fensive and what allowable. The
Society publish tracts in which the study of the Scriptures is enforced
and their denial to the laity by Romanists assailed. But throughout the
South it is criminal to teach a slave to read; throughout the South, no
book could be distributed among the servile population more incendiary
than the Bible, if they could only read it. Will not our Southern brethren
take alarm? The Society is reduced to the dilemma of either denying that
the African has a soul to be saved, or of consenting to the terrible
mockery of assuring him that the way of life is to be found only by
searching a book which he is forbidden to open.

If we carry out this doctrine of strict construction to its legitimate
results, we shall find that it involves a logical absurdity. What is the
number of men whose outraged sensibilities may claim the suppression of a
tract? Is the _taboo_ of a thousand valid? Of a hundred? Of ten? Or are
tracts to be distributed only to those who will find their doctrine
agreeable, and are the Society's colporteurs to be instructed that a
Temperance essay is the proper thing for a total-abstinent infidel, and a
sermon on the Atonement for a distilling deacon? If the aim of the Society
be only to convert men from sins they have no mind to, and to convince
them of errors to which they have no temptation, they might as well be
spending their money to persuade schoolmasters that two and two make four,
or mathematicians that there cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle. If
this be their notion of the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we
do not wonder that they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the
impropriety of sleeping in church.

But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they
unanimously adopted the following resolution: "That those moral duties
which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral evils
and vices which it is known to promote, and which are condemned in
Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly do
fall within the province of this Society, and can and ought to be
discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit." The Society saw clearly
that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line in the world of
ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude. The only line which
Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that great
horizon-line of the moral nature of man which is the bou