when without public protest they
allowed Ary Scheffer's _Christus Consolator_, with the figure of the
slave left out, to be published in a Prayer-Book.

The Society is not asked to disseminate Anti-slavery doctrines, but
simply to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they have
recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to remind him
in turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls of his
bondmen. But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at
present the ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all
appeals, that God in his good time will turn their hearts, and that
then, and not till then, will be the fitting occasion to do something
in the premises. But if the Society is to await this golden opportunity
with such exemplary patience in one case, why not in all? If it is to
decline any attempt at converting the sinner till after God has
converted him, will there be any special necessity for a tract society
at all? Will it not be a little presumptuous, as well as superfluous,
to undertake the doing over again of what He has already done? We fear
that the studies of Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue thus
have entered in order to fit themselves for the legal and
constitutional argument of the question, have confused their minds, and
that they are misled by some fancied analogy between a tract and an
action of trover, and conceive that the one, like the other, cannot be
employed till after an actual conversion has taken place.

The resolutions reported by the Special Committee at the annual meeting
of 1857, drawn up with great caution and with a sincere desire to make
whole the breach in the Society, have had the usual fate of all
attempts to reconcile incompatibilities by compromise. They express
confidence in the Publishing Committee, and at the same time impliedly
condemn them by recommending them to do precisely what they had all
along scrupulously avoided doing. The result was just what might have
been expected. Both parties among the Northern members of the Society,
those who approved the former action of the Publishing Committee and
those who approved the new policy recommended in the resolutions, those
who favored silence and those who favored speech on the subject of
Slavery, claimed the victory, while the Southern brethren, as usual,
refused to be satisfied with anything short of unconditional
submission. The word Compromise, as far as Slav