e and my desired haven there is a "hell-gate,"
where are sunken rocks and conflicting currents, and amid all these
complicated dangers my frail bark will make shipwreck, without my chart
and compass. Deprived of these, I cannot keep my reckoning, I cannot
shape my course, I cannot find my haven.

I need not tell you, my dear brother, that it is a part of the
slaveholding policy to take from thousands and millions of immortal
beings in our nominally Christian land, this precious chart and
compass,--the Bible, the only safe guide to heaven. I have often heard
you speak of it, and deplore it. Those severe laws which forbid
teaching the slave to read, do virtually take from him the Bible,--his
directory to the New Jerusalem. You may, indeed, give him oral
instruction, and in many instances, no doubt, they are blessed to his
conversion; but how utterly inadequate are they to his spiritual wants,
how imperfect are they at best, and in how many thousands of cases are
even these entirely wanting. Every enlightened and intelligent Christian
knows, from his own experience, how hard it is to enter the "strait
gate," and to keep in the "narrow way," and how needful to him are all
the helps within his reach, and then he is but "scarcely saved." What
hope is there, then, for the poor slave, who is deprived, not only of
most of the ordinary and extraordinary means of grace which we enjoy,
but is forbidden the printed Word of God? Is not a fearful
responsibility incurred by those who, for any reason, stand between God
and his children, and intercept those messages of grace and mercy which
are contained in the Holy Scriptures?

That noble institution, the American Bible Society, is multiplying
copies of the sacred Word by thousands and hundreds of thousands, and
scattering them over the land and the world; it hesitates not to thrust
them into the hands of the followers of the false prophet,--the deluded
followers of the man of sin,--the disciples of Confucius and
Zoroaster,--the worshippers of Juggernaut and Vishnoo, and the degraded
inhabitants of the South Seas and Caffraria;--it benevolently resolves
to put a copy of the Bible into the dwelling of every white family in
these United States; but it is obliged by law to pass by the cabin of
the slave, and leave more than three millions of immortal beings to find
the road to heaven the best way they can.

My brother, I cannot think of these things without the deepest grief,
and I know