, who seek to put an immediate close to such a state of things. What an immensity of good have the emancipationists of the South, as they wish to be called, of the colonizationists as they ought to be called, done during their fifty years labor, when this is yet left for the Rev. R. J. Breckinridge to say. Dear, delightful, energetic men! Truly, if this is all they have been able to effect it is time that the work were committed to abler hands. Mr. Thompson then read an extract from the Philadelphia declaration. Mr. Breckinridge had called it a declaration of independence, but it was only a declaration of sentiments;-- We have met together for the achievement of an enterprise, without which, that of our fathers is incomplete, and which, for its magnitude, solemnity, and probable results upon the destiny of the world, as far as transcends theirs, as moral truth does physical force. In purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of purpose, in intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in sincerity of spirit, we would not be inferior to them. Their principles led them to wage war against their oppressors, and to spill human blood like water, in order to be free. Ours forbid the doing of evil that good may come, and lead us to reject, and entreat the oppressed to reject the use of all carnal weapons, for deliverance from bondage--relying solely upon those which are spiritual, and mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds. Their measures were physical resistance--the marshalling in arms--the hostile array--the mortal encounter. Ours shall be such only as the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption--the destruction of error by the potency of truth--the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love--and the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance.