ing to say.

But to the second circumstance, namely, the position of the Free Church
of Scotland, with the great Doctors Chalmers, Cunningham, and Candlish
at its head. That church, with its leaders, put it out of the power of
the Scotch people to ask the old question, which we in the north have
often most wickedly asked--"_What have we to do with slavery_?" That
church had taken the price of blood into its treasury, with which to
build _free_ churches, and to pay _free_ church ministers for preaching
the gospel; and, worse still, when honest John Murray, of Bowlien
Bay--now gone to his reward in heaven--with William Smeal, Andrew
Paton, Frederick Card, and other sterling anti-slavery men in Glasgow,
denounced the transaction as disgraceful and shocking to the religious
sentiment of Scotland, this church, through its leading divines, instead
of repenting and seeking to mend the mistake into which it had fallen,
made it a flagrant sin, by undertaking to defend, in the name of God
and the bible, the principle not only{296} of taking the money of
slave-dealers to build churches, but of holding fellowship with the
holders and traffickers in human flesh. This, the reader will see,
brought up the whole question of slavery, and opened the way to its full
discussion, without any agency of mine. I have never seen a people more
deeply moved than were the people of Scotland, on this very question.
Public meeting succeeded public meeting. Speech after speech, pamphlet
after pamphlet, editorial after editorial, sermon after sermon, soon
lashed the conscientious Scotch people into a perfect _furore_. "SEND
BACK THE MONEY!" was indignantly cried out, from Greenock to Edinburgh,
and from Edinburgh to Aberdeen. George Thompson, of London, Henry C.
Wright, of the United States, James N. Buffum, of Lynn, Massachusetts,
and myself were on the anti-slavery side; and Doctors Chalmers,
Cunningham, and Candlish on the other. In a conflict where the latter
could have had even the show of right, the truth, in our hands as
against them, must have been driven to the wall; and while I believe we
were able to carry the conscience of the country against the action of
the Free Church, the battle, it must be confessed, was a hard-fought
one. Abler defenders of the doctrine of fellowshiping slaveholders as
christians, have not been met with. In defending this doctrine, it was
necessary to deny that slavery is a sin. If driven from this position,
they we