hope and trust that God would, in due time, by his inscrutable method, bring some inestimable good out of this great evil. Accordingly, we find, on turning to the doings of the great ecclesiastical bodies of our country, that they have descended from their very distinct protests against the enslavement of men, in 1780, 1789, 1794, &c., to palliations of the “sum of all villanies,” as Wesley called it,--and apologies for it, and justifications of it, and explicit, biblical defences of it, until at length--after Mr. Garrison and his co-laborers arose, demanding for the slaves their inalienable right to liberty--the churches and ministers of all denominations (excepting the Freewill Baptists and Scotch Covenanters) gathered about the “Peculiar Institution” for its _protection_; and vehemently denounced as incendiaries, disunionists, infidels, all those who insisted upon its abolition.[Q] This, I repeat, was the most serious obstacle to the progress of our antislavery reform. In 1830, and for several years afterwards, the influence of the clergy and the churches was paramount in our Northern, if not in the Southern communities; certainly it was second only to the love of money. The people generally, then, were wont to take for granted that what the ministers and church-members approved must be morally right, and what they so vehemently denounced must be morally wrong. Accordingly, the most violent conflicts we had, and the most outrageous mobs we encountered, were led on or instigated by persons professing to be religious. If the clergy and churches have less influence over the people now than they had forty years ago, it must be in a great measure because the people find that they were wofully deceived by them as to the character of slavery, and misled to oppose its abolition, until the slaveholders, encouraged by their Northern abettors, dared to attempt the dissolution of our Union, and so brought on our late civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of the people were killed, and an immense debt imposed upon this and succeeding generations.