mplicate themselves with it. Practically, they
are always chargeable who adopt it as their own in theory and practice,
who support it in the State, consecrate it in the Church, and labor for
its extension. They are chargeable, for they bring heresy into creeds,
unrighteousness into legislation, and crime into popular usage. If they
are masters, they stand in the same moral relations with persecutors and
tyrannical rulers, guilty for all personal injuries they inflict under
color of unjust laws; and, whether masters or not, they are guilty for
exerting their influence to sustain laws which set aside the authority
of God, and withhold the rights he has given. Such men are accountable
to God and to society for deliberate, organised, aggressive iniquity.
The "organic sin" of the State is their sin, the sin of each in his own
measure; for they are the individuals who determine the acts and the
character of the slave-holding State as such.

But are there no exceptions among slave-holders? We trust there are
many. There is a plain distinction between wicked laws and the personal
acts of men who live under those laws. Some may approve them, and use or
abuse them to the injury of their fellow men. Others may disapprove
them, and refuse, by means of them, to do or justify a wrong. Christians
may become in a legal sense owners of slaves, while they heartily
deprecate the system of oppression, while they are ready to unite with
good men in feasible and wise measures for its removal, and while they
obey the Christian precepts towards their servants, rendering unto them
what is just and equal to men and brethren in Christ. Such Christians
and such men do not hold slaves in the sense which God forbids; and they
cannot be charged with the wickedness of laws by which they, as well as
the slaves, are oppressed. On their estates a higher law than that of
slavery has sway. To them their slaves, though legally property, are
morally and actually men. The Bible sustains their position. They are
the Philemons to whom Paul gives fellowship, and Onesimus returns, not
as a slave, but a brother beloved. In the trials of their situation they
should receive the cordial sympathy of Christians everywhere. It is,
indeed, to their sound convictions and their political influence the
world must look, in part at least, for the ultimate, peaceful extinction
of American slavery. Without them, what would the South become? With the
Scriptures in our hand we ear