the Society, those who approved the
former action of the Publishing Committee, and those who approved the new
policy recommended in the resolutions, those who favored silence and those
who favored speech on the subject of Slavery, claimed the victory, while
the Southern brethren, as usual, refused to be satisfied with anything
short of unconditional submission. The word Compromise, as far as Slavery
is concerned, has always been of fatal augury. The concessions of the
South have been like the "With all my worldly goods I thee endow" of a
bankrupt bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his debts upon his
wife, and as a small return for his magnanimity consents to accept all her
personal and a life estate in all her real property. The South is willing
that the Tract Society should expend its money to convince the slave that
he has a soul to be saved so far as he is obedient to his master, but not
to persuade the master that he has a soul to undergo a very different
process so far as he is unmerciful to his slave.

We Americans are very fond of this glue of compromise. Like so many quack
cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel stronger
than those which have never been broken, but, like them, it will not stand
hot water,--and as the question of Slavery is sure to plunge all who
approach it, even with the best intentions, into that fatal element, the
patched-up brotherhood, which but yesterday was warranted to be better
than new, falls once more into a heap of incoherent fragments. The last
trial of the virtues of the Patent Redintegrator by the Special Committee
of the Tract Society has ended like all the rest, and as all attempts to
buy peace at too dear a rate must end. Peace is an excellent thing, but
principle and pluck are better; and the man who sacrifices them to gain it
finds at last that he has crouched under the Caudine yoke to purchase only
a contemptuous toleration that leaves him at war with his own self-respect
and the invincible forces of his higher nature.

But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was no
sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience and
self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their lost
Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which severs
one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that