and influence their conduct to this day. “What is the Church doing?” he said. “Selling indulgences for sin--the worst of sins--the sin of _man-stealing_--yea, the sin of stealing and selling _a brother in the Church_! What do they do? The hammer is lifted over the head of the Christian--yes, the Christian, the child of God--and the cry is, who bids? Brother sells his brother, and the Church says, _it is all right_, while the watchmen, on the walls of Zion, pass the word, _all’s well!_ Though the auctioneer is a church member, the seller, and buyer, and the poor slave, all members of the same Church, yet the Church does not censure the deed. _It is all right._ * * * The Church that does not pronounce slavery a sin, and deal with its members, who refuse to confess and forsake it, in effect, licenses slavery. It stands as the virtual endorser of the crime. If men are robbed of the Bible, and of all knowledge of letters; if parents are punished, as felons, for teaching their own children the alphabet, and the Church does nothing, then the Church, by its silence, endorses it, and declares it is all right. If parents are robbed of their children, forced to see them dragged to the market, and knocked off to the negro speculator--the Church stands by, and says, “_It’s all right._” The Church allows this, not only in its members, but in its elders, and deacons, and pastors, and bishops; and hence it stands justly responsible for selling indulgences to license the sin of slavery. * * * What! shall the American churches form Bible societies, and pledge themselves before God, that they will give the Bible to the whole world, and then withhold it from twenty-five hundred thousand souls in their very midst? What have we seen here? A Virginia Christian slaveholder comes here, and appeals to us about the Virginia State Bible Society, to send the Bible to the extreme ends of the earth. * * * Why don’t he give the Bible to his own slaves then, and teach them to read it, before he asks for our money to help him send Bibles to the slaves in sin in distant lands? How does he look; the agent of the Virginia Bible Society, begging for money, to give the Bible to Chinese men and Hindoo pariahs, and refusing to give it, or let us give it, to _six hundred thousand immortal beings in his own State_? Why, what a hypocrite! Is there a being on earth, the most degraded even of the miserable slaves, whose souls are left to perish, who cannot see the inconsistency, the absurdity, the hypocrisy of this? Is God a fool, to be thus mocked? Sir, I will raise my voice against such hypocrisy as long as I live. It shall ring in the ears of every slaveholder who asks us to help him give Bibles to the heathen, thousands of miles off, while he withholds