Their demands, decisions, decrees suddenly cease. They will revive them again, but with bated breath. Outwardly they may be more vociferous and abominable, but inwardly they fear and whisper: "See there! that strange, awful sight; how it burns our eyeballs! Northern whites as mad for Freedom as we are for Slavery. Made so by us, they are adopting our tactics and our weapons. As we have murdered men for Slavery in Kansas- as we have struck down great and high defenders of Freedom and the Constitution, in the Senate House-they are murdering us in the cause of Liberty; they are arming our slaves for their freedom. We shall lose our lives, perhaps; we shall certainly lose our property and our power." They see in this more than votes, more than the triumph of any political party- they see the death of Slavery. They see themselves the murderers; the favorite offspring of their lust of pride, and power, and wealth, dies by their own hands. Well may we say to them, as our prophet bard of Freedom did to their great leader, Calhoun, years ago, when a less fright congealed his soul:

"Are these your tones whose treble notes of fear
Wail in the wind? And do ye shake to hear,
Actæon-like, the bay of your own hounds,
Spurning the leash and leaping o'er their bounds?
Sore baffled statesmen, when your eager hand,
With game afoot, unslipped the hungry pack,
To hunt down Freedom in her chosen band,

Had ye no fears that, ere long, doubling back,

These dogs of yours might snuff on Slavery's track?"

Let their proud knees quake. They ought to fall before their slaves with cries of forgiveness for their inhuman conduct towards them; before their country, asking her pardon for the dishonor with which they have stained her fair fame before the world; and, above all, before their God, imploring his mercy for their false and cruel treatment of his truth and children. This little event will be magnified by them a thousand fold; yet, perhaps, not too highly. May it lead them to instant penitence, and its all-important work.

And now, my friends, let me say, in closing, if I hare spoken aught that offends your present judgment, weigh it carefully before you reject it. I have said only what I have thought, and prayed, and spoken for years. I believe no such sin is laid at the door of any nation as is laid upon us. I believe no such sufferings are seen by the all-loving Omniscience in the wide earth, as he sees in the breasts of multitudes of powerless victims in the Southern shambles. I have spoken in the interest of no party. Politics are tossed on this wild and mighty sea that sweeps over the whole land, as fishing boats off Newfoundland,

"When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic

Storm-wind of the Equinox."

So are rocking all other great interests. The Church fears her dissolution; free labor, in its grand and lesser divisions, fears her destruction; the throes of this great birth of freedom and fraternity to the least among the races of men, make all classes and callings to writhe. Yet there shall be no death of any vital force, Government, Religion, the Church, the Gospel, free and varied industry, all shall live, and live a higher life for the struggles through which they are now passing. I speak with no hardness to the slaveholder. Some of those that I know, I esteem. All God has loved, and has given his only-beloved Son, that they, believing on him, might not perish. May they receive the grace of God in its fulness, and let it lead them to give that which is just and equal to the slave, lest "the great and terrible day of the Lord come." Would to God they would treat their fellow-citizens in bondage as our fathers treated theirs; declare Slavery incompatible with their constitutions, and that it ceases henceforth to exist in their midst. So easy, so peaceful is their way of duty in this matter.

I have spoken in no love or expectation of a murderous uprising, or of armed intervention to aid them in rising. Their rights I have defended. Their duty it is not for me to

decide. I have striven to remember them as bound with them. I have seen them as they are to-day, sitting under vines and fig-trees not their own, with every thing to molest and make them afraid. I have seen them, as they are plodding in coffles, or crowded in holds, on their dreadful march to their unknown fate. With bleeding feet, and backs, and hearts, they are scourged from the miserable hut of their childhood, to the miserable grave of their early prime — from the dungeon of ice to the dungeon of fire. They have no rights, says the solemn and supreme tribunal of the land no rights which white men are bound to respect. The husband has no right to his wife, which you are bound to respect; the maiden no right to her honor; the mother no right to her babe; the babe no right to its mother; the mind no right to culture; the soul no right to its Saviour; no rights which white men are bound to respect! My God, what a decree! Let us obey God rather than man, and hold in higher respect their natural and divine rights, for the very contempt and loss they suffer, at the hands of those now so powerful and so cruel.

Yet let us not be discouraged. This deluge of hell has heard a voice it will obey, saying, "Hitherto shalt thou come but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." The very dilemma of the captors of these men is itself propitious. They dare not hang them; they dare not release them. If they pardon John Brown it is saying to all the world, "We are verily guilty. Any man may come among us, invite our slaves to assume their freedom, give them arms to defend that freedom, and even slay those who seem to oppose it, and yet we dare not hang him. Why? Because we know he is right, and we are wrong." They can never defend their system again if John Brown is allowed to live.

But if he dies, if he mounts the scaffold for Freedom, which may Heaven prevent, he will slay the monster which seems thus to slay him. He will make the scaffold in this land as

sacred and potent as it became in England when Vane, and Sidney, and Russell mounted it. Such a thrill of indignation and remorse will freeze the soul of every man, North and South, slaveholder and abolitionist, as never struck through the heart of a great Christian nation before. Let John Brown's great words be fulfilled: " Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done."

Out of that death life will leap; life for those miserable millions now worse than dead. To his memory honors will be paid; statues will bear his stern, mild features to posterity; and when Virginia is free, as free she will be, one of her first acts will be to erect a monument, to his memory, on the very spot where disgrace, defeat and death now overwhelm him as one of the first acts of this Commonwealth after she had achieved her liberty, was to raise the lofty memorial to the "monomaniac" Warren, and his slain and defeated comrades, rebels, like these, against a legal but tyrannical power.

May God help us all to give ourselves to Him, in the consecration of a holy heart and life, and then to the great moral warfare with every vice, chiefest of which, in the cry of the down-trodden, and the crime of the down-treader, is American Slavery.

IT

II.

SERMON BY REV. GEORGE B. Cheever.*

T were a cheering and blessed gratulation, could we assure each other this day that this precious promise is ours, and that we behold the brightening signs of its fulfilment. But as a promise, it has a condition. If judgment do return unto righteousness, if wicked statutes, and the wicked obedience of them and the systems of wickedness which they establish and sustain, are swept away, and the people return unto God, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him, then indeed he will be with them, he is with them, and cannot forsake them. And if there be the signs of such return, the very beginning of it is proof that God's mercy has begun. How blessed and glorious would be our condition, if judgment were returned unto righteousness! And it must be so returned, so brought back, and we with it, or God must cast us off. Let us praise God for every record of such return in others, and for all the instruction, drawn from their success, as to the methods by which the removal of a great evil was accomplished, the renunciation of a great wickedness effected, a great and peaceful revolution brought about, where utter ruin had been threatened. We need all the light

Entitled: "The Example and the Method of Emancipation by the Constitution of our Country, and the Word of God." Preached in the Church of the Puritans, Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24, 1859, by Rev. George B. Cheever, D. D., from Psalm xciv. 14, 15: "For the Lord will not cast off his people, neither will he forsake his inheritance. But judgment shall return unto righteousness, and all the upright in heart shall fol Low it."