e institutions would conduce to this object, they
would be granted, and just so far and so fast as this becomes apparent.

Again, the opinion that slaveholding is itself a crime, must operate to
produce the disunion of the States, and the division of all the
ecclesiastical societies in this country. The feelings of the people may
be excited violently for a time, but the transport soon passes away. But
if the conscience is enlisted in the cause, and becomes the controlling
principle, the alienation between the North and the South must become
permanent. The opposition to Southern institutions will become calm,
constant, and unappeasable. Just so far as this opinion operates, it
will lead those who entertain it to submit to any sacrifices to carry it
out, and give it effect. We shall become two nations in feeling, which
must soon render us two nations in fact. With regard to the church, its
operation will be more summary. If slaveholding is a heinous crime,
slaveholders must be excluded from the church. Several of our
judicatories have already taken this position. Should the General
Assembly adopt it, the church is ipso facto, divided. If the opinion in
question is correct, it must be maintained, whatever are the
consequences. We are no advocates of expediency in morals. We have no
more right to teach error in order to prevent evil, than we have a right
to do evil to promote good. On the other hand, if the opinion is
incorrect, its evil consequences render it a duty to prove and exhibit
its unsoundness. It is under the deep impression that the primary
assumption of the abolitionists is an error, that its adoption tends to
the distraction of the country, and the division of the church; and that
it will lead to the longer continuance and greater severity of slavery,
that we have felt constrained to do what little we could towards its
correction.

We have little apprehension that any one can so far mistake our object,
or the purport of our remarks, as to suppose either that we regard
slavery as a desirable institution, or that we approve of the slave laws
of the Southern States. So far from this being the case, the extinction
of slavery, and the amelioration of those laws are as sincerely desired
by us, as by any of the abolitionists. The question is not about the
continuance of slavery, and of the present system, but about the proper
method of effecting the removal of the evil. We maintain, that it is not
by denouncing slav