3. The importance of prayer for the abolition of slavery in this country, is shown from the inefficacy of other means to effect it. Every other mode of opposition has been vigorously employed. The first minds of Christendom have written and spoken against this monster iniquity. Its champions have been forced to acknowledge, “The literature of the world is against us.” But oppression laughs at literature,—it defies the rostrum and the press. The moral influence of the nation has borne against it with a pressure seemingly irresistible; State and national anti-slavery societies with the motto, “agitate, agitate, agitate;” mass meetings hurling the thunders of popular indignation; Christian conventions uttering the reprobations of religion; notes of warning from dying patriots; appeals to justice and humanity from honored philanthropists; remonstrances from the purest divines; the entreating voice of Christian women;—all these moral forces have borne against slavery. But it mocks at moral suasion. Political measures have been tried,—tried in good faith and with the utmost energy. But the Slave Power, versed in the intrigues of politics, has gained victory after victory, and grown stronger by this species of opposition. Providential events have signally fought against slavery. The successive acts of European powers have swept chattel slavery from their colonies. Cuba and Brazil, with our own country, alone retain it. Repeated emancipations by individual slaveholders at the South have kept alive the anti-slavery feeling. The violent measures which the slave power has employed to fortify and extend its dominions have exasperated and alarmed the people of the North. For a quarter of a century this movement of the people, of the churches, of political machinery, sustained by favoring providences, has been in progress; yet slavery in America is mightier to-day than it was at the beginning of the movement.