hat in many instances, through the
influence of the principles of humanity and religion on the minds of
masters, they do not, still the slave is deprived of his natural right,
degraded as a human being, and exposed to the danger of passing into the
hands of a master who may inflict upon him all the hardships which
inhumanity and avarice may suggest."

An Address from the Synod of Kentucky, in 1835, to the Presbyterians of
that State, is much more specific in its delineations of the evils of
slavery, and in its denunciations of the system, and adopts language far
more severe than many northern Christians would think it expedient to
use. It presents a picture of its actual workings which could be drawn
only by one who had seen the original. If you have not read this
address, I beg that you will do so. It is altogether a southern
document. I have room only for a short extract.

Slavery is characterized as "a demoralizing and cruel system, which it
would be an insult to God to imagine that he does not abhor; a system
which exhibits power without responsibility, toil without recompense,
life without liberty, law without justice, wrongs without redress,
infamy without crime, punishment without guilt, and families without
marriage; a system which will not only make victims of the present
unhappy generation, inflicting upon them the degradation, the contempt,
the lassitude, and the anguish of hopeless oppression; but which even
aims at transmitting this heritage of injury and woe to their children
and their children's children, down to their latest posterity. Can any
Christian contemplate, without trembling, his own agency in the
perpetuation of such a system?"

Coincident with the judgment of these two most respectable and revered
ecclesiastical bodies is the testimony of one of the most prominent and
honored sons of the southern church, the Rev. Dr. R. L Breckenridge.
Says he:--

"What then is slavery? for the question relates to the action of certain
principles of it, and to its probable and proper results; what is
slavery as it exists among us? We reply, it is that condition enforced
by the laws of one half of the States of this confederacy, in which one
portion of the community, called masters, are allowed such power over
another portion called slaves, as----

"1. To deprive them of the entire earnings of their own labor, except so
much as is necessary to continue labor itself by continuing healthful
existence: thus