but the one may have had every opportunity for acquiring a complete knowledge of his duty; the other may have been deprived of all such opportunities whatever. Their guilt will, in these cases, be very dissimilar. He who refuses to be informed concerning his duty, is voluntarily ignorant. His ignorance is his own fault, and he is justly responsible for all the consequences of his own act. The maxim in law clearly applies to this case—"No man may take advantage of his own wrong;" in other words, no man may plead ignorance as an excuse, when ignorance rather than knowledge is his own deliberate choice.

I am prepared to go further than this. Knowledge of my duty may be offered to me, but offered so commingled with error, and in a manner so repulsive to all my feelings of self-respect, that I instinctively reject it. In this case the guilt of rejecting knowledge of my duty is obviously less than it would have been if the same truth, unmixed with error, and clothed in the charity of the gospel, had been presented to my understanding. For instance, I am an instructor. In the discharge of my duties I may unwittingly adopt unsound principles. Suppose a stranger wishes to correct my errors, and introduces himself by stating as facts what I know to be exaggerations, and by loading me with gross and offensive personal abuse. I know that I ought to bear it calmly, and, carefully discriminating between the good and the bad, to use both as a means of self-improvement. I fear, however, that I should be, at the best, prejudiced against such instructions, and that some time would elapse before this discrimination could

take place. I grant that I should do wrong in allowing my judgment to be biased by this abuse. But it is certainly as true that he did wrong in abusing me. It is his abuse that has rendered me unwilling to be convinced, when I might have been convinced on the instant, if he had treated me with Christian courtesy. My ignorance is therefore the. combined result of his unchristian want of kindness and my unchristian want of meekness. The responsibility clearly attaches to both of us. Which of us will bear the larger portion of it, can only be known when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed.

I see not why these principles do not apply to the present case. And hence, among those who, as I believe, in violation of right, hold human beings in bondage, there may be found every pos sible gradation of guiltiness. There may be many persons in our Southern states who have been reared in the midst of slavery, who have uniformly treated their slaves humanely; and who, having always seen the subject discussed in such a manner that they have been instinctively repelled from it, have never yet deliberately investigated it as a question of duty. Slaves have been held by those whom the slaveholders most venerate among the dead, and by those whom they most respect among the living. It is surprising to observe how long. even a good man, under such circumstances, may continue in the practice of wrong, without ever suspecting its moral character. Of this fact the temperance reformation has furnished a thousand remarkable instances. It is only a few years since many of our most estimable citizens were acquiring their wealth by the manufacture and

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sale of spirituous liquors; that is, by means of the wholesale destruction, both temporal and eternal, of their fellow-men. Yet, strange as it may now seem, it never occurred to them that they were doing wrong. I remember very well that when this subject was first agitated in New England, I made it the theme of two fast-day discourses. In the course of the following week, a member of my ehurch, one of the most conscientious men I have ever known, a wholesale grocer, said to me, "If your doctrine be true, I do not see how I can continue to deal in spirituous liquors." I believe that the thought had never crossed his mind before. He examined the subject carefully, became fully convinced of his duty, and abandoned the traffic. Yet he had attained to more than middle life, and had been from youth a man of exemplary piety, without having been aware that he was doing wrong. The wrong was ever the same. Guilt commenced as soon as he was convinced of the wrong, and continued in the practice of it.

Now all this absence of consideration may exist among many persons at the South, on the subject of slavery. It has, under almost as peculiar circumstances, existed at the North. I have been told that the Rev. Dr. Stiles, afterwards President of Yale College, during his residence in Newport, R. I., being in want of a domestic, sent by the captain of a slave-ship a barrel of rum to the coast of Africa, to be exchanged for a slave. The venture was successful, and in due time a negro boy was brought back. It chanced that some time afterwards, in passing through his kitchen, he observed the boy in tears. He asked him the reason

of his sorrow, and the poor fellow answered that he was thinking of his parents, and brothers and sisters, whom he should never see again. In an instant, the whole truth flashed upon the master's mind, and he saw the evil he had done. He could not return the boy to Africa, but he made every reparation in his power. He provided for him every means of improvement, was the means of his conversion, and treated him ever afterwards not as a servant, but as a brother beloved. Newport, for that was his name, survived Dr. Stiles several years, and was, to the end of his life, supported by a legacy which his former master had left him.

Such cases as these may exist now in the Southern states. On the other hand, it is no violation of charity to suppose that there are others who, utterly regardless of justice, knowing what they do to be wrong, and intentionally steeled against every monition of conscience, deliberately sacri fice every right of their slaves to their own pecu niary advantage, or the gratification of their loveof power; who decide the question in how many years they shall work their fellow-men to death, by a calculation of profit and loss, and who exult in the power of subjecting to their uncontrolled will-a will avaricious, lustful, tyrannical and cruel -as many human beings as by purchase they can appropriate to themselves.

Let us now take these two extremes. These men are both slaveholders. They both do a wrong act in holding a fellow-man in bondage. But would any one confound the moral character of the one with that of the other? The one may be a brother beloved, desirous from his heart of doing

the will of God, so far as it shall be revealed to him. The other is a monster in iniquity-since the slave-trade exists I will not say without a parallel—but surely without many superiors in wickedness. And who does not see that the interval between these extremes may be filled up with every gradation of guiltiness?

And hence it is that I perceive, in reflecting on this subject, wide ground for the exercise of Christian charity. With a deep conviction of the universal wrong of the act, I have very dissimilar views of the guilt of the actors. Some of them, with pain, I believe to be unjust, tyrannical, and cruel-in the face of knowledge, acting in utter disregard of the dearest rights of their fellow-men. Others, I rejoice to believe, uphold this institution, in the belief that it is innocent, and exercise the power which they suppose themselves rightfully to possess with exemplary kindness, with paternal tenderness, and with a religious care for the souls that are, as they believe, committed to their charge. I cannot include these two classes in the same sweeping sentence of condemnation. In the one, though I see and lament their errors, I perceive the lineaments of the Christian character, in many cases strongly and beautifully expressed. Such men, while I testify against what seem to me their errors, I must receive as brethren, and I delight to co-operate with them in every good work, provided I so do it as not to imply any participation with what I believe to be wrong. Towards the others, I entertain the same sentiments which I entertain towards any other wicked and injurious men. I believe them to be not only doing wrong,