7. If slaveholders are admitted to church-fellowship _no class of sinners on earth should be excluded_. The church cannot consistently expel from its communion the rich man who grinds the face of the poor laborer that reaps down his fields, and at the same time retain the slaveholder who lives _entirely_ upon the unpaid labor of the poor. He who _occasionally_ cheats his neighbor out of a few dollars cannot consistently be censured by the church while the man who cheats whole families out of domestic comfort, home, education, and their all, passes without reproof. The occasional adulterer cannot receive church discipline in the presence of him who compels his slaves to live together without the sanction, and without the protection of the law. He who steals a sheep cannot be cast out from a church in which he who steals men occupies a high seat. As slaveholding is a violation directly or indirectly of every commandment of the Decalogue, if it cannot and must not be disciplined, then church discipline is useless; and all classes of sinners should be admitted and retained in this Holy Temple, unless the principle be established that he who commits a _petty_ offense shall be cast out, but he who has the heart and courage to commit a high offense, a daring crime, shall remain in full fellowship. I have wondered how slaveholding church members could try and expel from a religious society a poor negro who, in addition to his peck of corn per week, had stolen a little meat, while they were conscious of robbing that same negro of the products of his daily toil, and of his own soul and body. 8. To maintain its _independence_ the church must discard fellowship with slaveholders.--In no case have slaveholders been willing to occupy an humble position in a religious body long. They assume to be pre-eminently _the_ members of the church, and the press, pulpit, and General Assembly or General Conference, _must_, unequivocally, endorse, or patriarchalize their slaveholding. The history of all the pro-slavery churches in America is proof of this remark. A few slaveholders are able to change entirely the action of a powerful ecclesiastical body--to range it on the side of oppression, to silence or subborn its witnesses, to shut up its sympathies and take away the bow of hope from the slave. How many of the hundreds of ministers in the whole south are free to utter their convictions on slavery to day? How many religious presses are unfettered? If then the church would stand upon the solid rock of truth, unawed by the popular will, uncorrupted with gold, the immutable friend of _man_, proclaiming and enforcing the _whole_ truth, it must keep out of her communion legalized and practiced tyrants.