to the music of
the cart-whip, provided only they could save the soul of Sambo alive by
presenting him a pamphlet, which he could not read, on the depravity of
the double-shuffle,--that they would consent to be fellow-members in the
Tract Society with him who sold their fellow-members in Christ on the
auction-block, if he agreed with them in condemning Transubstantiation,
(and it would not be difficult for a gentleman who ignored the real
presence of God in his brother man to deny it in the sacramental wafer,)--
if those excellent men had been told this, they would have shrunk in
horror, and exclaimed, "Are thy servants dogs, that they should do these
things?"

Yet this is precisely the present position of the Society.

There are two ways of evading the responsibility of such inconsistency.
The first is by an appeal to the Society's Constitution, and by claiming
to interpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of law as applied to
contracts, whether between individuals or States. The second is by denying
that Slavery is opposed to the genius of Christianity, and that any moral
wrongs are the necessary results of it. We will not be so unjust to the
Society as to suppose that any of its members would rely on this latter
plea, and shall therefore confine ourselves to a brief consideration of
the other.

In order that the same rules of interpretation should be considered
applicable to the Constitution of the Society and to that of the United
States, we must attribute to the former a solemnity and importance which
involve a palpable absurdity. To claim for it the verbal accuracy and the
legal wariness of a mere contract is equally at war with common sense and
the facts of the case; and even were it not so, the party to a bond who
should attempt to escape its ethical obligation by a legal quibble of
construction would be put in Coventry by all honest men. In point of fact,
the Constitution was simply the minutes of an agreement among certain
gentlemen, to define the limits within which they would accept trust-
funds, and the objects for which they should expend them.

But if we accept the alternative offered by the advocates of strict
construction, we shall not find that their case is strengthened. Claiming
that where the meaning of an instrument is doubtful, it should be
interpreted according to the contemporary understanding of its framers,
they argue that it would be absurd to suppose that gentlemen from the
South