of its brightest ornaments.[A] To drive the slaveholding church and
its members from the equivocal, the neutral position, from which they
had so long successfully defended slavery--to compel them to elevate
their practice to an even height with their avowed principles, or to
degrade their principles to the level of their known practice, was a
preliminary, necessary in the view of abolitionists, either for bringing
that part of the church into the common action against slavery, or as a
ground for treating it as confederate with oppressors. So far, then, as
the action of the church, or of its individual members, is to be
reckoned among the events of the last two or three years, the
abolitionists find in it nothing to lessen their hopes or expectations.

[Footnote A: In the division of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian
church, that has just taken place, Mr. Plumer has been elected Moderator
of the "Old School" portion.]

2. The abolitionists believed, from the beginning, that the slaves of
the South were (as slaves are everywhere) unhappy, _because of their
condition_. Their adversaries denied it, averring that, as a class, they
were "contented and happy." The abolitionists thought that the argument
against slavery could be made good, so far as this point was concerned,
by either _admitting_ or _denying_ the assertion.

_Admitting_ it, they insisted, that, nothing could demonstrate the
turpitude of any system more surely than the fact, that MAN--made in the
image of God--but a little lower than the angels--crowned with glory and
honor, and set over the works of God's hands--his mind sweeping in an
instant from planet to planet, from the sun of one system to the sun of
another, even to the great centre sun of them all--contemplating the
machinery of the universe "wheeling unshaken" in the awful and
mysterious grandeur of its movements "through the void immense"--with a
spirit delighting in upward aspiration--bounding from earth to
heaven--that seats itself fast by the throne of God, to drink in the
instructions of Infinite Wisdom, or flies to execute the commands of
Infinite Goodness;--that such a being could be made "contented and
happy" with "enough to eat, and drink, and wear," and shelter from the
weather--with the base provision that satisfies the brutes, is (say the
abolitionists) enough to render superfluous all other arguments for the
_instant_ abandonment of a system whose appropriate work is such
infinit