I, "Mr. North, is the 'Northern Evil' again. Oh, what a
shame it is for intelligent people to decry Southern Christians in this
way, and to erect their own moral sense into such self-complacent
superiority!

"You will see in your church one excellent brother, whose heart is
filled with anguish at the thought of the 'poor slave.' One sits by him
who knows full as much on this and on all subjects as he, who feels that
the people at the South are perfectly qualified to manage this subject,
and that we have no need to interpose. He thinks that if one wishes to
be excited with compassion at the sorrows and woes of men, a short walk
will bring him to certain abodes such as no Southern slave would be
allowed by any human master to inhabit. If he would benefit men as a
class, our own sailors need all his philanthropy. But the good
anti-slavery brother is possessed with the idea that the Southern slave
is the impersonation of injustice and misery, and that those who stand
in the relation of masters are guilty of crimes, daily, which ought to
shut them out of the Church.

"I have often thought that the most appropriate prayers in our public
assemblies, with regard to slavery, would be petitions against Northern
ignorance and passion with respect to Southern Christians. It is we who
most need to be prayed for. When I think of those assemblies of
Christians of all denominations in the South, with a clergy at their
head who have no superiors in the world, and then hear a Northern
preacher indicting them before God in his prayers, what shall I say? The
verdict of a coroner's inquest, if it were held over some of his hearers
at such a time, might almost be, Died of disgust."

"Now I desire to know," said Mr. North, "if we are never to pray in
public about slavery? Is it not the great subject before the country,
and are not all our interests in Church and State deeply involved in
it?"

"While we believe," said I, "that holding slaves is a sin, I take the
ground that praying for the Southerners is a false impeachment. When we
are rid of this error, we do not feel their need of being prayed for any
more than 'all men,' for whom Paul says, 'I will that men pray
everywhere,'--'lifting up holy hands without wrath or doubting.' Our
'hands' must be 'holy' when we lift them up for 'all men,' including
Southerners; there must be no 'wrath' in our prayers,--which I am sorry
to say is too easily discerned in prayers against the South; and the