In the practice which provoked the fury of his Northern countrymen, the slaveholder could see nothing but what was right in the sight of God, and just as between man and man. Slavery, he said, was as old almost as time. From the hour of deliverance to the day of dispersion, it had been practised by the peculiar people of God, with the awful sanction of a theocratic State. When the Saviour came with his fan in his hand, he not only spared it from all rebuke, but recognized and regulated it as an institution in which he found no evil. The Church had bowed to the authority and emulated the example of the Master. With her aid and countenance, slavery had flourished in every age and country since the Christian era; in new lands she planted it, in the old she upheld and encouraged it. Even the modest of the sectaries had bought and sold, without a shade of doubt or a twinge of conscience, the bondmen who fell to their lot, until the stock was exhausted or the trade became unprofitable. To this rule the Puritans and Quakers were no exceptions. Indeed, it was but a few years since slavery in Massachusetts had been suffered to die of its own accord, and the profits of the slave-trade were still to be seen in the stately mansions and pleasant gardens of her maritime towns. The Southern man could see no reason of State, of law, or of religion which required him to yield his most ancient rights and his most valuable property to the new-born zeal of adversaries whom he more than suspected of being actuated by mere malignity under the guise of philanthropy. All that he knew or had ever known of the policy of the State, of religion, or of law was on the side of slavery. It was his inheritance in the land descended from his remotest ancestry; recorded in the deeds and written in the wills of his nearest kindred; interwoven more or less intimately with every tradition and every precious memory; the basis of public economy and of private prosperity, fostered by the maternal care of Great Britain, and, unlike any other domestic institution, solemnly protected by separate and distinct provisions in the fundamental law of the federal Union. It was, therefore, as much a part of his religion to cherish and defend it as it was part of the religion of an Abolitionist to denounce and assail it. To him, at least, it was still pure and of good report; he held it as sacred as marriage, as sacred as the relation of parent and child. Forcible abolition was in his eyes as lawless and cruel as arbitrary divorce, or the violent abduction of his offspring; it bereft his fireside, broke up his family, set his own household in arms against him, and deluded to their ruin those whom the Lord had given into his hand for a wise and beneficent purpose. He saw in the extinction of slavery the extinction of society and the subversion of the State; his imagination could compass no crime more daring in the conception, or more terrible in the execution. He saw