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| WILLIAM H. PURNESS, D. D. 661 closest league and union with those who claim and use the right to buy and sell human beings, God's poor, the lambs of Christ, a union, which we imagine brings us in aa much silver aud gold as compensates for the sacrifice of our humanity and manhood ? Nay, are we not under a law to do the base work of bloodhounds, hunting the panting fugitives for freedom ? I utter no word of denunciation. There is no need. For facts that have occurred only within the last week, transcend all denunciation. Only a few hours ago, there was a man wich his two eons, hurried back into the inhuman bondage, from which they had just escaped, and that man, the brother, and those two sons, the nephews of a colored clergyman of New York, of such eminence in the New School Presbyterian Church, that he has received the honors of a European University, aud has acted as Moderator in one of the Presbyteries of the satne Church, when held in the city where he resides. Almost at the very moment the poor fugitive with his children, were dragged through our city, the General Assembly of that very-branch of the Presbyterian Church, now in session here, after discussing for days the validity of Roman Catholic baptism, threw out as inexpedient to be discussed, the subject of that great wrong which was flinging back into the agony of Slavery, a brother of one of their own ordained ministers, and could not so ranch as breathe a word of condemnation against the false and cruel deed which has just been consummated at the capitol of the nation. When such facts are occurring in the midst of us, we cannot be guiltless concerning the lambs of Christ. It is we, we who make up the public opinion of the North, we who consent that these free States shall be the hunting-ground, where these, our poor brothers and sisters, are the game; it is we that withhold from them the bread of life, the inalienable rights of man. As we withhold these blessings, so is it in our power to bestow them. The sheep then that Christ commands us, as we love Him, to feed, are those who are famishing for the lack of the food which it is in our power to supply. And we can help to feed and relieve and liberate them, by giving our hearty sympathy to the blessed cause of their emancipation, to the abolition of the crying injustice with which they are treated, by uttering our earnest protest against the increasing and flagrant outrages of the oppressor, by withholding all aid and counteuance from the work of oppressiou." To say that Dr. Furness, in his pleadings for the slave, was " instant in season and out of season," is not to exaggerate. So palpably was this true, that even some of his sympathizing friends intimated to him, that his zeal carried him beyond proper bounds, and that his discourses were needlessly reiterative. To these friends,—who, it is needless to say, did not fuliy comprehend the breadth and bearing of the question,—he would reply as be did in the following extract from a sermon delivered soon after the one above quoted : " Again and again, I have had it said to me, with apparently the most |