Now, why should not _all_ this be done immediately? Which of these things is to be done next year, and which the year after? and so on. _Our_ immediate emancipation means, doing justice and loving mercy _to-day_--and this is what we call upon every slaveholder to do. I have seen too much of slavery to be a gradualist. I dare not, in view of such a system, tell the slaveholder, that ‘he is physically unable to emancipate his slaves.’ I say _he is able_ to let the oppressed go free, and that such heaven-daring atrocities ought to _cease now_, henceforth and forever. Oh, my very soul is grieved to find a northern woman thus ‘sewing pillows under all arm-holes,’ framing and fitting soft excuses for the slaveholder’s conscience, whilst with the same pen she is _professing_ to regard slavery as a sin. ‘An open enemy is better than such a secret friend.’ Hoping that thou mayest soon be emancipated from such inconsistency, I remain until then, Thine _out_ of the bonds of Christian Abolitionism, A. E. GRIMKÉ. LETTER III. MAIN PRINCIPLE OF ACTION. LYNN, _6th Month, 23d, 1837_. DEAR FRIEND:--I now pass on to the consideration of ‘the main principle of action in the Anti-Slavery Society.’ Thou art pleased to assert that it ‘rests wholly on a false deduction from past experience.’ In this, also, thou ‘hast not been sufficiently informed.’ Our main principle of action is embodied in God’s holy command--‘Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.’ Under a solemn conviction that it is our duty as Americans to ‘cry aloud and spare not, to lift up our voices as a trumpet, and to show our people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins,’ we are striving to rouse a slumbering nation to a sense of the retributions which must soon descend upon her guilty head, unless like Ninevah she repent, and ‘break off her sins by righteousness, and her transgressions by showing mercy to the poor.’ _This_ is our ‘main principle of action.’ Does it rest ‘wholly on a false deduction from past experience?’ or on the experience of Israel’s King, who exclaimed, ‘In keeping of them (thy commandments,) there is great reward.’