Friends and co-laborers for freedom! We have now a new and indispensable, though painful duty to perform. Our foes have hitherto been without the pale of the associations: we have now found the most deadly within. It misbecomes us to talk of “dissensions among _brethren_”--of “quarrels among _ourselves_,”--of “dreading the strife of tongues,”--of “hiding ourselves till this calamity be overpast.” Without our most strenuous exertions, it will never pass, but as the remorseless sea passes over the sinking vessel. If we would free the slave, we must meet and conquer a tyrannous influence and spirit, in the shape that it has _now_ taken, as we have done in all its transformations in the times that are past. We must disabuse our minds of the idea that all are brethren in the cause, who call themselves such. “Do you love freedom?” is the question we have startled our age withal; and we have begun to judge men--of all classes and conditions,--by the reply their lives make to it. Class after class have thus been tried and condemned. In earlier times, we have bound ourselves steadfastly to the truth which condemned them. Its might made riches a reproach, and “gentlemen of property and standing” a by-word. All our band joined their voices to the oracular one of truth, when _these_ sinners were tried by their own principles of action, and found wanting. Why is it that _some_ now cast aside the inspired maxim, “by their fruits ye shall know them”--when another class of men--the ministry, are found recreant to the cause of humanity? _It is because they have become like unto them._ We are not without experience of the facility with which men add hypocrisy to wrong. Let the professions of such be to us, from henceforth, as though they were not uttered; their past good deeds, registered with those of Lucifer before his fall. This and this only, in this emergency, is allegiance to the God “whose word is truth--whose will is love--whose law is freedom.” When, in earlier days in the cause, some of us foresaw the present state of things, we submitted our souls to the prospect of its painfulness. We said, “thy will be done,” in thus keeping our instrumentality effectual and pure. “May the numerous unpopular questions with which the anti-slavery cause is connected” (thus ran our prayer) “continually come up with it as it is borne onward. So that, up to the final triumph, the act of joining an anti-slavery association may be, as it has hitherto proved,--a _test-act_.”[9] And so we pray still; for still and forever, TRUTH is one and indivisible. All moral questions are by their nature inseparable, in any other than a mechanical sense, and while we sedulously keep them thus mechanically separate, because to do otherwise would be a sin against the freedom of others, and a betrayal of their confidence, we feel it to be no less a sin against freedom for others to impede any man’s course with reproach, on account of this eternal decree of God’s providence.