But the hardihood of Judge Baker was evinced in his using the language quoted, when he knew that his most intimate friends, and even members of his own family had been and were engaged in doing with impunity what in me was a crime. How he can reconcile his treatment of me with his conscience, when he remembers this fact, is best known to himself. Probably his usual admirable logic will help him out of the dilemma. I am sure I cannot. The learned Judge grows remarkably religious as he proceeds. He admits that “the slave population of the South are peculiarly susceptible of good religious influences.” He even dares to say that “their mere residence among a Christian people has wrought a great and happy change in their condition: they have been raised from the night of Heathenism to the light of Christianity, and thousands of them have been brought to a saving knowledge of the Gospel. Of the one hundred millions of the negro race, there cannot be found another so large a body as the three millions of slaves in the United States, at once so intelligent, so inclined to the Gospel, and so blest by the elevating influences of civilization and Christianity.” Allow me, oh wonderful judge! to ask you one simple question, which I much fear even your logic will be puzzled to answer. If such be the character and condition of the slave population, and the more, (as by your own showing,) they become acquainted with the principles of the Gospel, the more they conform to them, how is it that you regard as a crime, the giving them the instruction necessary to accomplish this purpose? Which horn of this dilemma will your Honor choose to be impaled upon? Sorry am I to be compelled to contradict a professed gentleman, but your Honor knew that you were telling an untruth when you uttered that sentence, and you knew also the _cause_ of the misery and degradation among Southern slaves, producing as it does a state of things which may well lead you to fear to have them instructed in any thing. I know that cause, also, and I am going to tell it boldly to my Southern brothers and sisters before I close my present labor. You are pleased to term the exercise of the commonest dictates of humanity in me a “sickly sensibility” towards the colored race. Be it so. But I require the aid of no physician to heal me, and rather, would to God that my disease were contagious, and that I could therewith infect the entire South. A little portion of the _virus_ might perhaps not be unavailable even in your veins. If it be a “sickly sensibility” to yearn to impart to immortal souls, that instruction necessary to guide them through life and upwards towards heaven, I confess that I am guilty. This is the head and front of my offending--no less--no more.