ndary between
light and darkness. The Society, by yielding (as they have done in 1858)
to what are pleasantly called the "objections" of the South, (objections
of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs were "forced to
flee,") virtually exclude the black man, if born to the southward of a
certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's providence, and
thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the Episcopal Church did to
the artist when they published Ary Scheffer's _Christus Consolator_ with
the figure of the slave left out.

The Society is not asked to disseminate antislavery doctrines, but simply
to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they have
recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to remind him in
turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls of his bondmen.
But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at present the
ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all appeals, that God in
his good time will turn their hearts, and that then, and not till then,
will be the fitting occasion to do something in the premises. But if the
Society is to await this golden opportunity with such exemplary patience
in one case, why not in all? If it is to decline any attempt at converting
the sinner till after God has converted him, will there be any special
necessity for a tract society at all? Will it not be a little
presumptuous, as well as superfluous, to undertake the doing over again of
what He has already done? We fear that the studies of Blackstone, upon
which the gentlemen who argue thus have entered in order to fit themselves
for the legal and constitutional argument of the question, have confused
their minds, and that they are misled by some fancied analogy between a
tract and an action of trover, and conceive that the one, like the other,
cannot be employed till after an actual conversion has taken place.

The resolutions reported by the Special Committee at the annual meeting of
1857, drawn up with great caution and with a sincere desire to make whole
the breach in the Society, have had the usual fate of all attempts to
reconcile incompatibilities by compromise. They express confidence in the
Publishing Committee, and at the same time impliedly condemn them by
recommending them to do precisely what they had all along scrupulously
avoided doing. The result was just what might have been expected. Both
parties among the Northern members of