In the autumn of 1835, an influential minister in one of the most southern States, (who only one year before had stoutly defended slavery, and vehemently insisted that northern abolitionists were producing unmixed and irremediable evil at the South,) wrote to the Corresponding Secretary of one of our State Anti-Slavery Societies who had furnished him with Anti-Slavery publications, avowing his conversion to Abolition sentiments, and praying that Anti-Slavery Societies might persevere in their efforts, and increase them. Among other expressions of strong feeling the letter contained the following: ‘I am greatly surprised that I should in any form have been the apologist of a system so full of deadly poison to all holiness and benevolence as slavery, the concocted essence of fraud, selfishness, and cold-hearted tyranny, and the fruitful parent of unnumbered evils, both to the oppressor and the oppressed, THE ONE THOUSANDTH PART OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN BROUGHT TO LIGHT. ‘Do you ask why this change, after residing in a slave country for twenty years? You remember the lines of Pope, beginning: ‘Vice is a monster, of so frightful mien As to be hated, needs but to be seen, But seen too oft, _familiar_ with her face; We first endure, then pity, then _embrace_.’ ‘I had become so familiar with the loathsome features of slavery, that they _ceased to offend_--besides, I had become a _southern man_ in all my feelings, and it is a part of our _creed_ to defend slavery.’ About two years since, Arthur and Lewis Tappan received a letter from a Virginian slaveholder, who held nearly one hundred slaves, and whose conscience had been greatly roused to the sin of slavery. In the letter, he avowed his determination to absolve himself from the guilt of slaveholding, declaring that he ‘had rather be a wood cutter or a coal heaver, than to _remain in the midst of slavery_.’ An intelligent gentleman, a lawyer and a citizen of the District of Columbia, has just written a letter to a gentleman of New York city, from which I give thee the following extract: ‘The proceedings in Congress at this session have had the effect, I think, to rouse the attention of the public in all quarters, to the subject of slavery; and that, of itself, I think is a good: and it is in my opinion the chief present good that is to grow out of it. Discussion of some sort takes place, and the real foundation on which the system rests, cannot but be brought more or less into view. My hope is, that men who _denounce_ now, will at length _reason_. That is what is wanted--reasoning, reflection, and a true perception of the basis on which slavery is founded.’