It may be presumptuous to proffer counsel to such authorized expositors of religion, but one can hardly help insinuating the humble suggestion, that it would be as well, if they must give up the principles of liberty, not to throw Christianity in. We may be permitted to doubt the theory of Providence which teaches that a man never so much serves God as when he serves the Devil. Doubtless, Slavery, though opposed to God's laws, is included in the plan of God's providence, but, in the long run, the providence most terribly confirms the laws. The stream of events, having its fountains in iniquity, has its end in retribution. It is because God's laws are immutable that God's providence can be _foreseen_ as well as seen. The mere fact that a thing exists, and persists in existing, is of little importance in determining its right to exist, or its eventual destiny. These must be found in an inspection of the principles by which it exists; and from the nature of its principles, we can predict its future history. The confidence of bad men and the despair of good men proceed equally from a too fixed attention to the facts and events before their eyes, to the exclusion of the principles which underlie and animate them; for no insight of principles, and of the moral laws which govern human events, could ever cause tyrants to exult or philanthropists to despond. If we go farther into this question, we shall commonly find that the facts and events to which we give the name of Providence are the acts of human wills divinely overruled. There is iniquity and wrong in these facts and events, because they are the work of free human wills. But when these free human wills organize falsehood, institute injustice, and establish oppression, they have passed into that mental state where will has been perverted into wilfulness, and self-direction has been exaggerated into self-worship. It is the essence of wilfulness that it exalts the impulses of its pride above the intuitions of conscience and intelligence, and puts force in the place of reason and right. The person has thus emancipated himself from all restraints of a law higher than his personality, and acts _from_ self, _for_ self, and in sole obedience _to_ self. But this is personality in its Satanic form; yet it is just here that some of our theologians have discovered in a person's actions the purposes of Providence, and discerned the Divine intention in the fact of guilt instead of in the certainty of retribution. The tyrant element in man is found in this Satanic form of his individuality. His will, self-released from restraint, preys upon and crushes other wills. He asserts himself by enslaving others, and mimics Divinity on the stilts of diabolism. Like the barbarian who thought himself enriched by the powers and gifts of the enemy he slew, he aggrandizes his own personality, and heightens his own sense of freedom, through the subjection of feebler natures. Ruthless, rapacious, greedy